A new study released Monday found that warming temperatures in Pacific Ocean waters off the coast of North America over the past century closely followed natural changes in the wind, not increases in greenhouse gases related to global warming.

The study compared ocean surface temperatures from 1900 to 2012 to surface air pressure, a stand-in for wind measurements, and found a close match.

“What we found was the somewhat surprising degree to which the winds can explain all the wiggles in the temperature curve,” said lead author Jim Johnstone, who did the work while a climatologist at the Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean at the University of Washington.

“So clearly, there are other factors stronger than the greenhouse forcing that is affecting those temperatures,” he said.

The study released by the online edition of the peer-reviewed journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences does not question global warming, but argues there is evidence that in at least one place, local winds are a more important factor explaining ocean warming than greenhouse gases.

It was greeted with skepticism by several mainstream climate scientists, who questioned how the authors could claim changes in wind direction and velocity were natural and unrelated to climate change.

They said the study sees a correlation but did not do the rigorous statistical and computer analysis to show that the cause of the wind changes were natural – the kind of analysis done when scientists attribute weather extremes to global warming. “This may say more about the state of climate modeling than it says about causes of warming in the Pacific Northwest,” said Ken Caldeira, an atmospheric scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science’s Department of Global Ecology.