It depends which climatologists you consider. The dominant school of climatology in the Anglosphere (which deserves your scorn quotes) assumes that climate can be predicted by studying general circulation models of the earth's atmosphere, focusing on things like CO2 levels and heat-transfer between atmosphere and ocean. They predicted nothing of the sort.
The dominant school of climatology in Russian and Denmark looks at solar activity as the main determinant of global temperature, both total solar irradiance and solar magnetism (which matters because cosmic ray strikes seed cloud formation, which has a cooling effect -- less solar magnetism means less shielding from cosmic rays, more cloud formation and cooler temperature -- this the the causal link, discovered by H. Svensmark, that explains the correlation between sunspot number and global temperature). They predicted this, and the 30 year cool period is the least extreme of the possible futures they are predicting: the other end is a full-on ice age.
This won’t post as an image, but it’s a rather interesting pattern!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_age#mediaviewer/File:Vostok_Petit_data.svg
and:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_age#mediaviewer/File:Five_Myr_Climate_Change.svg
