Chris,
Swanson’s RC post is another way of looking at it. The 1976/1977 and 1998/2001 events are extreme events assoiated with chaotic bifurcation.
‘We develop the concept of “dragon-kings” corresponding to meaningful outliers, which are found to coexist with power laws in the distributions of event sizes under a broad range of conditions in a large variety of systems. These dragon-kings reveal the existence of mechanisms of self-organization that are not apparent otherwise from the distribution of their smaller siblings. We present a generic phase diagram to explain the generation of dragon-kings and document their presence in six different examples (distribution of city sizes, distribution of acoustic emissions associated with material failure, distribution of velocity increments in hydrodynamic turbulence, distribution of financial drawdowns, distribution of the energies of epileptic seizures in humans and in model animals, distribution of the earthquake energies). We emphasize the importance of understanding dragon-kings as being often associated with a neighborhood of what can be called equivalently a phase transition, a bifurcation, a catastrophe (in the sense of Rene Thom), or a tipping point. The presence of a phase transition is crucial to learn how to diagnose in advance the symptoms associated with a coming dragon-king.’ http://arxiv.org/abs/0907.4290
So the idea is of course to exclude these points to arrive at a residual trend. It is again not the 0.17/decade trend commonly discussed.
The Pacific phases seem stable for 20 to 40 years as standing spatio-temporl waves in the Earth’s climate system. They can be seen in hydrology, oceanography, climatology and biology. They have an influence on energy dynamics through clouds.
Swanson is right and we have a decade or three of moderate warming if not cooling.