Despite the cold descending on Asia, Europe and North America—see Ventusky's map for a particularly good representation of The Beast From the East bearing down on Scandinavia—we are still in a warmer than average temperature regime and probably will be for at least a couple more years.
From the journal Nature Communications, 14 August 2018:
A novel probabilistic forecast system predicting anomalously warm 2018-2022 reinforcing the long-term global warming trend
Abstract
In a changing climate, there is an ever-increasing societal demand for accurate and reliable interannual predictions. Accurate and reliable interannual predictions of global temperatures are key for determining the regional climate change impacts that scale with global temperature, such as precipitation extremes, severe droughts, or intense hurricane activity, for instance. However, the chaotic nature of the climate system limits prediction accuracy on such timescales. Here we develop a novel method to predict global-mean surface air temperature and sea surface temperature, based on transfer operators, which allows, by-design, probabilistic forecasts. The prediction accuracy is equivalent to operational forecasts and its reliability is high. The post-1998 global warming hiatus is well predicted. For 2018–2022, the probabilistic forecast indicates a warmer than normal period, with respect to the forced trend. This will temporarily reinforce the long-term global warming trend. The coming warm period is associated with an increased likelihood of intense to extreme temperatures. The important numerical efficiency of the method (a few hundredths of a second on a laptop) opens the possibility for real-time probabilistic predictions carried out on personal mobile devices....
This is a model. Models are not reality. However, this one seems to have shown what the modelers call skill, both in the hindcasts and more importantly in the two years since the paper came out. And the TL;dr?
A dramatic drop-off in the odds of above average global Mean Temperature (GMT) and Sea Surface Temperature (SST):
Table 1 Likelihood of anomalously warm years for the next decade
Forecast period GMT SST 1 year: 2018 58% 75% 2 years: 2018–2019 64% 74% 3 years: 2018–2020 70% 71% 4 years: 2018–2021 72% 69% 5 years: 2018–2022 58% 69% 6 years: 2018–2023 55% 65% 7 years: 2018–2024 45% 58% 8 years: 2018–2025 50% 59% 9 years: 2018–2026 49% 60% 10 years: 2018–2027 50% 62%
....MUCH MORE
