'Uncertain science,' Newsweek. Climate scientists can't explain why warming has stopped for a decade.

5/28/10, "The backlash against climate scientists," Newsweek by Stefan Theil

"One crucial point of contention is climate “sensitivity”—the mathematical formula that translates changes in CO2 production to changes in temperature. In addition,

• scientists are not sure how to explain a slowdown in the rise of global temperatures that began

• about a decade ago.

The backlash against climate science is also about the way in which leading scientists allied themselves with politicians and activists to promote their cause.

Some of the IPCC’s most-quoted data and recommendations were taken straight out of unchecked activist brochures, newspaper articles, and corporate reports—

• including claims of plummeting crop yields in Africa and
  
• the rising costs of warming-related natural disasters,
  
• both of which have been refuted by academic studies.

Just as damaging, many climate scientists have responded to critiques by questioning the integrity of their critics, rather than by supplying data and reasoned arguments. When other researchers aired doubt about the IPCC’s prediction that Himalayan glaciers will melt by 2035, the IPCC’s powerful chief, Rajendra Pachauri,

• trashed their work as “voodoo science.”
  

Even today, after dozens of IPCC exaggerations have surfaced, leading climate officials like U.N. Environment Program chief Achim Steiner and Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research head Joachim Schellnhuber

• continue to tar-brush critics as “anti-Enlightenment” and engaging in “witch hunts.”"...

11/19/09, "Climatologists baffled by global warming time-out," over 10 years, Der Spiegel, by G. Traufetter

• "Global warming appears to have stalled. Climatologists are puzzled as to why average global temperatures have stopped rising over the last 10 years.
• 
  
• Some attribute the trend to a lack of sunspots, while others explain it through ocean currents."...

2/14/10, "ClimateGate U-Turn as scientist at centre of row admits: there has been no global warming since 1995," UK Daily Mail, J. Petre

• "He further admitted that in the last 15 years there had been no ‘statistically significant’ warming,

• although he argued this was a blip rather than the long-term trend."...

Stefan Theil is Newsweek's European Economics editor.