Global warming stopped 16 years ago: UK Met department report

UK Met Office quietly releases report, says there has been no discernible rise in aggregate global temperature.

A report quietly published by the UK meteorological department has revealed that global warming stopped 16 years ago with no discernible rise in aggregate global temperature, Daily Mail reported on Sunday.

The data, compiled from more than 3,000 measuring points on land and sea, noted that the “plateau” or “pause” in global warming has now lasted for about the same time as the previous period when temperature rose from 1980 to 1996.

The Daily Mail report quoted climate scientists – some argued that 15-16 years was too short a period to draw conclusions from, while others said that it was clear that the computer models used to predict future global warming were ‘deeply flawed’.

Professor Phil Jones, director of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, admitted that he and his colleagues did not understand the impact of ‘natural variability’, but he was convinced that the current decade would end up significantly warmer than the previous two, the report added.

The report quoted other climate scientists who said that the computer models used by the Met Office are flawed and that the climate is far more complex than the models assert.

Professor Judith Curry, chair of School of Earth and Atmospheric Science at America’s Georgia Tech university, was quoted as saying,

“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.

“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.”