September 28, 2015, by Brigitte Nerlich
The pause
About three years ago, in 2013, I became aware of discussions around the ‘pause’ (a period of relatively little change in globally averaged surface temperatures) and since then I have been observing goings-on around this new talking point in the climate change debate. I was a bit surprised by how much trouble a wiggle in a wiggly (upward) trend line could cause.
I noticed several things since I first became aware of ‘the pause’ (and I oversimplify of course):
- Some of those who reject significant tenets of mainstream climate science and/or policy have used the pause as ‘evidence’ for saying that global warming has ‘stopped’.
- Some mainstream scientists have tried to find explanations for the ‘pause’.
- An interdisciplinary team led by cognitive scientists has tried to show that (1) has influenced (2).
Questions about what came before (1) and what happened between (1) and (2) have puzzled me for some time, but I just didn’t have the time and patience to sit down and dig. In today’s post I’ll try to delve into these issues a bit more, building on work by Max Boykoff, Roz Pidcock and Chris Mooney, for example. I have to admit that things became much more complicated than I had thought (and the post became longer and longer as a result).
The rise of the pause
In order to ascertain who first used the word ‘pause’ in the context of global warming and when, I searched Scopus (a database for science articles) and Lexis Nexis (a database for news articles). This means that there are limitations to my digging and I’ll probably have missed things, but it’s a start.
When you put ‘pause’ AND ‘global warming’ into Scopus, you’ll find that articles began to use that phrase rather slowly, with one in 2004, one in 2007, two in 2010 (one very relevant, as we’ll see), one in 2011 (not relevant), two in 2012, five in 2013, nine in 2014 and eight in 2015 so far. This is, of course, only the tip of the iceberg exposed by using Scopus and using a rather narrow search phrase; for overviews of all the numerous other scientific articles dealing with the ‘pause’, see here and here.
According to my search, the most cited articles on the ‘pause’ were published in Nature/Nature Climate Change (in 2014 Nature Climate Change also published a special issue on the ‘pause’ and science communication which didn’t show up in my search). The paper with the most citations so far (25) was published in January 2014 in Nature Climate Change by Kevin Trenberth et al. and entitled “Seasonal aspects of the recent pause in surface warming”.
All this seems to show that there has been an increase in attention to the issue of the ‘pause’ by scientists since around 2013. Several things happened that year. The pause was briefly discussed in the IPCC report and the Met Office published a report entitled ‘The recent pause in global warming’. I’ll come back to that later. What happened before 2013? And what happened in the media?
2009/10
Let’s first look at the two early scientific articles that Scopus unearthed, published in 2004 and 2010. In 2004 a team of Russian scientists published an article “On climate oscillations over the last 150 years” and predicted a pause in the future. This article did not spark any debate.
In 2010 a team of Chinese scientists published an article entitled “Does the global warming pause in the last decade: 1999-2008” (using ‘pause’ as a verb!). The beginning of the article is interesting, as it refers to a report published in August 2009 in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society on “State of the Climate in 2008”. Even more importantly it refers to an article by Richard Kerr that appeared in October 2009 (that is, a month before climategate and COP15) in the journal Science and asked: “What happened to global warming?”. As the Chinese team points out: “In Kerr’s article, he analyzed the time series of global mean SAT for 1999–2008 using the Had-CRUT3 dataset [Brohan, 2006], as shown in Figure 1, in which the red line stands for the warming trend of 1999–2008, which tends to be zero.”
As far as I can see, “State of the climate 2008” doesn’t use the word ‘pause’ and neither does the Brohan et al.’s 2006 article. However, the figure that appeared in the October 2009 Science article certainly shows a visible ‘plateau’. In the article itself Kerr points out: “The blogosphere has been having a field day with global warming’s apparent decade-long stagnation. Negotiators are working toward an international global warming agreement to be signed in Copenhagen in December, yet there hasn’t been any warming for a decade. What’s the point, bloggers ask? Climate researchers are beginning to answer back in their preferred venue, the peer-reviewed literature. The pause in warming is real enough, but it’s just temporary, they argue from their analyses. A natural swing in climate to the cool side has been holding greenhouse warming back, and such swings don’t last forever. ‘In the end, global warming will prevail,’ says climate scientist Gavin Schmidt of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York City.”
I haven’t properly tracked the discussion about the pause in the blogosphere, but a 2009 Real Climate post shows how things were hotting up around 2007/2008 and who the main protagonists in the debate were. Let’s now go to the news as captured by Lexis Nexis.
Alongside Scopus, I searched Lexis Nexis (‘All English Language News’) on 25 September, using the search phrase ‘pause in global warming’ (I could not use ‘pause’ AND ‘global warming’ as two search terms, as things became much too messy). I got 510 hits (476 when you remove duplicates). Just in the last five years, that is, since 2010, 504 news items used this phrase (470 when you remove duplicates), mostly in the Daily Mail and mostly in 2013 and 2014 (so over the last five years we have three articles in 2010, one in 2011, 23 in 2012, 138 in 2013, 147 in 2014 and 102 in 2015 up until 25 September).*
Graph of ‘Newspapers’ using the phrase ‘pause in global warming’ in ‘All English Language News’ (search carried out 25 September, 2015; I cut off a long ‘tail’ of newspapers that only mention the issue in one or two articles)
The reference to the August 2009 report by the American Meteorological Society in the 2010 article by the Chinese team, quoted above, is interesting, as the first relevant attestation of ‘pause in global warming’ in my overall corpus of news items can be found on 26 September 2009 in an article by Andy Ho for The Straits Times (Singapore) entitled “Spot-less answer to global warming”. The article is about speculations that sun spots may cause climate change. What’s important in all this is the following question posed by Ho: “Does the sun’s present quiescence presage a coming mini ice age then? Last month, the American Meteorological Society noted that there has been a decade-long pause in global warming from 1999 – even as greenhouse gases rose.”
After this article there was what one may call a relatively quiescent phase in media reporting on the ‘pause in global warming’ until 2012, when there was a sudden eruption of articles, as demonstrated by Boykoff, with a spike in 2013. So what happened then?
2012
2012 began with two events in the US and two press articles in the UK press that might have contributed to the ‘pause’ becoming a climate change talking point (and there might be more events…). At the end of January 2012 the Oregon chapter of the American Meteorological Society organised a meeting. Some members of the chapter seem to doubt some aspects of mainstream climate science and use the ‘pause’/’hiatus’ to discredit it.** A journalist for The Oregonian pointed out that this “helps spur skepticism”. Another announcement probably also contributed to the spike in media attention in 2013 but did not show up in my searches. This was a 2012 temperature update by James Hansen et al. published in January 2013 and which contained an unfortunate section heading: “Global Warming Standstill” (see here for an interesting write-up). The same year the Global Warming Policy Foundation published a report by David Whitehouse with the same headline.
At the same time, and even more importantly perhaps, the Met Office updated some of its datasets which prompted David Rose at the Daily Mail to write an article entitled “Forget global warming – it’s cycle 25 we need to worry about” (29 January, 2012). The article points out that the planet hasn’t warmed for 15 years, “that the rising trend in world temperatures ended in 1997”, that we might be heading for a mini ice age, and that the scientific consensus has been shaken. Cycle 25 refers to solar cycles. The article goes on to say/quote: “‘We’re now well into the second decade of the pause,’ said Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation. ‘If we don’t see convincing evidence of global warming by 2015, it will start to become clear whether the models are bunk. And, if they are, the implications for some scientists could be very serious.’”
Another article by Rose appeared on 14 October 2012 under the title “Global warming stopped 16 years ago, reveals Met Office report quietly released… and here is the chart to prove it”. It says: “The world stopped getting warmer almost 16 years ago, according to new data released last week.” The article uses the words ‘pause’, as well as ‘plateau’. It quotes Judith Curry as saying “that the computer models used to predict future warming were ‘deeply flawed’.”
Both articles were picked up by the Met Office which discussed some errors they contained on its ‘blog’ ‘Met office in the media’, with a post on 29 January and another on 14 October 2012. And, of course, this ‘dialogue’ was widely discussed in the blogosphere. You can read a summary of various rebuttals of Rose’s claims that global warming has stopped on the Carbon Brief Blog of October 2012.
This flurry of activity, of claims and counter-claims, contributed to putting the ‘pause’ squarely on the public agenda.
2013
In hindsight, it is easy to say that when ‘the pause’ was used by some commentators as evidence for rejecting some basic tenets of climate science, scientists might have been well advised to stop using the word ‘pause’. However, this did not happen. On the contrary, both the Met Office and the IPCC published reports that tried to deal with ‘the pause’. One Met Office report was entitled ‘The recent pause in global warming’; the first part of the IPCC report, published in September 2013, contained a discussion of the ‘hiatus’ (p. 61); and IPCC authors talked about the ‘pause‘ (see Mooney’s paper cited above).
Furthermore, “at the Science Media Centre in London in July 2013, journalists met Met Office scientists and were given a briefing document with three papers on ‘the recent pause in global warming’ in surface temperatures.” (Wikipedia)
A first longer article on the ‘pause in global warming’ to appear in The Independent was published on 17 November 2013, that is, a year after the Daily Mail had put the topic on the media agenda (see figure above which shows The Independent as the second most active newspaper on the topic, but obviously from a different perspective). The article was entitled “What is the global warming ‘pause’ and does it mean we’re off the hook?” It was set out in a Question and Answer format. One question was: “Does this mean that global warming has stopped?” and the answer was: “No. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is the combined expertise of thousands of climate scientists, says that each of the past three decades has been successively warmer at the Earth’s surface than any preceding decade since 1850. In the northern hemisphere, the period from 1983 to 2012 was likely to be the warmest 30-year period for the last 1,400 years.” One other answer says: “Simply put: the pause does not really exist”. But by then the horse had bolted, so to speak.
2006/2007
Now, when I searched Scopus and the Lexis Nexis news database I used the phrase ‘pause in global warming’ as a search term. I therefore didn’t find some articles from 2006/2007, which are however, highly relevant in this context, as they antedate the announcement by the American Meteorological Society, the scientific articles from 2009 and 2010 and the media furore that erupted in 2012/13. One article was written by a well-known climate contrarian, Bob Carter, for The Telegraph and entitled “There IS a problem with global warming… it stopped in 1998”.
The article responds, I believe, to the 2006 paper by Brohan et al. entitled “Uncertainty estimates in regional and global observed temperature changes: A new data set from 1850” published in the Journal of Geophysical Research (which also precipitated blog discussions from that time onwards). Carter doesn’t use the word ‘pause’; neither does David Whitehouse in a 2007 article for The New Statesman entitled “Has global warming stopped?”. So it seems that when the word ‘pause’ began to be used in 2009/2010 in scientific circles, the ground was prepared for shaping the meaning of the word and its use in wider society.***
Trends
It is also interesting to look at Google Trends and see how often and when people searched for ‘pause in global warming’ and ‘global warming stopped’. As you can see from the featured image above (I searched Google Trends on 26 September), there were spikes in the searches for ‘global warming stopped’ in 2009/10 and in 2012/13 which coincide with spikes of attention to the ‘pause’ in science and the media. Small spikes in searches for ‘pause in global warming’ can only be found towards 2014/15, that is, when the existence/importance of the ‘pause’ began to be more seriously discussed. There is slightly a higher search volume for ‘global warming pause’ than for for ‘pause in global warming’. Searches for ‘global warming pause’ started at the beginning of 2014 and quite a few question the existence of a ‘pause’. For more info, see Mooney’s article quoted above and this article by Lewandowsky et al. which has just appeared in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society). All this needs more scrutiny though, as does the rest of my ‘research’ for this post!
Some tentative conclusions
According to the Oxford English Dictionary a ‘pause’ is “an act of stopping or ceasing for a short time in a course of action; a short interval of silence or inaction, esp. one arising from uncertainty, doubt, or reflection; an intermission; a delay, a hesitation.” I won’t here go into the issue of time and what ‘short’ may mean. However, as one can see, it is quite natural to take some easy inferential steps along a semantic path that goes like this: from ‘pause’ as something stopping for a short time interval in a course of action, or in this case a statistical trend, to something stopping completely, to something no longer being an issue of concern or interest, to something no longer existing.
It is very difficult to see this inferential semantic path emerging while it is being walked by the users of the words ‘pause’ or ‘stopped’ and to stop them, or indeed pause them, from following that path. As we have seen, the path began to emerge mainly in the blogosphere and in the mainstream press after the publication of Brohan et al. (2006) (when contrarian writers seem to have jumped almost immediately to the second step on our inferential path, from ‘ceasing for a short time interval’ to ‘stop completely’).
As far as I can make out, the topic was then taken up in the science literature in 2009/10 before exploding more fully in the mainstream press, especially the Daily Mail, in 2012/13, when scientists began to publish more on the topic of the pause, thereby inadvertently giving ‘it’ more credibility and entrenching the inferential pathway from pause to stopped to unimportant or non-existent.
Footnotes
*I also searched Lexis Nexis for ‘global warming pause’, but I haven’t analysed the data set yet; excluding duplicates there were 211 articles, of which 202 were published in the last five years, that is, since 2010; at first glance results seem to overlap with my findings achieved using ‘pause in global warming’ as a search term.
**I haven’t charted the use of ‘hiatus’, but in the news ‘hiatus in global warming’ first appears to have been used in passing in 2005, then more frequently from 2011 onwards; 200 times in the last five years, excluding duplicates 152 times. I also haven’t looked at stagnation, plateau, slowdown etc.
*** Another piece of work could be carried out on a set of news items that use the phrase ‘global warming stopped’. A Lexis Nexis search reveals that (as of 26 September) 794 articles (excluding duplicates) in ‘All English Language News’ have used that phrase.
PS: And the ‘pause’ has resurfaced again in 2016: Nice overview in this article by Graham Redfearn http://www.theguardian.com/environment/planet-oz/2016/mar/03/did-global-warming-really-slowdown-have-a-large-injection-of-nuance-and-a-side-order-of-abuse
Glad to visit and read a good article on your site, you may be successful always.
It’s all a little bit – the parrot is not dead, it is merely resting…
so it seems, ‘pause’ is being used to say, it hasn’t stopped… with the hope/assumption/expectation warming will start again (at a decently high rate to be concerned about) very soon
All in response to a headline of stopped.. (for the moment) nobody was saying it had stopped forever more, but not warming for ten years really went against, a high decadal rate of warming projected by climate science..
Personally I’ve always preferred slowdown, as there is less to argue/quibble about.
maybe it will ‘plateau’ and fall a bit over the next couple of decades, what then?
That’s actually an interesting point that I overlooked, that ‘stopped’ also can have two interpretations.
thus, the ‘pause’ seems to be climate sciences response to – headlines in the media of ‘stopped’ – when the articles about stopped are more nuanced than the headlines suggest. (Blame the sub editors, trying to get attention!)
So if I use ‘pause’ – the ‘seepage’ has been from climate science to myself?
‘Slowdown’ probably the most descriptive- though the Met Office’s Chief Press Officer liked – ‘hiatus’ – when I asked him what word should I use not to upset anybody!
Nobody has said stopped for ever? just articles about observed stopped until now, these articles were in a response to high predicted rates of decadal warming for the 1st 2 decades of this century (02-0.3C per decade, AR4)
Only climate scientist were projecting the future, the ‘sceptics’ were observing from past projections/predictions (as was science itself) that warming had stopped for the now – Phil Jones even said so, and that he would only get worried if for 15 years – now at 17?
We should probably say lowish decadal rate of warming – or slowdown..
And if someone want to say warming at 0.05C per decade or less, then it would be only fair to say cooling at -0.05 C per decade – given the errors involved – it would be better if either case was basically a bit flat (not cooling/warming very much) – to hit even the low end of projected models of warming by 2040- we need to be warming at a rate of over 0.3C per decade from now. (There is a video of me and Richard Betts discussing that somewhere online, at the Met Office)
Came up w/ this paper in 2009. Top climate scientists rebutting a slow down or pause. Page 15 of PDF. http://w ww.preventionweb.net/files/11989_CopenhagenDiagnosisLOW.pdf
Thanks for this! I hadn’t seen that. An example of an early rebuttal, it seems, which coincides with the 2009/10 wave of interest that I seem to have identified in my, albeit limited, searches. I should also say that the blog is based on two days of work. It is not the outcome of a whole research project. So I wouldn’t be at all surprised if I was told I overlooked something 😉 And as I said in the footnotes, there are other bodies of texts that I haven’t even had time to look at!
I started using ‘slowdown’ as it was used here:
“These results show that climate models possess internal
mechanisms of variability capable of reproducing the current slowdown
in global temperature rise.”
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/media/pdf/j/j/global_temperatures_09.pdf
Do global temperature trends over the last decade falsify climate predictions?
J. Knightht, J. J. Kennededy, C. Folllland, G. Harris, G. S. Joneses, M. Palmelmelmer, D. Parkeker, A. Scaifefe, and P. Stotttt
“Observations indicate that global temperature rise has slowed in the last decade (Fig. 2.8a). The least squares trend for January 1999 to December 2008 calculated from the HadCRUT3 dataset (Brohan et al. 2006) is +0.07±0.07°C decade–1—much less than the 0.18°C decade–1 recorded between 1979 and 2005 and the 0.2°C decade–1 expected in the next decade
(IPCC; Solomon et al. 2007).”
———————-
NOTE – the 0.2C expected in the NEXT decade –
This paper was cited in the Met Office press release in 2009, that warming would continue very soon. In the press release they use ‘hiatus’ (posh ‘pause’ ?)
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/news/releases/archive/2009/global-warming
Global warming set to continue
14 September 2009
Global temperatures
Global warming continues to pose a real threat that should not be ignored – a claim reinforced in a new study by scientists, reported in a supplement of the August issue of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. This is despite very small global temperature rises over the last 10 years.
Met Office Hadley Centre scientists investigated how often decades with a neutral trend in global mean temperature occurred in computer modelled climate change simulations. They found that despite continued increases in greenhouse gas concentrations, a single-decade hiatus in warming occurs relatively often.
————-
six year on ,we are beyond the single decade ‘slowdown/hiatus/pause’
and we are no where near that 0.2C per decade…
see also earlier strong predictions by Met Office (2007), press release, government advice, and videos.
◾There would be 0.3°C warming over the decade 2004-2014
◾At least half of the years after 2009 would be warmer than the record year of 1998
Paul Matthews summarised that here:
https://ipccreport.wordpress.com/2013/11/20/the-skillful-predictions-of-climate-science/
So when ‘sceptics’ talk of pause/slowdown’hiatus’ it really must be taken in context of predictions of 0.2C per decade for this decade, pauses no more than 10 years in models (at the time) and the actual science, which noticed a 10 year slowdown.. compared to rates seen in the 1980-90’s
That is the context, a response, based on observations, that climate science itself was discussing.
2009: Met Office J Knight et al paper..
“Given the likelihood that
internal variability contributed
to the slowing of global temperature
rise in the last decade, we
expect that warming will resume
in the next few years, consistent
with predictions from near-term
climate forecasts (Smith et al. 2007;
Haines et al. 2009). Improvements
in such forecasts will give greater
forewarning of future instances of
temporary slowing and acceleration
of global temperature rise, as
predicted to occur in IPCC AR4
projections (Easterling and Wehner
2009).”
————-
NOTE: “warming will resume in the next few years, consistent with predictions from near-term climate forecasts”
but the slowdown continued for another 6 yrs – ie we are not warming at 0.2C+ per decade as predicted.
remember in 2007 – Vicky Pope (Paul Matthews link) – and on video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=WyDmdcPw7Uw
Vicky Pope: By 2014, we’re predicting that we’ll be 0.3 degrees warmer than 2004. Now just to put that into context, the warming over the past century and a half has only been 0.7 degrees, globally – now there have been bigger changes locally, but globally the warming is 0.7 degrees. So 0.3 degrees, over the next ten years, is pretty significant. And half the years after 2009 are predicted to be hotter than 1998, which was the previous record. So again, these are very strong statements about what will happen over the next ten years.
So again, I think this illustrates that, you know, we can already see signs of climate change, but over the next ten years, we are expecting to see quite significant changes occurring.” – Pope 2007
full transcript.
https://sites.google.com/site/mytranscriptbox/home/20070905_vp
And these claims were part of government advice from the Met Office.
Press Release:
http://web.archive.org/web/20080708230357/http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/corporate/pressoffice/2007/pr20070810.html
10 August 2007
The forecast for 2014…
Climate scientists at the Met Office Hadley Centre will unveil the first decadal climate prediction model in a paper published on 10 August 2007 in the journal Science. The paper includes the Met Office’s prediction for annual global temperature to 2014.
Over the 10-year period as a whole, climate continues to warm and 2014 is likely to be 0.3 °C warmer than 2004. At least half of the years after 2009 are predicted to exceed the warmest year currently on record
These predictions are very relevant to businesses and policy-makers who will be able to respond to short-term climate change when making decisions today. The next decade is within many people’s understanding and brings home the reality of a changing climate.
advice:
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/media/pdf/b/1/informing.pdf
————————
so as the pause/slowdown/hiatus continued beyond 2009 – as the scientists were already discussing it, using that language, so ‘sceptics’ discussed it as well. As many ‘sceptics’ actually look at what the science has said (2007 and earlier), and are interested in the science.
Yes I think at that time there was a quite tight coupling between the various ‘discussants’ of this ‘phenomenon’ but I think it became uncoupled and more polarising around 2012. But again, more data are always welcome!
And of course. late 2009 – we had climategate, and the emails where scientist were discussing no warming, trying to understand why (put publicly saying something else) which is probably why ‘pause/slowdown/hiatus/etc – got a lot of hits late 2009-2010 –
that and Copenhagen cnference had lots of hype about global warming, so that the last decade, acknowldeged by science as ‘slowed down’ got attention..
(leaked in 2009) – 4 years on, still
5 July, 2005
“The scientific community would come down on me in no uncertain terms if I said the world had cooled from 1998. OK it has but it is only 7 years of data and it isn’t statistically significant…,” Dr. Phil Jones – CRU emails.
7 May, 2009
“No upward trend” has to continue for a total of 15 years before we get worried,” Dr. Phil Jones – CRU emails.
elsewhere in 2009:
15 Aug 2009
“…This lack of overall warming is analogous to the period from 2002 to 2008 when decreasing solar irradiance also countered much of the anthropogenic warming…,” Dr. Judith L. Lean – Geophysical Research Letters.
19 November 2009
“At present, however, the warming is taking a break.[…] There can be no argument about that,” Dr. Mojib Latif – Spiegel.
19 November 2009
“It cannot be denied that this is one of the hottest issues in the scientific community. [….] We don’t really know why this stagnation is taking place at this point,” Dr. Jochem Marotzke – Spiegel.
http://www.climatedepot.com/2013/06/04/long-list-of-warmist-scientists-say-global-warming-has-stopped/#ixzz3nAXRrdbe
– also – “taking a break” – and stagnation’ – ‘no upward trend’ – etc
simple explanation, lots of scientist using lots of different phrases to describe the same observation. and the simple explanation is one of those phrase ‘stuck’ and became more commonly used – ‘pause’.
and as ‘pause’ in global warming means in most people minds it will ‘unpause’ – it is not the ‘sceptics’ choice if they want to ‘message’ it PR style.. so no seepage from ‘sceptics’ to scientists on the language front?
Great additions to, as I said, my limited collection of data. And yes, initially I wanted to mention climategate in this context but … In a larger piece this would certainly have to be discussed as well as all the other synonyms of pause.
I’m sure there is a paper in this – put me down as a co-author?! 😉
How ‘climategate’ got called climategate is also interesting.
I’ve see one paper that thinks it was a deliberate ‘sceptic’ ploy, the reality was more interesting – at Bishop hill it was called CRUgate for quite a few days, Delingpole was NOT the 1st to use it in the MSM, etc, etc. at WUWT Warmergate was used 1st.. and we can to the exact minute, identify when and who 1st used ‘climategate’ – fairly common knowledge
If only I had time. At the moment I having to invest quite a bit of time of kickstarting a new project that’s not at all about climate change… but yes, a paper would be good. Climategate – Was the moment of lexical creation Nov. 19, 2009 3:52 p.m? See here: http://bigthink.com/age-of-engagement/student-researcher-tracks-the-origins-of-the-climategate-name
Not sure there’s a proper noun for it, but stopped or slowed down, global warming was supposed to be accelerating by now.
Suggestions on how to translate second derivatives into English, very welcome. In general I’ve found the warmist community much more preoccupied about the implications of any word for the “pause”, and that’s a sign of weakness as much as cognitive scientists magically blaming seepage from superhuman skeptics to dumb scientists.