A new study by the United Kingdom’s National Weather Service, known as the Met Office has concluded that no significant rise has been noted in global temperature readings between 1997 and 2012, essentially indicating that accelerated global warming has stopped as far as 15-16 years ago. According to the study, "There has been no noticeable increase in global temperatures since early 1997… The warming trend observed from 1980 to 1996 was about as long as the current 'plateau' period and prior to that… global temperatures had been stable or dropping for decades." The revelation has sparked a heated debated between ecology and environmental experts – whose reactions ranged between dismissing the report altogether to saying that past evaluation methods were grossly inaccurate. The figures bolstered the claims of those saying global warming warnings have been widely exaggerated, to the point of "creating mass hysteria." According to the global warming theory's critics, the report once again debunked United Nations' theories and proved that at the veer least, the "multi-trillion dollar schemes to deal with alleged human-caused climate change are at the very least severely misguided." The uproar caused by the report's coverage prompted the Met Office to release a statement stressing that "Choosing a starting or end point on short-term scales can be very misleading. "Climate change can only be detected from multi-decadal timescales due to the inherent variability in the climate system. "Looking at successive decades over this period, each decade was warmer than the previous – so the 1990s were warmer than the 1980s, and the 2000s were warmer than both. Eight of the top ten warmest years have occurred in the last decade. "Over the last 140 years global surface temperatures have risen by about 0.8C," the Met Office said. "However, within this record there have been several periods lasting a decade or more during which temperatures have risen very slowly or cooled. "The current period of reduced warming is not unprecedented and 15-year long periods are not unusual," the statement said. "Climate models are very complex, but they are imperfect and incomplete," Georgia Tech climate science department chief Professor Judith Curry told the Daily Mail. "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." Follow Ynetnews on Facebook and Twitter