Analysis of global warming

Forecasts without systematic errors: climate models, such as the model MPI - ESM LR of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, predict a significant increase in temperature by the end of this century, especially at the Earth's poles. No model, however, has predicted the global warming hiatus which climate researchers have observed since the turn of the millennium. This, however, is not due to systematic errors of the models, but to random fluctuations in the climate system. The model predictions are therefore reliable, taking some statistical uncertainty into account.

Credit: MPI for Meteorology / Deutsches Klimarechenzentrum (DKRZ)

Skeptics who still doubt anthropogenic climate change have now been stripped of one of their last-ditch arguments: It is true that there has been a warming hiatus and that the surface of Earth has warmed up much less rapidly since the turn of the millennium than all the relevant climate models had predicted. However, the gap between the calculated and measured warming is not due to systematic errors of the models, as the skeptics had suspected, but because there are always random fluctuations in Earth's climate. Recently, Jochem Marotzke, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, and Piers M. Forster, a professor at the University of Leeds in the UK, have impressively demonstrated this by means of a comprehensive statistical analysis. They also clearly showed that the models do not generally overestimate human-made climate change. Global warming is therefore highly likely to reach critical proportions by the end of the century - if the global community does not finally get to grips with the problem.

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