Global warming stopped 16 years ago, reveals Met Office report quietly released… and here’s the chart to prove it

Graph: global temperature changes.

Research: The new figures mean that the ‘pause’ in global warming has now lasted for about the same time as the previous period when temperatures rose, 1980 to 1996. This picture shows an iceberg melting in Eastern Greenland

Disagreement: Professor Phil Jones, left, from the University of East Anglia, dismissed the significance of the plateau. Professor Judith Curry, right, from Georgia Tech university in America, disagreed, saying the computer models used to predict future warming were ‘deeply flawed’ Warmer: Since 1880 the world has warmed by 0.75 degrees Celsius. This image shows floating icebergs in Greenland The regular data collected on global temperature is called Hadcrut 4, as it is jointly issued by the Met Office’s Hadley Centre and Prof Jones’s Climatic Research Unit. Since 1880, when worldwide industrialisation began to gather pace and reliable statistics were first collected on a global scale, the world has warmed by 0.75 degrees Celsius. Some scientists have claimed that this rate of warming is set to increase hugely without drastic cuts to carbon-dioxide emissions, predicting a catastrophic increase of up to a further five degrees  Celsius by the end of the century. The new figures were released as the Government made clear that it would ‘bend’ its own  carbon-dioxide rules and build new power stations to try to combat the threat of blackouts. At last week’s Conservative Party Conference, the new Energy Minister, John Hayes, promised that ‘the high-flown theories of bourgeois Left-wing academics will not override the interests of ordinary people who need fuel for heat, light and transport – energy policies, you might say, for the many, not the few’ – a pledge that has triggered fury from green activists, who fear reductions in the huge subsidies given to wind-turbine firms.

Flawed science costs us dearly

Here are three not-so trivial questions you probably won’t find in your next pub quiz. First, how much warmer has the world become since a) 1880 and  b) the beginning of 1997? And what has this got to do with your ever-increasing energy bill? You may find the answers to the first two surprising. Since 1880, when reliable temperature records began to be kept across most of the globe, the world has warmed by about 0.75 degrees Celsius. From the start of 1997 until August 2012, however, figures released last week show the answer is zero: the trend, derived from the aggregate data collected from more than 3,000 worldwide measuring points, has been flat. Not that there has been any  coverage in the media, which usually reports climate issues assiduously, since the figures were quietly release online with no accompanying press release – unlike six months ago when they showed a slight warming trend. The answer to the third question is perhaps the most familiar. Your bills are going up, at least in part, because of the array of ‘green’ subsidies being provided to the renewable energy industry, chiefly wind. They will cost the average household about £100 this year. This is set to rise steadily higher – yet it  is being imposed for only one  reason: the widespread conviction, which is shared by politicians of all stripes and drilled into children at primary schools, that, without drastic action to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions, global warming is certain soon to accelerate, with truly catastrophic consequences by the end of the century – when temperatures could be up to five degrees higher. Hence the significance of those first two answers. Global industrialisation over the past 130 years has made relatively little difference. And with the country committed by Act of Parliament to reducing CO2 by 80 per cent by 2050, a project that will cost hundreds of billions, the news that the world has got no warmer for the past 16 years comes as something of a shock. It poses a fundamental challenge to the assumptions underlying every aspect of energy and climate change policy. This ‘plateau’ in rising temperatures does not mean that global warming won’t at some point resume. But according to increasing numbers of serious climate scientists, it does suggest that the computer models that have for years been predicting imminent doom, such as  those used by the Met Office and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, are flawed, and that the climate is far more complex than the models assert. ‘The new data confirms the existence of a pause in global warming,’ Professor Judith Curry, chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Science at America’s Georgia Tech university, told me yesterday. ‘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.’ Professor Phil Jones, director of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, who found himself at the centre of the ‘Climategate’ scandal over leaked emails three years ago, would not normally be expected to agree with her. Yet on two important points, he did. The data does suggest a plateau, he admitted, and without a major El Nino event – the sudden, dramatic warming of the southern Pacific which takes place unpredictably and always has a huge effect on global weather – ‘it could go on for a while’. Like Prof Curry, Prof Jones also admitted that the climate models were imperfect: ‘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. We don’t know what natural variability is doing.’ READ MORE