Seems the planet isn’t exactly getting warmer.

Maybe it’s relevant maybe it isn’t. Mostly I think it’s not simply because it’s too short of a time frame to really be worth discussing.

From Realclimate , check out the graph, use it to impress your friends.

The first point to make (and indeed the first point we always make) is that the climate system has enormous amounts of variability on day-to-day, month-to-month, year-to-year and decade-to-decade periods.

I admit to being pretty much a skeptic to all of this. I’m that way with just about anything that involves some version of the sky falling…mostly because the sky rarely falls. I also think there is a bit of a modeling problem in that mother nature hasn’t provided a complete list of the relevant variables. I searched for a reference and couldn’t find it before I lost interest, but it involved a recent warming trend due to solar irradiation and a current cooling trend with a decrease in that radiation. Once that returns to “normal”, we’ll see temperatures starting to increase again with a rise in greenhouse gas. I mention that because I’ve seen it used to explain rising temperatures, but rarely used to explain falling ones, and I think many global warming skeptics are guilty of dancing around the topic. And it is after all, a completely separate issue from CO2 warming.

No matter what you think about all of this, RealClimate has this part right:

…the question should be, are there analyses that will be made over the next few years that will improve the evaluation of climate models? There the answer is likely to be yes. There will be better estimates of long term trends in precipitation, cloudiness, winds, storm intensity, ice thickness, glacial retreat, ocean warming etc. We have expectations of what those trends should be, but in many cases the ‘noise’ is still too large for those metrics to be a useful constraint. As time goes on, the noise in ever-longer trends diminishes, and what gets revealed then will determine how well we understand what’s happening.