Abstract
Since the slowing of the trend of increasing surface air temperature (SAT) in the late 1990 s, intense interest and debate have arisen concerning the contribution of human activities to the warming observed in previous decades. Although several explanations have been proposed for the warming-trend slowdown (WTS), none has been generally accepted. We investigate the WTS using a recently developed methodology that can successfully identify and separate the dynamically induced and radiatively forced SAT changes from raw SAT data. The dynamically induced SAT changes exhibited an obvious cooling effect relative to the warming effect of the adjusted SAT in the hiatus process. A correlation analysis suggests that the changes are dominated primarily by the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), and Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO). Our results confirm that dynamically induced variability caused the WTS. The radiatively forced SAT changes are determined mainly by anthropogenic forcing, indicating the warming influence of greenhouse gases (GHGs), which reached levels of 400 ppm during the hiatus period. Therefore, the global SAT will not remain permanently neutral. The increased radiatively forced SAT will be amplified by increased dynamically induced SAT when the natural mode returns to a warming phase in the next period.