Global warming has been temporarily 'paused' according to a group of scientists, who attribute this interlude to climate fluctuations and a more restrained sun. Researchers at ETH Zurich have explained the two reasons behind the warming hiatus in their study published in the latest issue of the journal Nature Geoscience. The first is that global temperatures, which rose significantly in the 1990s, have only risen very slightly since 1998 - which has been used by sceptics to question climate change and the models used to measure it. However, climate fluctuations such as El Ni?o and its counter-phenomenon La Ni?a have been shown to have caused the high in 1998 and following cooler years respectively.

Climate models cannot predict when exactly these fluctuations will happen. The other reason for the lower temperatures is weak solar irradiance. As well as fluctations in the climate, changes in the intensity of solar irradiance have been showing unusual patterns. The researchers also say that volanic eruptions, such as Eyjafjallaj?kull in Iceland in 2010, "have increased the concentration of floating particles (aerosol) in the atmosphere, which has further weakened the solar irradiance arriving at the Earth's surface".

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