"By visual inspection it can be seen that..." Can it? That certainly seems to be the approach of folks at the GWPF and elsewhere in the paws-o-sphere.

So, say you were locked in a windowless box room, someone handed you this daily temp record (pictured on the right also) and demanded you tell them which was coming next, summer or winter solstice? And if you get it wrong they'll shoot you in the head? You'd be happy with "by visual inspection it can be seen that..." would you?

As it happens, trends that long (29 days) go against the seasonal trend about 30% of the time for daily temp data near me. 3 in 10 odds of getting shot in the head there, if you went with "visual inspection". There is, of course, a seasonal trend, but it's noisy. With noisy trends, "visual inspection" is regularly, predictably misleading.

And that's the problem with the "pause" argument: the people most strongly selling it are going on nothing more than "by visual inspection it can be seen that..." Some of them do it knowingly, many others do it because it seems intuitively correct. Intuition is not always a good guide.

I cherrypicked that one, of course: the next solstice is summer. Here it is circled in green, in the context of four years' temp data, with other pink lines for all of the 30% that go against the seasonal trend.