Seeing the environmental forest

Much has been made of the pause in global surface temperatures since 1998.  Among the factors advanced to explain that pause include a change in ENSO, a decline in solar output, and an increase in aerosols (i.e. Foster and Rahmstorf 2011 ).  One of the previously neglected factors is artificial cooling in global surface temperature data sets.  Neither the HadCRUT4 nor the NOAA temperature data cover the polar regions.  As the polar regions are the fastest warming areas on Earth (UAH Arctic trend since November 1978: +0.44ºC per decade, Global trend: +0.14ºC per decade), excluding those regions leads to an artificial cooling bias in the data. Anomaly map of HadCRUT4, showing the gaps in data coverage (in white) Both NOAA and GISS are artificially cooled by an outdated ocean temperature data set (HadSST2) that doesn't account for the change from ship-based temperature measurements to buoy-based temperature measurements that occurred within the last 10 years ( ...

One of the dominant memes among climate deniers are that climate models are inaccurate.  While true, particularly since 1998 (see Fyfe et al. 2013 ), that fact doesn't mean that global warming isn't happening or that global warming is due to a natural cycle and not CO 2 as many deniers claim.  For those leaps of logic to be true, the entire field of radiative physics, 152 years of experiments, and 40+ years of satellite observations would all have to be wrong.  Nor does it mean that climate isn't as sensitive to changes in radiative forcing as multiple studies have shown it to be (i.e. Paleosens 2013 ).  What it means is far more complex. To illustrate this complexity, I compared IPCC AR5 climate models with surface temperatures (GISS).  The AR5 models were run with four scenarios, labeled RCP 2.6, RCP 4.5, RCP 6.0, and RCP 8.5.  Data for each scenario, along with global temperature data, AMO, PDO, etc. are available at Climate Explorer .  The RCP s...