The trend towards ever warmer weather will be halted over the next decade because of natural variations in sea temperatures, scientists predict.
Lower sea surface temperatures forecast for the North Atlantic will cancel out the trend towards warmer weather as a result of greenhouse gases, they suggested.
Cooler sea conditions will mask the man-made impact on weather systemns for a decade, they concluded in a paper published in the journal Nature.
'Our results suggest that global surface temperature may not increase over the next decade, as natural climate variations in the North Atlantic and tropical Pacific temporarily offset the projected anthropogenic warming,' the researchers concluded.
The team of scientists from Germany said the strength of deep sea currents in the Atlantic follow a 70-80-year cycle and are about to enter a cooler phase.
Scientists predicted the cooling after running computer models which used sea surface temperature measurements to calculate the likely deep water temperatures.
The research team from the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in Kiel and the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg said their findings could pave the way for weather forecasts looking a decade ahead.
Cooler sea conditions created by meridional overturning circulation (MOD), the giant current bringing warm water northwards, would have a cooling impact on weather in Europe and North America, they suggested.
Commenting on the study, Richard Wood, of the Met Office Hadley Centre, said: 'Such a cooling could temporarily offset the longer-term warming trend from increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
'That emphasises once again the need to consider climate variability and climate change together when making predictions over timescales of decades.'
He cautioned, however, that sea surface temperatures might not accurately reflect the state of the MOC, which is several kilometres deep and dependent on a variety of factors, including salt content.
If the model could accurately forecast other variables besides temperature, such as rainfall, it would be increasingly useful, but climate predictions for a decade ahead would always be to some extent uncertain, he added.
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