John Nielsen-Gammon is the Texas State Climatologist and a Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at Texas A&M University.  Viewers may remember him from my snapshot of the Great Texas drought. Reposted with permission: It's common knowledge among those who follow such things that global temperatures have not gone up very much in the past several years.  This has caused many to believe that the recent lack of warming contradicts what climate models say should happen in response to the increasing Tyndall gases.  This, in turn, has provoked the counterargument that the Earth is still warming, just on a longer time scale, or that the recent period is too short to yield statistically significant results. These counterarguments are not compelling.  Fundamentally, any change in global temperature, even if it's just from one year to another, must have a cause.  Saying that we need to look at longer time scales denies the need to find the cause of the actual global temperature changes (or lack thereof) at shorter time scales. Such causes have been sought, and a few papers have proposed various combinations of cloud cover, volcanic aerosols, the El Nio/Southern Oscillation (ENSO), deep ocean heat uptake, and so forth.  A recent paper I like by Foster and Rahmsdorf (discussed here and here ) takes a statistical approach to attempt to eliminate the effect of the other known forcing mechanisms, and what's left over is a fairly steady warming.  Others have noted, more casually, that 2011 was the warmest La Nia year on