Global warming stopped 16 years ago

Global warming stopped 16 years ago, Met Office report reveals: MoS got it right about warming... so who are the 'deniers' now?

By
David Rose PUBLISHED: 01:12, 13 January 2013 UPDATED: 01:13, 13 January 2013

Last year The Mail on Sunday
reported a stunning fact: that global warming had ‘paused’ for 16 years.
The Met Office’s own monthly figures showed there had been no
statistically significant increase in the world’s temperature since
1997.
We were vilified. One Green website in the US said our report was ‘utter bilge’ that had to be ‘exposed and attacked’.
The
Met Office issued a press release claiming it was misleading, before
quietly admitting a few days later that it was true that the world had
not got significantly warmer since 1997 after all. A Guardian columnist
wondered how we could be ‘punished’.


Pause: Last year The Mail on Sunday reported global warming had 'paused' for 16 years

But then last week, the rest of
the media caught up with our report. On Tuesday, news finally broke of a
revised Met Office ‘decadal forecast’, which not only acknowledges the
pause, but predicts it will continue at least until 2017. It says world
temperatures are likely to stay around 0.43 degrees above the long-term
average – as by then they will have done for 20 years.
This
is hugely significant. It amounts to an admission that earlier
forecasts – which have dictated years of Government policy and will cost
tens of billions of pounds – were wrong. They did not, the Met Office
now accepts, take sufficient account of ‘natural variability’ – the
effects of phenomena such as ocean temperature cycles – which at least
for now are counteracting greenhouse gas warming.

Surely the Met Office would
trumpet this important news, as it has done when publishing warnings of
imminent temperature rises. But there was no fanfare. Instead, it issued
the revised forecast on the ‘research’ section of its website – on
Christmas Eve. It only came to light when it was noticed by an
eagle-eyed climate blogger, and then by the Global Warming Policy
Foundation, the think-tank headed by Lord Lawson.

Then, rather than reporting the news
objectively, Britain’s Green Establishment went into denial. Neither The
Guardian nor The Independent bothered to report it in their paper
editions, although The Independent did later run an editorial saying
that the new forecast was merely a trivial ‘tweak’. Instead, they
luridly reported on the heatwave and raging bushfires in Australia.
One
of the curious features of Green journalism is that if it gets
unusually cold, this will be dismissed as mere ‘weather’ of no
significance, while a heatwave or violent storm will be seized on as a
warning that catastrophic climate change is already here.


Instead of focusing on the news that global
warming had halted, other newspapers reported on the heatwave and raging
bushfires in Australia

Where the new forecast was
mentioned on the BBC and other websites, experts were marshalled to
reassure apocalypse-hungry readers that the end of the world was just as
nigh as before. A warming hiatus of a mere 20 years, they said, was
nothing.
This would all be faintly humorous, if
it wasn’t so deadly serious. Back in 2007, when the Labour Government
was preparing what became the Climate Change Act, far from being
neutral, the Met Office made a blatant attempt to influence political
debate.
In a glossy
brochure, it revealed it had a ‘new system’ that could predict the
future, by combining analysis of natural variability with long-term
trends. The system, it warned, showed that by 2014 ‘global average
temperature is expected to have risen by around 0.3 degrees compared to
2004, and half of the years after 2009 are predicted to be hotter than
the current record hot year, 1998’.
It
boasted that this showed how the Met Office used ‘world-class science
to underpin policy’. No doubt some of the MPs who voted for the Act,
with its hugely expensive targets to replace fossil energy with
‘renewables’ such as wind, were swayed by it. Barely five years later,
it is clear this forecast was worthless. But the Met Office is
unrepentant. ‘Climate models do predict periods of little or no warming,
or even cooling,’ a spokesman told me. Despite the pause, the long-term
projection that the world is likely to warm by about three degrees if
the proportion of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere doubles was still on
course.


Inconvenient truth: The MoS report last October that was vilifed by the Green Establishment

We all get things wrong, and by
definition futurology is a risky business. But behind all this lies
something much more pernicious than a revised decadal forecast. The
problem is not the difficulty of predicting something as chaotic as the
Earth’s climate, but the almost Stalinist way the Green Establishment
tries to stifle dissent.
There
is, for example, the odious term ‘denier’. This is applied to anyone
who questions the new orthodoxy about global warming. It doesn’t matter
if one states that yes, CO2 does warm the planet, but the critical
issues we need to address are how fast and how much: if one doesn’t
anticipate catastrophe, one must be vilified, and equated with those who
deny the Holocaust.
Yet the
real deniers are those who don’t just claim that the pause is
insignificant, but that it doesn’t exist at all. Such deniers also still
insist that the ‘science is settled’. The truth is that the unexpected
pause has triggered a new spate of research, in which many supposed
‘consensus’ conclusions are being questioned.
Some
scientists are revisiting some basic assumptions of climate prediction
models, such as the effects of clouds and smoke particles in the
atmosphere. They now think that the claim that the warming effect of CO2
is ‘amplified’ by things such as cloud cover have been seriously
exaggerated. In their view, doubling CO2 may only warm the world by 1.5
degrees or so, giving us many more decades to develop lower carbon
energy sources.
How have the Green deniers been so successful in concealing such debates?
Partly
it is the web of commercial interests that both fund and are sustained
by Green climate orthodoxy. But it is also their dissenter-trashing
machine.
A day before the
revised Met Office forecast broke, US blog site Planet 3.0 awarded me
its Golden Horseshoe award for the ‘most brazenly damaging and malign
bad science of 2013’.’
I’ll be clutching it when they burn me at the stake.


Source:-
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2261577/Global-warming-stopped-16-years-ago-Met-Office-report-reveals-MoS-got-right-warming--deniers-now.html