Won't be able to reply after this on this thread. I'm going to be in a large project for the next several days. But no, his point was that global warming was continuing, despite the obvious plateauing in the data for the past ten years. His analysis of the 1998 - 2007 data verged on scientifically dishonest, claiming that the data supported an upward trend but holding back the silly p-values.
This plateauing is why the AGW guys are suddenly adjusting their models to predict that temperatures will be falling for the next ten years or so. Anyone who thinks the past 9 years of data have not thown a panic into the AGW world doesn't realize what these data mean. They mean: (1) Temperature has not gone up for almost ten years now. The past 3-4 years have trended down (although not statistically significantly yet--we need another year or two of data to get statistical significance); (2) The previous AGW models substantially overpredict the temperatures that have actually occurred since 1999.
So for all the "no need to not worry, temperatures are still rising" rhetoric, the reality is they are frantically going back and redoing the models at this very moment because the last 9 years establish that the existing models have been overpredicting temperatures with high statistical significance.
As a result, we now see the recent German AGW publication to this effect.
You and I had a previous discussion about this process and how constant redoing of the model produces overfitting to the back data. This is just another new parameter shoved into an unvalidated model to make it fit to new data that previous versions could not explain. But the likely reason the previous version did not work is that it was already overfit because of the high dimensionality of the parameterization of the model and a very limited data set with which to set the parameters.
I've already spent more time on this post that I can afford. God bless and good night!
You (and others) keep getting this wrong. 1998 was about 0.2 C warmer than it would have been without an El Nino. (See my profile.) It should only have gotten as warm as 1998, according to the ~0.2 C warming trend, about NOW. The temperatures NOW are consistent with the ~0.2 C warming trend that started in the late 1970s. The 1998 El Nino was inconsistently/anomalously warm because of a big El Nino that year. So saying "Temperature has not gone up for almost ten years now" is very inaccurate. It is more accurate to say that global temperatures over the past 3-4 years have now reached the temperature achieved during the anomalous El Nino year of 1998.
(2) The previous AGW models substantially overpredict the temperatures that have actually occurred since 1999.
Cite one that does.