It isn't corroborated by reality since global average temperatures have not followed the predictions of that model.
You seem to think that MBH 1998 made predictions. What they did was a reconstruction of past temperatures. As you can see from the paper.
They are now too busy coming up with theories for where the missing heat went and saying it went down a whole (literally).
I'm not aware of work by any of the authors of MBH that look at energy balance. Dr Trenberth is an important researcher in that field.
This Nature news article might be as good a place as any to start reading about that. Note that 2014 was the hottest year on record when you read the end: “You can’t keep piling up warm water in the western Pacific,” Trenberth says. “At some point, the water will get so high that it just sloshes back.” And when that happens, if scientists are on the right track, the missing heat will reappear and temperatures will spike once again.
Well why didn't it go down a hole before too?
If you mean why haven't the oceans changed temperature before, or ice melted, then the answer is that they have.
A lot of us think this is much more easily explained by solar activity but of course what matters to these people is an insignificant amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.
I suspect that you're over-counting if you think that "a lot" of people think a lower solar activity, and particularly the current very weak solar cycle would cause a warming.
But there are other reasons why it is obviously not the sun.
The current warming is greater at night and winter, in line with greenhouse warming, but the opposite of what you would expect from solar activity, as the sun warms things when it is shining.
The current warming is accompanied by a cooling of the stratosphere, an obvious consequence of trapping the heat below, but impossible to explain with solar activity.
The spatial distribution of the warming, being greater at the poles and less at the tropics, also aligns better with the greenhouse effect than the sun.
Do you know there is some evidence that if global temperatures went up the world's deserts would actually recede?
I know that rainfall requires evaporation or transpiration, so it will generally be heavier in a warmer world. This is not generally true on a regional scale, where changes to wind patterns have a dominating effect on precipitation.
Even if the temperature wouldn't rise as much the arctic would become navigable just like it was in the Middle Ages when the Novgorod Republic was a major trading power and Iceland was colonized. That's what the scaremongerers won't tell you.
A navigable Arctic is of some economic benefit. But there are many economic disbenefits, that greatly outweigh the benefits plus the cost of moving to a low carbon economy.