Global temperature records extending about 100 years into the past display interannual fluctuations of a few tenths ¿C on a variety of time scales. A number of previous model simulations have employed anthropogenic CO2 warming, solar variability, and volcanic aerosol loading as external forcings to account for major features of these records. We develop a simple system using a one-dimensional, upwelling-diffusion world ocean model that incorporates a nonlinear linkage between the global surface temperature and the large-scale oceanic overturning. Interesting dynamic behavior was discovered, in particular, internal self-excited oscillations with parameter-dependent periods of the approximate order of a hundred years exhibiting surface temperature changes of the order of ¿0.5¿C. The largest features of the northern hemispheric surface land temperature record can be simulated with our climate and deep ocean feedback formulation and CO2 forcing alone. One would conclude that internal processes of this type can indeed produce temperature changes as powerful and as rapid as those produced by the above mentioned external forcings, and our results indicate that more work is needed on the role of nonlinear coupling between surface temperature and ocean dynamics in transient climate models.