Global warming stopped in 1998

Global warming stopped in 1998
	MISLEADING
	"The Earth has not warmed since 1998, which shows that global warming has stopped or was never real."
Domain	Science & Environment
Tactic	Statistical & Evidentiary Distortion;
Era	Current
First seen	2006
Origin	Opinion columns and commentary arguing against climate science, notably in the British press, from around 2006
Last reviewed	2026-10-26
	Further reading: books on Science & Environment

The claim that global warming stopped in 1998 was one of the most widely repeated arguments against climate science in the 2000s and early 2010s. It relied on a classic statistical trick: starting a trend line at an unusually extreme year. In 1998, a powerful El Niño event pushed global temperatures to a record high. By measuring later years against that spike, commentators could make the warming trend appear to vanish. Subsequent years broke the 1998 record many times over, and the long-term warming trend continued.

The claim

The argument usually took this form: global average temperatures have not risen since 1998, even though carbon dioxide emissions have continued to increase; therefore carbon dioxide cannot be driving climate change, or warming has stopped. Variants spoke of a "pause" or "hiatus" in warming.

Origin

1998 was an exceptional year. A very strong El Niño, a natural pattern in which warm water spreads across the tropical Pacific Ocean and releases heat into the atmosphere, made it the warmest year on record at the time by a wide margin.

Within a few years, commentators began using 1998 as a starting point. One prominent early example was an April 2006 column in Britain's Sunday Telegraph by the geologist Bob Carter, who argued there was a problem with global warming: it stopped in 1998. The argument was widely picked up in blogs, opinion pieces and political speeches.

How the trick works

Short-term temperature records are noisy. Natural variations, especially El Niño and its cool counterpart La Niña, push individual years up or down by large amounts compared with the slow, steady warming trend underneath.

If you start a trend line at a year that was unusually hot because of natural variation, the next several years will look flat or even cooler by comparison, even if the underlying warming continues. Choosing the starting point to produce the desired conclusion is a form of cherry-picking. Climate scientists usually look at trends over 30 years or more for this reason. The science-communication website Skeptical Science made the point with an animated graph called "the escalator," showing that the temperature record could be broken into short flat steps that all lie on a steadily rising slope.

What scientists actually said

There was a real scientific discussion about a "slowdown" in the rate of surface warming in the early 2000s compared with some model projections. Scientists investigated several explanations, including increased uptake of heat by the deep ocean, natural Pacific Ocean cycles, volcanic aerosols and a weaker solar cycle. The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change discussed the slowdown in its 2013 assessment.

That discussion was about the pace of surface warming over a short period, not about warming stopping. Throughout that period, the oceans, which absorb more than 90 percent of the extra heat trapped by greenhouse gases, continued to accumulate heat, and sea levels kept rising. In 2015, a study by scientists at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration found that corrections for changes in how ocean temperatures were measured reduced the apparent slowdown further.

How the record changed

The years that followed settled the question. Global temperature records set in 1998 were broken in 2005 and 2010 in several major datasets, and then decisively in 2014, 2015 and 2016, the last driven partly by another strong El Niño. The 2010s were the warmest decade on record at the time. 2023 and 2024 were the two warmest years in the instrumental record, with 2024 the first calendar year to exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, according to the World Meteorological Organization and the European Union's Copernicus climate service.

By the late 2010s, the "warming stopped in 1998" argument had largely disappeared, though the cherry-picking technique has resurfaced with other start dates, such as claims that warming "stopped" after the record year of 2016.

What the evidence shows

Global warming did not stop in 1998. The claim was produced by choosing an unusually hot starting year and focusing on a short period of surface temperatures while ignoring other indicators, such as ocean heat content, sea-level rise and melting ice. The short-term slowdown that scientists studied was real but limited, and it did not change the long-term trend.

Bullshitopedia classifies the claim as Misleading rather than false in every detail: for a few years, surface temperatures did not set new records above 1998 in some datasets. The deception lay in the selection of the starting point and in the conclusion drawn from it.

Lessons for readers

When you see a trend, ask why it starts where it does. A different starting point may tell a different story.
Be wary of short time spans in noisy data. Weather and natural cycles can dominate a few years; climate is measured over decades.
Look at more than one indicator. A claim that rests on a single measure while ignoring others is often incomplete.

Sources

Bob Carter, "There IS a problem with global warming... it stopped in 1998," The Sunday Telegraph, 9 April 2006.
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis, Working Group I contribution to the Fifth Assessment Report (2013).
Thomas R. Karl et al., "Possible artifacts of data biases in the recent global surface warming hiatus," Science 348 (2015).
World Meteorological Organization, State of the Global Climate 2024 (2025).
NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, GISTEMP global surface temperature record.