“There is no substantive evidence for a ‘pause’ or ‘hiatus’ in warming,” write Stephan Lewandowsky, a professor at the University of Bristol in the UK, and two colleagues in Tuesday’s Nature Scientific Reports. “We suggest that the use of those terms is therefore inaccurate.”

The study at issue in Smith’s inquiry, published by scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in the journal Science, updated an influential NOAA dataset to resolve discrepancies between certain types temperature measurements — and that’s when the “pause” disappeared. But the new study takes a different approach — it suggests that scientists have had curiously inconsistent definitions of the “pause,” and whenever you take a long enough period of climate history, there’s always an upward trend anyway.

Perhaps most notably, the new study uses a different temperature dataset kept by NASA, not NOAA, in its analysis. “You can definitely 100 percent say that our conclusion does not depend on the NOAA update,” says Lewandowsky. “We did not use the NOAA data.” The implication is that independent of Smith’s inquiry, the “pause” argument could still be invalid.