Has Global Warming Stopped?

Christopher Monckton has a little item out titled "Global Warming Has Stopped." It's the usual chart, starting at 2002:


Here's why I think this is just simply wrong. If you plot the globally average temperature (I'm using the NASA GISS data series) since, say, 1990, you get:

Red bars are monthly temperatures in Celsius; the yellow line is the 5-year moving average.

If you think global warming has stopped in recent years, just because the yellow line is flat for the last couple of years, then why wouldn't you have drawn the same conclusion in 1997, 2002, and 2005 (especially 1997)?

You would have. But obviously you would have wrong each time, as global temperatures resumed moving upward after each period.

So what is unique about this latest pause? Nothing. So you can't say "global warming has stopped."


NOTE: This is essentially the same argument made by Bill Chameides. Monckton accuses him of being "dishonest" and accusing him of tampering with the data.