[GOPJ]

...something far more startling has happened: The El Nino has dissipated, but global ocean waters have still continued to cool. By this, I mean that the sea surface temperatures, globally averaged and adjusted for seasonal variations, have declined. What's more, land temperatures, which had shown a greater warming trend over the past few decades, plummeted, from a near-record high last February (according to some data sets, it was a record high), to temperatures considerably below the 20th century average this past January.

Sun cycle?

[dangus]

I suspect a combination: I think the temperature leap we saw in the 1980s and 1990s was due to the elimination of “global dimming” by cleaner air standards, which literally obscured warmth in the 1950s through 1970s. The recent sudden cool, I suspect, is partly partly the solar magnetism gone missing, partly a rebound by an El Nino obscured by what would have been a longer, slower trend, and partly perhaps a reversal of some other ocean-warming phenomenon which set in in 2000.