Nature, one of the world’s premier science journals, has just published a new study showing that “proves that ocean circulation is the link between weather and decadal scale climatic change.” More important, it undermines the storyline of dangerous anthropogenic global warming so hotly promoted by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and Green groups around the world.

But note how Science Daily, which is sold out to global warming alarmism, spins this story. The study finds that an ocean cycle will drive about a half-degree Celsius reduction in global average temperature, among other things.

Does the headline hint at that?

Does the lead hint at that?

No, and no.

It’s obscured in this sentence in the second paragraph: “Since this new climatic phase could be half a degree cooler, it may well offer a brief reprise from the rise of global temperatures, as well as resulting in fewer hurricanes hitting the United States.”

And what’s wrong with that sentence? Let’s count the problems:

• This new (well, really cyclical, but who’s counting?) phenomenon is (according to the lead) likely to last “a number of decades.” Well, let’s be really charitable and interpret that as only two decades. That’s the full length of the warming (roughly 1977 to 1997) to which AGW alarmists appeal for evidence that we’re driving dangerous, historically unprecedented warming. But this new phenomenon is clearly naturally driven, not anthropogenic. Why not the prior warming phase?
• This new phenomenon “may well offer a brief reprise from the rise of global temperature”? But we’ve been in that reprise for at least the last 18 years and 5 months. Add a couple of decades to that and you get 38 years and 5 months–nearly twice the length of the purportedly AGW. So what’s the fuss about?

• The wording, “this new climatic phase could be half a degree cooler” obscures the significance for non-specialists. What it really means is, “this new climatic phase could set global warming back by two-thirds of its entire gain from 1850 to 2000.”
• This new phenomenon might result in “fewer hurricanes hitting the United States.” Well, might it? The historical data indicate more hurricanes in cooler years than in warmer years–precisely the opposite of what the global computer models predicting high AGW simulate, but who cares about observations anymore? The Greens’ agenda is all that really matters. If the new phenomenon really does reduce GAT by about 0.5C, history suggests (and I claim nothing more than that) that we’ll see more, not fewer, hurricanes. But I suppose the Nature study authors had to stay consistent with the AGW storyline to get published.
• Finally, the most obvious problem: The sentence, properly worded, should have been the lead, since it reveals the most surprising thing (to those who have been enthralled by the IPCC and other AGW alarmists).