Don’t tag me for support on this. I’ve consistently argued that the “pause” was nothing but a statistically-insignificant blip, of exactly the form you expect to see when combining a steady trend with reasonably-strong short term fluctuations (especially when said fluctuations are autocorrelated). You can easily prove this to yourself with some minimal effort in Excel: in one column calculate the values for a straight line with a slope similar to the trend we see in global temperatures. In the second column use the random() function to put random values with about the same magnitude as the fluctuations. In the third column, put the sum of the first two.
Now, plot that third column against time, and what will you see? Pauses! Pauses everywhere you look! And every time you regenerate the data, you’ll get a different set of pauses! Amazing. Clearly you must have done something wrong, and there’s no trend there at all.
Serious ly, this is the typical level of denialist “analysis”:
