That is exactly what has been happening. You can see it in the number (quality is a separate issue) of media stories about recent scientific research into the recent temperature record.

Every natural forcing mechanism (sun, PDO, etc) always has been and continues to be studied. These are important components of the climate system and in understanding the physics of our universe.

>>- if it is happening, that it means that global warming has stopped or that it means that climate sensitivity is low?<<

Neither. AGW is happening. If global warming were to stop, there would have to be an explanation of how and why – both physically and in terms of its contradiction of well-established scientific principles. If global warming was not real then mean global temperature should be varying around – or at least occasionally getting within 2 standard deviations of the long-term mean and variance.

Contrary to the ignorant nitwittery of Deniers, global temperatures over the last 15 years are reason for more – not less – concern. This is so because (1) the climate system has and is changing – there is additional energy in the system that we are having some difficulty finding – there are scientific reasons for what is happening – and we cannot explain and understand it until we can identify, define, and describe what is happening and (2) it is happening faster than most people expected.

Any time a system’s output changes unexpectedly and measurably, it means there is a process control problem somewhere. If we were quality control engineers monitoring a manufacturing or industrial system and detected a shift in the distributional properties of some performance measure, it would be a reason for concern that demanded immediate attention. The climate system is a lot larger, more complex, and more powerful than any man-made system – and the consequences of a system failure are proportionally greater, as well.

I just listen to the climatologists. I don't try to interpret their data as if I somehow know more than they do. And if the very people who took the data showing the 'pause' and who made it publicly available, don't think it constitutes a failure of the theory of AGW, then I'll believe them.

When the public start to decide what is and is not correct science, you end up believing things like the sun orbits the earth, the earth is 6000 years old, and that, to decide if a woman is a witch, you throw her over the edge of cliff and if she survives she was, if not she wasn't.

First, let's be clear about some key facts:

The rate of increase of the land/ocean surface temperature has gotten smaller over the past 15 years, but global mean surface temperature has continued to increase.

Multiple data sources show the rate of increase in ocean heat content has increased over this same period.

The global cryosphere continues to warm as demonstrated by continued ice loss in the Arctic, Himalayas, and Antarctica.

These three facts provide strong evidence that there has been no pause in global warming. The main thing to be skeptical about is the intelligence of anyone who would assert categorically that global warming has paused in light of those three observations.

Skepticism would be the proper response until it was proved. Dook pontificates for his entire answer and doesn't address the pause except to assure his fellow alarmists that he is still one of them because that is what it is all about (that was my interpretation of his rant). Obviously a pause was not forecast and therefore it should cause some stirrings of skepticism to those with a scientific mind (notice I didn't put IMO)

A lot of warmers (Big Gryph for one) deny there is a pause, and spout on about the ten hottest years.

There is NO pause. And that pause, which is NOT occurring, is caused by the missing heat in the ocean, or China, or lack of sunspots, or volcanic activity, or whatever else I make up. Anyways, the pause is definitively NOT occurring, and I have a list of excuses for why it is occurring.

Alarmists: "Reality. Who the **** cares about reality? If the model says it was supposed to warm 0.2C/decade than it did warm 0.2C/decade."

1. There are no "warmers" except conspiring geoengineers high on too much Rothschild's candy.

2. Many scientists are rightly skeptical about the "pause," http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/arc... though most consider it an interesting anomaly that indicates little about revision to the long term trend.

3. Anyone with even half a brain (if filled with brain cells and not globally-warmed desertificationized sage), can go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warm... and see in half a minute that whereas CO2 has been steadily increasing, year by year, since at least the 1950s, global average temperatures, although rising significantly between 1920 and 1940, and between 1980 and 2000, were basically flat between 1880 and 1920, and between 1940 and 1980.

4. Whether or not we are in another plateau period now, virtually nothing in the massive century-long scientific research on man-made climate change suggests that the long term global average temperature trend will change, unless (and even then with a considerable lag) greenhouse gas emissions are not just reduced but cut to zero, or made negative.

http://www.aip.org/history/climate/index...