A valuable short paper that has been accepted for publication in Geophysical Research Letters (subscription required) makes a strong case against presenting any argument about human-driven global warming that’s based on short-term trends (a decade or so). I’ve noted here before that climate campaigners who seek to use real-time events to engage the public can only retain credibility if they account for natural variability in framing their case and explain that the odds of such events are shifting. (Realclimate explored natural variability and warming last year, too.)

“We show that the climate over the 21st century can and likely will produce periods of a decade or two where the globally averaged surface air temperature shows no trend or even slight cooling in the presence of longer-term warming,”