“[A]ccording to a new study, global warming may have hit a speed bump and could go into hiding for decades.”
“Earth's climate continues to confound scientists. Following a 30-year trend of warming, global temperatures have flatlined since 2001 despite rising greenhouse gas concentrations, and a heat surplus that should have cranked up the planetary thermostat.”
“This is nothing like anything we've seen since 1950,” Kyle Swanson of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee said. “Cooling events since then had firm causes, like eruptions or large-magnitude La Ninas. This current cooling doesn't have one.”
How about less activity (namely solar flares) on the Sun?
“In 1997 and 1998, the tropical Pacific Ocean warmed rapidly in what Swanson called a 'super El Nino event.' It sent a shock wave through the oceans and atmosphere, jarring their circulation patterns into unison.”
I am not so sure about that.
“But just what's causing the cooling is a mystery. Sinking water currents in the north Atlantic Ocean could be sucking heat down into the depths. Or an overabundance of tropical clouds may be reflecting more of the sun's energy than usual back out into space.”
“It is possible that a fraction of the most recent rapid warming since the 1970's was due to a free variation in climate,” Isaac Held of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Princeton, New Jersey wrote in an email to Discovery News. "Suggesting that the warming might possibly slow down or even stagnate for a few years before rapid warming commences again."
Don't let evidence like this dissuade you from thinking “man made” climate change is a severe problem though.
“When the climate kicks back out of this state, we'll have explosive warming,” Swanson said. “Thirty years of greenhouse gas radiative forcing will still be there and then bang, the warming will return and be very aggressive.”
Meanwhile, Pelosi and friends were “snowed out” of the global warming rally in D.C. Politco has a short video segment on it.
AJH