Picture an orchestra where each instrument plays at its own tempo: violins speed up, woodwinds slow down, and percussion keeps losing the beat. That's roughly what Earth's climate looks like, with the ocean, the Sun, volcanoes, and human activity pulling temperature in different directions. From 1998 to 2012, the orchestra seemed to ease off: global temperature rose more slowly than in previous decades, and that slowdown long remained a puzzle.

But a quarter remained that nature didn't cover. Scientists from Japan and France set out to find who else was holding back warming. They took a reduced-complexity climate model, a simplified climate simulator that quickly computes the contribution of individual factors, and compared its results with real temperature observations. It turned out that cuts in methane and ozone-depleting emissions, the very ones that destroy the ozone layer, slowed the planet's warming by about 13% and 11%, respectively.

In other words, the climate orchestra fell off its fast tempo not only because of the whims of the conductor, nature, but also because some musicians, namely us, started playing more softly. And that's good news: if cutting emissions can slow warming within a decade, then we have levers to influence climate in the foreseeable future.

Of course, volcanoes during that period, on the contrary, slightly accelerated warming by spewing particles that trap heat. But their contribution was modest. The main takeaway of the study is that the climate system responds to our actions faster than we used to think, and that's worth keeping in mind when planning climate policy.