The new annual forecast, published on December 24, is the first to make use of
the Met Office’s latest climate model, HadGEM3, which it said "includes a
comprehensive set of improvements based on the latest scientific
understanding”.
It suggests that global average temperature will remain between 0.28C and
0.59C above the long-term average "with values most likely to be about 0.43C
higher than average”.
The Met Office said: "This is an extremely challenging area of research not
least because long-term comprehensive observations of the ocean do not exist
to help us understand how the global oceans behave over decadal and longer
timescales.
"As with all areas of science, our knowledge is continually increasing and it
is therefore not surprising that our models and predictive skill will
continue to improve.
"The fact that the new model predicts less warming, globally, for the coming
five years does not necessarily tell us anything about long-term predictions
of climate change for the coming century.”
Labour MP Graham Stringer accused the Met Office of "burying bad news” by
releasing the data on Christmas Eve and said it should give up climate
change forecasts as well as long-term predictions.
He said: "They failed completely with their models to predict the flattening
out of global warming. I think that they are just trying to bury bad news
that their predictions in the medium and long-term have been pretty poor.”
Figures from last November, showing that 2012 would be cooler than average for
the past decade, had already indicated that global warming was slowing down.
Dr Peter Stott, Head of Climate Monitoring and Attribution at the Met Office,
said at the time that the past decade had been the warmest on record.
But he pointed out that warming has slowed down since 2000, in comparison to
the rapid warming of the world since the 1970s.
"Although the first decade of the 21st century was the warmest on record,
warming has not been as rapid since 2000 as over the longer period since the
1970s,” he said. "This variability in global temperatures is not unusual,
with several periods lasting a decade or more with little or no warming
since the instrumental record began.
"We are investigating why the temperature rise at the surface has slowed in
recent years, including how ocean heat content changes and the effects of
aerosols from atmospheric pollution may have influenced global climate.”
Dr Stott warned that global warming could speed up again at any time, and
insisted that the general pattern of warming was not in doubt.
