By Andy May
Chapter 10 of the 2013 IPCC Working Group 1 Assessment Report (WG1 AR5) report on climate change deals with how man-made climate change is detected and how much of the total change is due to man. They call the chapter “Detection and Attribution of Climate Change: from Global to Regional,” but in the critical calculation they assume the natural contribution is zero, so we consider “man-made” an appropriate addition to the title of this post. In summary, it says that the Earth’s surface has warmed since 1880 and over half of the warming from 1951 to 2010 is due to man. That humans have some influence on climate is not in dispute, all major species have some influence on climate. Phytoplankton occupy most of the Earth’s surface and, since they photosynthesize, they consume CO2 and produce sugars and oxygen. In all probability, they have the largest effect on climate, but we don’t know how much. Humans mostly live in urban areas that occupy 3% of the Earth’s land area and 1.3% of the Earth’s surface. We burn fossil fuels and biomass, producing greenhouse gases (GHGs), that may have some net warming effect on the climate. Some laboratory measurements show a warming effect from CO2 and methane, but no measurements have been made in the real world (see pages 883-884 in WG1 AR5).
Using satellite data, we can show that the radiative effect of greenhouse gases, has increased from 1970 to 1997. But, measuring the net surface temperature effect of this increase has proven elusive. For an excellent discussion of the problems of predicting the warming effect of GHG’s see Richard Lindzen’s Remarks on Global Warming. In Lindzen’s remarks he notes that the measurements of global warming that we have are ambiguous regarding man’s GHG emissions and:
“Finally, we must turn to the models. It is from model results that our fear of profound greenhouse warming arises. …doubling CO2 will increase the downward flux at the surface by about 4 Watts/m2/sec; the solar flux in existing models must be adjusted by many times this quantity simply in order to get the present day global temperature correct.”
In the classic paper Lindzen and Choi, 2011, they argue that CERES satellite data suggests that natural feedback to an increase in CO2 is negative. That is, it reduces the temperature increase due to CO2 rather than increasing it as the CMIP5 global climate models predict. So, despite the absence of measurements how has the IPCC separated the warming due to man from natural warming? After all, surface temperatures have been rising since the Little Ice Age which only ended in the late 19th century just as we began to keep track of surface air temperatures worldwide.