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Science 21 January 1994:
Vol. 263. no. 5145, pp. 341 - 347
DOI: 10.1126/science.263.5145.341
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Articles

Detecting Climatic Change Signals: Are There Any "Fingerprints"?

Stephen H. Schneider 1

1 Department of Biological Sciences and Institute for International Studies, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, and National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO 80307

Projected changes in the Earth's climate can be driven from a combined set of forcing factors consisting of regionally heterogeneous anthropogenic and natural aerosols and land use changes, as well as global-scale influences from solar variability and transient increases in human-produced greenhouse gases. Thus, validation of climate model projections that are driven only by increases in greenhouse gases can be inconsistent when one attempts the validation by looking for a regional or time-evolving "fingerprint" of such projected changes in real climatic data. Until climate models are driven by time-evolving, combined, multiple, and heterogeneous forcing factors, the best global climatic change "fingerprint" will probably remain a many-decades average of hemi-spheric- to global-scale trends in surface air temperatures. Century-long global warming (or cooling) trends of 0.5°C appear to have occurred infrequently over the past several thousand years—perhaps only once or twice a millennium, as proxy records suggest. This implies an 80 to 90 percent heuristic likelihood that the 20th-century 0.5 ± 0.2°C warming trend is not a wholly natural climatic fluctuation.


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