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The old Chinese curse apparently says, "May you live through interesting times,'' and we certainly are particularly when it comes to climate change. The hiatus in global warming, unanticipated by popular climate models, has engendered a healthy scientific debate on the causes ranging from stratospheric humidity changes to the heat escaping into the bottom of the ocean.
None of the models has offered predictions of when this pause might end. Considering the continued increase in greenhouse gases and their inexorable impact on the planet's energy balance, it is clear that the global-warming pause is just a snooze button and we will wake up to continued warming one of these days because greenhouse gases trap more of the sun's energy and it is either being stored in the ocean or being thrown back to space and neither will continue ad infinitum. As interesting and as challenging as the scientific problem is, it does raise questions about whether the climate community is not comfortable accepting that there is much that is not understood about the "natural" or "internal" variability of Earth's climate system.
The natural, or internal, variability of the climate system is essentially the rich spectrum of timescales in weather and climate that are not directly forced by the daytime and seasonal energy received from the sun. For example weather can change many times a day and we can have warm days within a harsh winter. That continuum of timescales is generated by internal feedbacks in the Earth system between the atmosphere, land, ocean and ice.
We in the climate science community, are clearly earnest about our concern for the future of our planet's climate, but we need to avoid being deadly earnest in our messages about global warming to avoid even the appearance of an end-justifies-the-means approach. The climate system is too non-linear to be perfectly predictable, and even a high level of scientific understanding does not mean predictions are possible at all timescales because of of irreducible uncertainties of this internal variability.
