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AGU: Journal of Geophysical Research, Atmospheres

 

Keywords

  • climate change
  • solar variability
  • climate models

Index Terms

  • Global Change: Solar variability
  • Global Change: Climate variability
  • Global Change: Global climate models
  • Global Change: Instruments and techniques
  • Mathematical Geophysics: Time series analysis
Abstract
Cited By (0)
 

Abstract

Solar trends and global warming

R. E. Benestad

Climate Division, Norwegian Meteorological Institute, Oslo, Norway

G. A. Schmidt

NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York, New York, USA

We use a suite of global climate model simulations for the 20th century to assess the contribution of solar forcing to the past trends in the global mean temperature. In particular, we examine how robust different published methodologies are at detecting and attributing solar-related climate change in the presence of intrinsic climate variability and multiple forcings. We demonstrate that naive application of linear analytical methods such as regression gives nonrobust results. We also demonstrate that the methodologies used by Scafetta and West (2005, 2006a, 2006b, 2007, 2008) are not robust to these same factors and that their error bars are significantly larger than reported. Our analysis shows that the most likely contribution from solar forcing a global warming is 7 ± 1% for the 20th century and is negligible for warming since 1980.

Received 17 December 2008; accepted 13 May 2009; published 21 July 2009.

Citation: Benestad, R. E., and G. A. Schmidt (2009), Solar trends and global warming, J. Geophys. Res., 114, D14101, doi:10.1029/2008JD011639.

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