Has Anthony Watts just declared he now rejects AGW?

I'm not sure what to make of this, but I think it means that Anthony Watts has finally fallen off the cliff into utter nuttery.  Seriously.  He himself.

He's been tending that way for a while now.  Despite some vague arm-waving about how he won't let slayers who don't accept physics on his blog, he has been publishing their articles and now is down to a mere handful of utter nutters like Christopher Monckton (birther, curer of AIDS) and Tim Ball (author of the slayers book).

The evidence

Today he writes about a new paper about the role of the eastern equatorial Pacific in recent surface temperatures and writes:

This has important implications for IPCC’s upcoming AR5 report, where they will attempt to give attribution to the warming, which now looks more and more like a natural cycle. See updates below.  – Anthony

Is Anthony Watts saying that he now thinks that global warming is a "natural cycle"?  Or was he just being careless with words and writing that he now accepts climate models and that this one shows the role of the oceans in global surface temperature?  I've archived the WUWT blog article here.

I'll let you know if there's any more info.

I don't have time to write about the paper itself.  If you like you can comment on it.  I'll be back later.  Oh, I should point out that the paper in no way rejects AGW, as if I needed to write that!

Kosaka and Xie Recent global-warming hiatus tied to equatorial Pacific surface cooling, Nature (2013) doi:10.1038/nature12534

Despite the continued increase in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations, the annual-mean global temperature has not risen in the twenty-first century1, 2, challenging the prevailing view that anthropogenic forcing causes climate warming. Various mechanisms have been proposed for this hiatus in global warming3, 4, 5, 6, but their relative importance has not been quantified, hampering observational estimates of climate sensitivity.

Here we show that accounting for recent cooling in the eastern equatorial Pacific reconciles climate simulations and observations. We present a novel method of uncovering mechanisms for global temperature change by prescribing, in addition to radiative forcing, the observed history of sea surface temperature over the central to eastern tropical Pacific in a climate model. Although the surface temperature prescription is limited to only 8.2% of the global surface, our model reproduces the annual-mean global temperature remarkably well with correlation coefficient r = 0.97 for 1970–2012 (which includes the current hiatus and a period of accelerated global warming). Moreover, our simulation captures major seasonal and regional characteristics of the hiatus, including the intensified Walker circulation, the winter cooling in northwestern North America and the prolonged drought in the southern USA.

Our results show that the current hiatus is part of natural climate variability, tied specifically to a La-Niña-like decadal cooling. Although similar decadal hiatus events may occur in the future, the multi-decadal warming trend is very likely to continue with greenhouse gas increase.