As a recent SkS post by Dana Nuccitelli has pointed out global warming hasn't stopped, despite a recent lull in global surface temperatures.

The oceans, which are the main heat sink for global warming, have scarcely skipped a beat in soaking up heat.

The hiatus in global surface temperatures appears to simply be a reflection of natural variability, principally the exchange of heat between the ocean surface and the atmosphere.

But we shouldn't expect this to last much longer. Eventually that ocean heat buried in deeper layers will come back to the surface, and we'll experience the warm phase of this natural cool/warm (La Niña/El Niño-based) cycle.

As if to reinforce this very point, a group of scientists at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (NASA GISS), have released an analysis of global temperatures in 2011, and near-future prospects.

They find that 2011 was the 9th-hottest year on record (9 out of the 10 hottest years on record since 1880, have occurred in the 21st century), and that this cool-ish year (by 21st century standards, but hot by 20th century standards) was largely due to the cooling influence of a quiet phase of the 11 year-long solar cycle (small changes in the intensity of sunlight reaching Earth), and La Niña which has been dominant over the last 3 years (See figure 1).

They conclude that the lull is an illusion, and that rapid warming of global surface temperatures is likely to resume in the next few years.