Study Ties Global Warming ‘Hiatus’ to Pacific Cooldown: 'Scientists probing the mystery of the so-called "global warming hiatus" may have made a breakthrough. According to a new study published Wednesday in the journal Nature, a persistent area of unusually cool sea surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific Ocean could explain why, despite ever-increasing amounts of manmade greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, global average surface temperatures have increased at a slower rate during the past 15 years. By running sophisticated computer models that looked at observed energy coming into the climate system, plus observed sea surface temperatures in the central and eastern Pacific Ocean, researchers from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography found that the decadal-scale cooling of a portion of the tropical Pacific accounts for most of the current plateau in global average surface temperatures.'
'I think this is a very well designed study that strongly supports the notion that internal variability of the climate system can influence the rate of global warming on timescales ranging from years to decades,” said John Michael Wallace of the University of Washington, in an email. 'It argues that not only could the current hiatus in the warming be due to natural causes: so also could the rapidity of the warming from the 1970s until the late 1990s.'