NIPCC vs. IPCC: Addressing the Disparity between Climate Models and Observations: Testing the Hypothesis of Anthropogenic Global Warming

Introduction

This booklet discusses:

(1) The central issue, the cause of global warming: Is it natural or is it manmade? We update the ongoing controversy. [This issue is of crucial importance for both climate science and for climate policy.]

(2) The chaotic uncertainties of climate models and how to overcome them.

(3) New thinking on Climategate, Hockeystick graph – and what we can say about the absence of post-1979 warming in the temperature data of the 20th century. [Is the reported 1979-1997 warming real?]

Conclusions:

(1) We have given here a description of the controversy about the cause of climate change in the 20th century. There is never any question about the observed increases in greenhouse (GH) gases or about their human cause. But we see no evidence at all that any of the tempe-rature changes are human-caused (anthropogenic). We certainly do not see any effect that can be traced to greenhouse gases, such as CO2.

(2) Climate models are known to be chaotic. None of current models have a sufficient number of runs to overcome chaotic uncertainty and therefore cannot be validated against observations.

(3) The global surface warming for 1979-1997, reported by CRU-Hadley, NCDC-NOAA, and GISS-NASA, and used by the IPCC to support its claim of a GH-gas cause, is problematic. It is not seen by any other observations; we cite six independent methods, incl. radiosonde, satellite, and proxy data.

1. The Controversy about Attribution – Cause of Climate Change

Without question, the central issue in climate science is to determine whether the human contribution to the warming of the 20th century is significant. This is quite a difficult problem. There is no reason to think that natural forcings have suddenly ceased. But anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is certainly plausible: the level of greenhouse (GH) gases has been increasing steadily as a result of human activities – mostly the