From Climate Etc.
Judith Curry reflections at end of her blog post (emphasis added to concluding sentence):
Judith Curry reflections at end of her blog post (emphasis added to concluding sentence):
The climate community is in a big rut when it comes to climate change attribution – as I’ve argued in previous threads, climate models are not fit for the purpose of climate change attribution on decadal to century timescales. Alternative methods are needed, and the two papers discussed here are steps in the right direction.
We will not be successful at sorting out attribution on these timescales until we have more robust paleo proxy data. The paleo proxy community also seems to be in a rut, with continued reliance on tree rings and other proxies having serious calibration issues.
The key challenge is this: convincing attribution of ‘more than half’ of the recent warming to humans requires understanding natural variability and rejecting natural variability as a predominant explanation for the overall century scale warming and also the warming in the latter half of the 20th century. Global climate models and tree ring based proxy reconstructions are not fit for this purpose.
We will not be successful at sorting out attribution on these timescales until we have more robust paleo proxy data. The paleo proxy community also seems to be in a rut, with continued reliance on tree rings and other proxies having serious calibration issues.
The key challenge is this: convincing attribution of ‘more than half’ of the recent warming to humans requires understanding natural variability and rejecting natural variability as a predominant explanation for the overall century scale warming and also the warming in the latter half of the 20th century. Global climate models and tree ring based proxy reconstructions are not fit for this purpose.
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