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Detection of Anthropogenic Climate Change in the World's Oceans
Tim P. Barnett,*David W. Pierce,Reiner Schnur
Large-scale increases in the heat content of the world's oceans
have been observed to occur over the last 45 years. The horizontaland
temporal character of these changes has been closely replicatedby the
state-of-the-art Parallel Climate Model (PCM) forced byobserved and
estimated anthropogenic gases. Application of optimaldetection
methodology shows that the model-produced signals areindistinguishable
from the observations at the 0.05 confidencelevel. Further, the
chances of either the anthropogenic or observedsignals being produced
by the PCM as a result of natural, internalforcing alone are less than
5%. This suggests that the observedocean heat-content changes are
consistent with those expectedfrom anthropogenic forcing, which
broadens the basis for claimsthat an anthropogenic signal has been
detected in the global climatesystem. Additionally, the requirement
that modeled ocean heatuptakes match observations puts a strong, new
constraint on anthropogenicallyforced climate models. It is unknown if
the current generationof climate models, other than the PCM, meet this
constraint.
Climate Research Division, Scripps Institution of Oceanography,
University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093, USA.
*
To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail:
tbarnett{at}ucsd.edu
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