Global Climate Warming Stopped 15 Years Ago, UK Met Office Admits

by Alex Newman
The New American

Despite playing a key role in advancing climate change hysteria, the United Kingdom’s National Weather Service, known as the Met Office, quietly released a report last week conceding that so-called “global warming” actually stopped more than 15 years ago. The startling admission shows once again that United Nations theories and climate models are wildly inaccurate at best, experts say, meaning multi-trillion dollar schemes to deal with alleged human-caused “climate change” are at the very least severely misguided.

According to the latest UK Met Office report, first reported by the Daily Mail, there has been no noticeable increase in global temperatures since early 1997. The alleged warming trend supposedly observed from 1980 to 1996 was about as long as the current “plateau” period, the paper reported. Prior to that, climate scientists admit, global temperatures had been stable or dropping for decades, a fact that prompted previous generations of climate alarmists to sound the alarm about the supposed dangers of man-made “global cooling.”

“Climate models are very complex, but they are imperfect and incomplete. Natural variability [the impact of factors such as long-term temperature cycles in the oceans and the output of the sun] has been shown over the past two decades to have a magnitude that dominates the greenhouse warming effect,” Georgia Tech climate science department chief Professor Judith Curry told the Daily Mail. “It is becoming increasingly apparent that our attribution of warming since 1980 and future projections of climate change needs to consider natural internal variability as a factor of fundamental importance.”

The Met Office temperature data report is known as Hadcrut 4 because it is compiled by the Met Office’s Hadley Center and the now-disgraced Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia – the institution at the center of the infamous ClimateGate scandal that exposed so-called “climate scientists” fudging numbers, covering up contradictory data, conspiring to attack dissenting experts, and unlawfully trying to evade freedom of information requests. Unsurprisingly, the CRU’s discredited boss, Phil Jones, downplayed the significance of the latest findings.

Despite having claimed in 2009 that if there were no warming for 15 years it would be time for climate alarmists to “get worried,” Jones now says 15 years is not a long enough span to draw any conclusions. At least 20 years will be needed before the climate hysteria can be reconsidered, the controversial climate activist – he styles himself a scientist despite his unabashed activism – told the Daily Mail, adding that the ongoing lack of global warming “could go on for a while.” He apparently still thinks this decade will be warmer than the last, though he admitted that the wild climate models predicting doom were based on multiple uncertainties.

“We don’t fully understand how to input things like changes in the oceans, and because we don’t fully understand it you could say that natural variability is now working to suppress the warming,” Jones admitted to the paper, apparently acknowledging what skeptical climate scientists have been attempting to convey for years. “We don’t know what natural variability is doing.”

Also in 2009, meanwhile, the alarmist Met Office predicted that three of the next five years would set new world records for warming. Now that the data has proven the wildly alarmist prediction false, however, a spokesperson for the agency had no comment on it. Still, the Met Office, like Jones – both depending largely on taxpayer funding that will dry up if and when climate hysteria disappears – also tried to downplay the latest data. “Choosing a starting or end point on short-term scales can be very misleading,” a Met Office spokesperson said. “Climate change can only be detected from multi-decadal timescales due to the inherent variability in the climate system.”

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October 27, 2012

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