Not looking too settled, is it?

For reasons not entirely clear to me, this paragraph apparently does nothing to raise doubts at the New York Times about how "settled" climate science is, despite the fact that the paragraph in question appears in a global warming story in the New York Times:

The rise in the surface temperature of earth has been markedly slower over the last 15 years than in the 20 years before that. And that lull in warming has occurred even as greenhouse gases have accumulated in the atmosphere at a record pace.

The NYT declines to mention that by "markedly slower" they mean "nonexistent," They do, however, admit that the real world is baffling so-called climate scientists, many of whom are no such thing. James Richard  Hansen, [update: I was thinking of Richard Lindzen at MIT; my bad]  the Goddard Space Center hack who is the leader of the global warming pack and, coincidentally (nudge nudge, wink wink), is in charge of one of the primary networks for measuring global surface temperatures (subject, of course, to adjustment by algorithms that supposedly account for unidentified variables even decades after the fact and, of course, which algorithms are not released for public or scientific peer review, despite the fact that the algorithms consistently adjust historic temperatures down while adjusting recent temperatures up to create a steeper warming curve. Funny how that works.) has a Ph.D. in astronomy. Not physics, not meteorology, certainly not climatology. This is your leading climate scientist, while Richard Lindzen, and atmospheric physicist and head of MIT's climatology department, is a "denier"? Yeah, right.

Anyway, the clueless New York Times, to which I normally would not link, apparently has forgotten that the science is settled, since some English major at the NYT wrote this paragraph:

The slowdown is a bit of a mystery to climate scientists. True, the basic theory that predicts a warming of the planet in response to human emissions does not suggest that warming should be smooth and continuous. To the contrary, in a climate system still dominated by natural variability, there is every reason to think the warming will proceed in fits and starts.

It seems to me if you remember that the science is settled, then motherfucking nothing should be "a bit of a mystery" to climate scientists.  Further, "the basic theory that predicts a warming of the planet in response to human emissions" is a false statement, because the models actually predict a linear rise in temperature. The models, of course, are really fucking wrong, but hey, the science is settled, right? And by the way -- yo, Clapper, blow me!