They point out that the trend may have been skewed by unusually strong El Nino events.
And that's interfered in some ways with the El Nino pattern up till now.
And from year-to-year they can be, you know, locally warmer associated with things like El Nino.
But it has not been anything like a classical El Nino pattern up until now.
Dr. TRENBERTH: Normal for El Nino, but still not a normal winter by any means.
But just like weather cycles such as El Nino, the music industry tends to repeat its trends.
The El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is generally thought to be the main reason for inter-annual warming or cooling.
But besides Sars, the El Nino weather phenomenon is also having its ill-effects.
Since 1995, the Atlantic hurricane seasons have been above normal except for the El Nino years of 1997 and 2002.
La Nina is the cold cousin of El Nino - the two collectively making up the El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO).
But it looks like El Nino is about to pick up and will hold sway in the next couple of months at least.
At sea, periodic El Nino disturbances in the Pacific create moist rising air and thunderstorms, which can affect the weather thousands of kilometres away.
The second, following a slight cool-down, began in 1975 and rose at quite a constant rate until 1998, a strong Pacific Ocean El Nino year.
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We're thinking that the El Nino pattern is really about to kick in and will be with us for maybe the next two or three months.
Temperatures have been essentially flat since 1998, with the exception of another brief 2010 El Nino spike immediately followed by a dramatic 2011 La Nina decline.
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It could change the frequency of the Pacific pattern known as El Nino, a cycle of peculiar weather that affects ocean currents and rainfall across the planet.
But recent research has shown that some wild birds' patterns of flights and stopovers during migrations, or moulting times, differ between El Nino and La Nina years.
Additionally, expect a weak el Nino to develop this year.
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There is no threat from El Nino, an abnormal warming of surface ocean waters which disrupted even distribution of last year's monsoon rainfall, the official told The Wall Street Journal.
The combination of a weak el Nino that should develop with higher than normal pressures over the eastern and central Atlantic can create strong low level easterlies and enhance shear.
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Much of the variability in global TC ACE is explained by the concomitant changes or evolution in the character of the El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO).
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Dr. TRENBERTH: It changes the way in which an El Nino gets manifested, and in some places - and certainly in the North Pacific - there's a little bit of a battle.
Weather officials said they are hopeful for normal rains as there is no threat of El Nino, an abnormal warming of surface ocean waters that disrupted even distribution of last year's monsoon rainfall.
And there is a modern El Nino going on, supposedly, out in the Pacific, and that can have a very large influence in the weather patterns, the storm tracks, the atmospheric waves across North America.
He suggested that rather than being proof that global warming had stopped, as some sceptics had claimed, it was due to a combination of El Nino conditions and increased amounts of what are called aerosols.
The forecasters base their prediction on the cooling of the Atlantic Ocean over the past several months and the increased chances of an El Nino, or warming of Pacific waters, over this year's hurricane season.
The piece, a kind of sequel to the team's 2000 Nativity oratorio, "El Nino, " is in two halves, the first recounting the raising of Lazarus from the dead, the second the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus.
The best hope lies in trying to identify the broader changes under way - for example with the retreat of the Arctic sea-ice or the cycle of warming in the Pacific Ocean with El Nino and La Nina.
Although the Met Office has 1998 as the single warmest year, that coincided with strong El Nino conditions - the warming of surface waters in the eastern Pacific that releases heat stored in the deep ocean into the atmosphere, raising temperatures globally.
"There is other research out there pointing out that this storage may be part of a natural cycle that will eventually reverse, either due to El Nino or the so-called Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, and therefore may not imply what the authors are suggesting, " he said.
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