The debate about the “uncertainty of the historical temperature record” is not over, yet. There is still a vivid scientifical debate about the historical temperature record with some interesting arguments which should be taken seriously.
If you are interested in this or you have to be interested (because you are supposed to take a skeptical position in the next role-play)- here are some scientifically based articles doubting the published historical temperature record and its uncertainties:
- Balling, R. C., & Idso, S. B. (1989). Historical temperature trends in the United States and the effect of urban population growth. Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, 94(D3), 3359-3363.
- McKitrick, R. R., & Michaels, P. J. (2007). Quantifying the influence of anthropogenic surface processes and inhomogeneities on gridded global climate data. Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, 112(D24).
- Fall, S., Watts, A., Nielsen‐Gammon, J., Jones, E., Niyogi, D., Christy, J. R., & Pielke, R. A. (2011). Analysis of the impacts of station exposure on the US Historical Climatology Network temperatures and temperature trends. Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, 116(D14).
- Frank, P. (2010). Uncertainty in the Global Average Surface Air Temperature Index: A Representative Lower Limit. Energy & Environment, 21(8), 969-989.
- Frank, P. (2011). Imposed and Neglected Uncertainty in the Global Average Surface Air Temperature Index. Energy & Environment, 22(4), 407-424.
- Watts, A. (2009). Is the US surface temperature record reliable? The Heartland Institute, Chicago, IL. (http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/watts_is_surface_temp_reliable.pdf)
Dear Maike,
thank you for hinting to this list of papers from the “climate science-skeptical community”, which I provided during last year’s course to help for preparation of playing a “climate change science skeptic”.
I would like to come back to the question of Hadas, which she asked during the online plenary discussion today. She uploaded a screenshot of a youtube video of the outspoken “climate sceptic” John Coleman apparently discussing the deviation of temperature projections by the variety of models and scenarios and the observed temeprature records. I think that the data he shows is not particularly questionable. You find very similar Figures in the latest IPCC report. See Figure TS.14 in AR5 IPCC (2013), p. 87.
In the IPCC figure, however, the gridded temperature datasets of Hadley Centre/Climatic Research Unit (HadCRUT4), European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) interim re-analysis of the global atmosphere and surface conditions (ERA-Interim), Goddard Institute for Space Studies Surface Temperature Analysis (GISTEMP), National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) are plotted.
In Coleman’s figure, on the other hand, the plotted observational data are two different satellite-derived temperature datasets (RSS, UAH).
I think that it is a valid question to ask why most of the models show higher warming in the recent past than the available observational datasets .
Reference:
IPCC, 2013: Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Stocker, T.F., D. Qin, G.-K. Plattner, M. Tignor, S.K. Allen, J. Boschung, A. Nauels, Y. Xia, V. Bex and P.M. Midgley
(eds.)]. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA, 1535 pp.