Note these headlines:

“Dire climate outlook despite warming ‘pause’”

“Climate slowdown means extreme rates of warming ‘not as likely”

“Study: Global warming took decade-long pause, outlook still dire”

No wonder the Inhofe crowd can declare victory.

Besides the correspondence writers not meaning what the deniers think they meant, the assertion being made about “extreme rates” is just more bad wording and misunderstanding.

“Rate” implies change over a period of time. Except in medicine (and they have their own screwy definition of the word.) The misuse of the word “rate”, along with similar poor language creations such as “point in time”, “acceleration” (when velocity is meant), is endemic.

And, when the Trenberth paper came out a few weeks ago about ocean heat uptake one of the possible implications - not tested yet - is that it means the ultimate change per doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere could be greater than previous averaged changed agreed upon by the IPCC authors.

Anyway, it’s a bunch of UK scientists being sloppy in their wording again, this time the leads are from Oxford, and not the East Anglia. Sometimes I think the Brits do these things just so they can generate press in order to keep themselves in the news, as American (and other nations) have stolen the spotlight in these areas with ease.