World's a lot cooler than we thought - The Sun

GLOBAL warming is on a 20-year "plateau", the UK's top climate researchers have revealed.

Sceptics celebrated this week when the Met Office acknowledged temperatures are only creeping slightly above highs the world hit in 1998 and will be much the same over the next five years.

Even the forecasters' harshest critics say this does not mean the world's climate will stop heating up but it raises questions over what the scientists and their £30million super-computer think is really going on.

THE Met Office have revealed that global warming appears to have STALLED.

The upwardly surging arrow used on graphs warning us of its deadly effect on the planet has wilted — leaving climate experts scratching their heads.

The news crept out after it was quietly uploaded onto obscure web pages on Christmas Eve.

While nine out of ten of the world's hottest years on record have occurred this century, one year has caused the experts problems.

How can the world be warming if 1998 is still the hottest year ever?

And now new forecasts for the years to 2017 show temperatures might creep up only slightly above that record set 15 years ago.

Temperatures are predicted to warm by just 0.43°C above the 1971-2000 average over the next five years — 20 per cent less than the previous 0.54°C per cent estimated rise. And the new figure is just a smidgen above the 0.40°C rise in 1998.

But this doesn't mean global warming has stopped. Even the highly critical UK-based Global Warming Policy Foundation admit the planet is warming and that it is caused by man.

A steadily rising line since 1860 seems to prove that and could help to explain the extremes of weather — from droughts to floods — that have hit the UK.

But the experts have admitted temperatures are not rising as fast as they expected and they have to figure out why.

Prof Julia Slingo, the Met Office's chief scientist, this week admitted to The Sun that she has had a team working on the problem for a YEAR.

One theory is 1998 brought once-in-100-year temperatures, helped by swirling ocean-related weather pattern El Niño.

Other explanations are not so easy to prove — even with a £30million supercomputer. One, the professor says, could be the sun — currently in an 11-year cycle called the solar minimum, a period of less solar activity.

Sunspots and the sun's cycles may have much more to do with temperature changes than we currently know.

Other calculations figure that if the planet is not warming something must be soaking up or reflecting the heat.

One theory under investigation involves aerosols in China.

Sulphate-based aerosol deodorants could be preventing the planet heating as fast as expected, Prof Slingo says.

She adds: "Aerosols have a cooling effect on the planet because they cause a layer in the air that reflects sunlight and we have an explosive growth of them in China.

"They can make quite a contribution to changes in short-term warming trends."

We can only wait to hear which theory is correct, if any.

But at least, as with the ancient Mayans' theories, predictions of the apocalypse have at least been postponed...