Roy Spencer has more trouble for the alarmists this week. A few recent reports (like the recent Environment Canada State of the Climate Report) have used data sets ending in 2016 to report on the terrible progress of global warming. But 2016 coincided with a very strong spike in temperatures due to the El Niño that year, and since then temperatures have been declining. Indeed Spencer shows that since 2016 temperatures have fallen by enough to wipe out half of the warming so far this century. Let’s see the models explain that cooling.

Spencer's post was prompted by news coverage of a new study reporting with great fanfare that a new but very short satellite-based temperature record spanning 2003-2017 showed more warming than expected. But as Spencer noted, it's too short a record to conclude anything from, especially with the El Niño spike at the end which biases the trend upward. Using other data records but shifting the window back slightly, looking at the 2000-2015 period, you see almost no warming at the surface and none in the lower troposphere. And even with the 2017 data in the sample, observations only show about half as much warming as climate models predict for the period.