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Global warming NOT stalling despite ignorant claims

By Sunny Hundal
January 14 2012

 

 

 

On Tuesday this week the Telegraph blared: ‘Global warming at a standstill, new Met Office figures show’.The Daily Mail also claimed triumphantly: ‘Global warming has STALLED since 1998: Met Office admits Earth’s temperature is rising slower than first thought’.

The Times took a similar line: ‘Global warming is over for five years, says Met Office’.

All of the headlines are rubbish, and deliberately distort what the Met Office actually said.

These headlines are all based on the Met Office’s latest temperature forecast, issued at the end of last year.

The Met Office’s updated forecast says that by between 2013 to 2017, global temperatures would rise by around 0.43 degrees above the long term average. This is 0.11 degrees lower than the Met Office’s prediction for the same period back in 2007.

In other words, the Met Office slightly revised down their projections of global warming, but that still means global warming is taking place rather than ‘stalling’.

As the Carbon Brief blog point out:

The fact that temperatures are currently rising slowly compared to the rapid warming from the 1970s until the late 1990s doesn’t mean global warming has stopped, or stalled. Rather, natural fluctuations in the climate system are currently having a combined cooling effect on atmospheric temperatures that’s damping the full extent of human-caused temperature rise – as the Met Officeexplained in a response to a similar claim by journalist David Rose last year.

In fact the Met Office also released a statement this week saying the media coverage of their forecasts was wrong, and that global warming was still happening.

Globally, 2012 is unlikely to be at hot as previous year due to cooling La Niña weather, but still expect it to be the world’s eighth or ninth-warmest year on record.

As the New York Times pointed out this week:

Assuming that prediction holds up, it will mean that the 10 warmest years on record all fell within the past 15 years, a measure of how much the planet has warmed.

As the NYT goes on to point out, nobody under the age of 28 has lived through a month of global temperatures below the 20th-century average. For the last 28 years, global temperatures each month have been above average.

All this is in stark contrast to how our ignorant press keep spinning this news.

Originally published by Liberal Conspiracy 

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