Well, I never saw this one coming. According to this report on NPR:

Some 3,000 scientific robots that are plying the ocean have sent home a puzzling message. These diving instruments suggest that the oceans have not warmed up at all over the past four or five years.

Once again, it amazes me how the standard rules of science don’t apply when an issue has become overly politicized. In something non-controversial, a lack of corroborating data would send the scientist back to the drawing board to come up with a new theory. With global warming, however, the first conclusion is always, “We must be reading the data wrong,” or, “maybe this is just a temporary lull in the cycle.” A lack of rising temperatures is always explained as a lull, not a lack of a proper model. Later in the article, one scientist explains how clouds are an important control on how the earth warms or cools and, then, admits we don’t know how to measure their effect:

Kevin Trenberth at the National Center for Atmospheric Research says it’s probably going back out into space. The Earth has a number of natural thermostats, including clouds, which can either trap heat and turn up the temperature, or reflect sunlight and help cool the planet.That can’t be directly measured at the moment, however.”Unfortunately, we don’t have adequate tracking of clouds to determine exactly what role they’ve been playing during this period,” Trenberth says.

Oh, so what you’re saying is that one of the major influences on global temperatures is hard to measure accurately. How in the heck can you tell me you know exactly how the earth is warming, then? Then, to cap it off, the article ends with this gem:

Trenberth and Willis agree that a few mild years have no effect on the long-term trend of global warming. But they say there are still things to learn about how our planet copes with the heat.

Does anyone else see the contradiction here? How can anyone definitively say that the long-term trend of warming will continue and, in the same breath, admit science is unclear on how the planet copes with heat? This has become farce. Would somebody please admit that we don’t know enough to predict how the environment will react in the next ten years, much less the next fifty?

It is not science when the theories and the facts diverge over time. The theories should adapt, not wait for facts that fit.