Those who deny the reality of human-induced climate warning should mark their calendars. Today, climatologists reported a new prediction from their computer-based model of the planet’s climate. After folding into the model precise information about the state of the ocean and the atmosphere rather than the approximate parameters other models use, they find that global warming will slow during the next few years.

Just to emphasize: even as greenhouse gases accumulate in the atmosphere, other influences will keep the world from continuing on the upward temperature path it’s been on since the 1990s. No one ever said that the greenhouse effect is the only thing driving our climate, and from time to time other factors will outweigh it. We are moving into one of those times, say the British climatologists. So when 2008, say, turns out not to set any temperature records even though 11 of the last 12 years have done so, can we please not have press conferences and headlines and op-eds and Senate floor speeches saying, “see? That whole global warming thing was a hoax.” To the contrary. The same climate models that foresee the changes chronicled in the IPCC reports also say that we’re in for a few years of reprieve from the almost unrelenting temperature rise.