I have been arguing for some time that what the pattern of global warming suggests is a rising trend due to AGW with an alternating trend from some other cause superimposed on it, the latter having a period of about sixty years. On that interpretation, the period of stable to slightly falling temperatures from about 1940 to 1970 and the period of roughly stable temperatures from 2002 on represent periods when the two trends were pushing in opposite directions and so roughly canceling each other, the rapid warming from about 1910 to 1940 and 1970 to 2002 periods when they were reinforcing each other.The conventional explanation for the mid-century pause is that it was due to aerosols producing a temporary cooling effect. That became less plausible, at least to me, when the pause reappeared, roughly on schedule. If I am correct, the IPCC models, by special casing the earlier pause instead of treating it as part of a recurring pattern, overestimated the average rate of warming, treating periods when the two trends reinforced as if they were the norm, the period when they canceled as a special case.I have now come across an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that supports my interpretation of the pattern, based on analysis of the 353 year Central England Temperature Series, the longest instrumental temperature record that exists. The authors conclude that there is a recurrent multidecadal oscillation with a period of about seventy years, likely due to the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation. They reject the aerosol explanation and conclude that:
The underlying net anthropogenic warming rate in the industrial era is found to have been steady since 1910 at 0.07–0.08 °C/decade, with superimposed AMO-related ups and downs that included the early 20th century warming, the cooling of the 1960s and 1970s, the accelerated warming of the 1980s and 1990s, and the recent slowing of the warming rates.
Almost precisely my conjecture—I slightly underestimated the period of the oscillation—with an explanation and a lot more data.