Pausa Revivida!

Back in January 2025, I mentioned that since 2025 was expected to trend towards La Niña conditions we would be less likely to see another record-breaking year like we had in 2023 and 2024. And then I said contrarians would likely pivot back to the rhetoric they used following the 1998 and 2016 El Niño events:

And since La Niña conditions are expected to develop in 2025, it's doubtful that 2025 will be another record-breaking year, so we should expect contrarians to pivot again back to the same kinds of fake arguments they used after 1998 and 2016. They'll start counting the months for which we've seen no warming while ignoring the fact that we should expect La Niña years to fall below the overall trendline and El Niño to land above it.

I don't think anyone following climate discussions on social media would be surprised that this prediction is already showing itself to be accurate, and I'm sure there are many others that made similar predictions. But now on social media posts to this effect are already proliferating. Here's a post I saw today from Matthew Wielicki:

Post from Wielicki on X

You can find similar posts on X here and here. Even Grok added "support" to this here. John Shewchuk has made similar claims about "cooling" SSTs here. This of course is just the beginning of a pivot in rhetoric among pseudo-skeptics. This will continue until the next El Niño returns.

The problems with this line of reasoning are at least three-fold:

1. The 18-month "trend from January 2024 to June 2025 is -1.071 ± 1.072°C/decade (2σ), so it's not even a statistically significant trend. We can't yet say to 95% confidence that there is a cooling trend.
2. ENSO adds variability to the long-term climate trend of 0.2°C/decade since 1970, since El Niño years average warmer than the long-term trend and La Niña years average cooler than the long-term trend. Scientists expect this interannual variability from ENSO; even if we do end up with short-term cooling, it's just an artifact of the shift in ENSO.
3. Wielicki has cherry-picked his start date (Jan 2024) to create a false impression of what actually is happening. Climate is measured on longer time scales, typically 30 years or longer, and the 30 year trend is 0.244 ± 0.017°C/decade (2σ). So warming, if anything, is accelerating. 

The graph above shows the slopes of La Niña years, El Niño years and neutral years since 1980. The trend of all of these are warming at about the same rate. Wielicki et al are just 1) cherry picking an El Niño start date with a neutral end date and 2) ignoring statistical significance to 3) make false claims about climate trends. There is a long history among pseudo-skeptics using this tactic, which I describe here. But it's not limited to temperature. Any bump or dip in a climate-related trend that can be exploited will be exploited by this trick. If they try it with temperature, they will try it with ice mass balance as well.

Getting the Most Mileage out of the Short-Term Trend Trick

Later in the day today, Wielicki essentially used the same trick with Antarctic ice mass. NASA reports that Antarctica has lost 135 Gt/yr of ice mass since 2002. However, there was a short-term bump for a couple years, and so posts on X have to be made. And yet despite the bump, Greenland and Antarctica lose a combined 400 Gt/yr of ice. This doesn't matter to pseudo-skeptics, though. What matters is the little, short-term bumps and dips along the way.

For someone of Wielicki's education, these tricks are a clear indicator of dishonesty - I see no evidence he's a good faith player in climate discussions. Wielicki knows he's being dishonest with these tricks, and he knows why he's being dishonest.