Lessons learned from a recent Nature article

A recent paper in Nature “Advancing decadal-scale climate prediction in the North Atlantic sector” caused a fair amount of confusion as it forecasted "a decade of cooler temperatures in North America and Europe".

However a closer scrutiny showed that was not what the paper meant--"a decade" in the paper doesn't mean in the next ten years as you normally would think.

Two lessons learned here:

1. For the general public, scales matters for climate change. There is a difference between year to year variation and long term trend. Similarly, there is a difference between local cooling and global warming.

2. For the science community, choose our words carefully, at least when writing an abstract. Read it to a couple of non-scientists and see if there is any confusion.