Article content continued

Over the next five years, “global average temperature is expected to remain between 0.28 degrees celsius and 0.59 degrees celsius above the long-term (1971-2000) average … with values most likely to be about 0.43 degrees celsius higher than average,” reads the new Met Office report. A previous prediction said they would be 0.54 degrees higher.

Likewise, the Met Office’s earlier prediction that “about half” of the years 2010 to 2019 will be warmer than 1998 (which was the warmest year since records were kept, at 0.40 degrees above average) is now unlikely under the new model.

“It’s like Keynesian economic models in the 1970s that kept predicting high inflation would bring down unemployment,” Prof. McKitrick said. “Eventually they were so far off reality that it was no longer a case of trying to fine tune bits that didn’t fit, economists had to admit the underlying theory was wrong and start over.”

The downgraded prediction recalls the 2006 report by the British government that pegged the economic cost of climate change at 20% of global GDP each year “now and forever,” but was criticized for relying too heavily on extreme and unlikely outcomes, and is now outdated after the global economic downturn.

“This does not mean that there is no man-made global warming,” said Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish academic and author of The Skeptical Environmentalist. “But it does mean that we perhaps should not be quite as scared as some people might have been from the mid ’70s to about 2000, when temperatures rose dramatically, because they were probably at least partially rising dramatically because of natural variation, just like they are now stalling because of natural variation.”