From The BBC: "A new computer model developed by German researchers, reported in the journal Nature, suggests the cooling will counter greenhouse warming. However, temperatures will again be rising quickly by about 2020, they say...The key to the new prediction is the natural cycle of ocean temperatures called the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), which is closely related to the warm currents that bring heat from the tropics to the shores of Europe. The cause of the oscillation is not well understood, but the cycle appears to come round about every 60 to 70 years. It may partly explain why temperatures rose in the early years of the last century before beginning to cool in the 1940s."
The Island of Doubt:
Why climate change is so tricky to cover:
Climatologists probably need to take a stiff drink before they open the papers (or fire up their web browsers) the morning after their studies appear in print or online. Two if the studies involved say anything interesting about global warming. Today's coverage of a Nature paper that predicts a decade-long, regional cooling trend for Europe and North America is sure to give the authors the jitters.
Noel Keenlyside of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in Kiel, Germany, and his co-authors laced their letter with caveats. They call their attempt to model the effects of meridional overturning circulation "a simple approach" and note that they are working with surface temperatures when what they really need are subsurface records. But most observers seem to think they are at least giving the climate science community lots to think about when they conclude that global average surface temperatures could stop rising until the end of the next decade thanks to natural ocean cycles.
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5:33:17 PM 
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