The lead article raises questions about the statement that global warming has stopped, but unfortunately the "artifact" claim does not hold (1998 was an unusual record year, so cannot be used as the starting point).

The statement was made that the claim of no warming since 1998: "has been thoroughly debunked every time it's popped up". A link to a statement by James E. Hansen is cited.

I prefer to go to the actual source of the data rather than relying on sites like gristmill or individuals like Hansen to tell me a message they want to get across.

So I downloaded the Hadley record:
http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcrut3/diagnostics/global/n ...

I then plot the most recent record with different start dates:
If I plot the last 10 years (starting January 1998, ending February 2008) I get a totally flat trend.

If I plot the trend starting January 1999 I get a linear trend of 0.009 degrees C per decade.  Taken over the 9 years this is a linear increase of 0.008 degrees C per decade (not 0.2 degrees C per decade as projected for the first two decades in the 21st century by IPCC in its 2007 SPM report).

Then I also checked the actual trend with later start dates:

Starting in 2000, the warming trend is +0.004 degrees C per decade
Starting in 2001, the cooling trend is -0.009 degrees C per decade
Starting in 2002, the cooling trend is -0.018 degrees C per decade
Starting in 2003, the cooling trend is -0.023 degrees C per decade

It looks like the facts show that the IPCC Chairman is correct when he refers to the recent flat trend as a "plateau" in global warming and the "debunkers" of the flat trend are "flat wrong" (if you'll pardon the expression).

Max

Check this out and you will see that there has been a plateau for the last decade:

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.C.lrg.gif

In other words the average temperature anomally for the last ten years has been about 0.6 degrees C