The planet is no longer warming. The brief warming episode of the late 20th century completed its course in the mid 1990s, and is now over. These are now uncontroversial statements.
They are based on hard data which has been available for many years on the websites of many official agencies. But somehow those agencies found ways to interpret the data differently, and to continually sidestep the elephant in the room.
There have been three distinct warming episodes since the instrumental record began – 1860-80,1912-40 and 1978-96.
VANISHED GLOBAL WARMING may NOT RETURN – UK Met Office
But it might. Hey, we don't know, we're the Met Office
The mighty Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO).
The AMO has actually been heating the world up since the mid-1990s - though not strongly enough to raise temperatures -
but now it looks set to swing into a negative phase and cool the planet off, probably for a long time, as AMO phases typically last several decades. The Met Office's new report (pdf), just out today, has this to say about the AMO:
The current warm phase is now 20 years long and historical precedent suggests a return to relatively cool conditions could occur within a few years ... Observational and model estimates further suggest AMO shifts have an effect on global mean near-surface temperatures of about 0.1°C. A rapid AMO decline could therefore maintain the current slowdown in global warming ...
http://www.theregist..._uk_met_office/