Think the basic science of climate change – accelerating global warming from man-made greenhouse gases showing itself clearly in the Earth’s climate record – is settled? It might be time to think again.
A team of climate scientists from the University of Oxford in the U.K. and the US government’s National Center for Atmospheric Research, writing in the December 2022 issue of the Journal of Climate, a peer-reviewed publication of the American Meteorological Society, took a detailed look at the atmospheric record, attempting to tease out, in the words of noted numerical nabob Nate Silver, “the signal from the noise.” They were not entirely able to do it.
Their conclusion – in a difficult, obscurely written article filled with arcane scientific terms, littered with acronyms, titled “Is Anthropogenic Global Warming Accelerating?” — “Short-term [effective radiative forcing] ERF trends are difficult to verify using observations, so caution is required in predictions or policy judgments that depend on them, such as estimates of current anthropogenic warming trend, and the time remaining to, or the outstanding carbon budget consistent with, 1.5°C warming. Further systematic research focused on quantifying trends and early identification of acceleration or deceleration is required.”
In other words, the study finds that the conventional wisdom about the rate of global warming and its direction over the past 20 years may be wrong. Nor is it clear in what direction the errors, if they exist, are trending.
“Further systematic research focused on quantifying trends and early identification of acceleration or deceleration is required.”
The warming-skeptical website Climate Discussion Nexus commented, “These sources are not ‘deniers.’ They are simply scientists who are doing honest research on the very large uncertainties in our understanding even of what has happened let alone why. But of course if the science is not ‘settled’, and if a significant share of whatever recent temperature changes have occurred might be natural, then it follows that a significant portion of the actually minor increase since 1850 might also be natural and CO2 not very important. And we say if the taboo on discussing this possibility is broken, real science can resume.”
Net Zero Watch, another skeptical website, commented, “It is important research because it is the trend in the increase of global temperature caused by anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions that is the most important variable for policymakers considering the scale and timescale of action in the coming decades. However, this vital parameter is uncertain because recent decades have shown that we are living through a period of considerable natural climate variability.”
Respected climate scientist Judith Curry commented on Twitter, “An important new paper, obscurely written, with implications that most of the warming in the 20th century could be natural.”
The lead author, Stuart Jenkins, is a doctoral candidate in atmospheric physics at Oxford, with several other publications to his record. Co-author Adam Povey is a post-doc researcher at Oxford’s Earth Observation Data Group; co-author Andrew Gettleman, a PhD in atmospheric science, is a research scientist in the Climate and Global Dynamics Division and the Atmospheric Chemistry Division at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., sponsored by the National Science Foundation; co-author Roy Grainger, is a PhD in atmospherics and full professor in the Oxford Department of Physics; co-author Philip Stier is a PhD in meteorology and professor of atmospheric physics and head of atmospheric, oceanic and planetary physics in the Department of Physics at the University of Oxford. He also heads the Climate Processes Group and serves on the steering group of the Oxford Climate Research Network; co-author Myles Allen, professor of geosystem science in the School of Geography and the Environment and Department of Physics, and director of the Oxford Net Zero initiative. A frequent contributor to reports from the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Allen was awarded Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2022 New Year Honours for services to climate change attribution and prediction and net-zero.
–Kennedy Maize
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