Detection and attribution of climate change, and understanding solar influence on climate

The detection of externally-forced climate change in observations, and its attribution to specific forcings, sounds simple enough to some people, but with others it has a reputation as a complex and arcane specialism. In fact, both these impressions have some truth - in principle it is no more than regressing expected patterns of climate change (normally obtained from GCM sim-ulations forced with observed or reconstructed past forcings) against the corresponding observa-tions, with uncertainty estimates that try to be as rigorous as possible, but there are many technical complexities. This survey begins with some motivating examples, and then summarizes the principles, problems and procedure without formal mathematics, before surveying results with an emphasis on possible solar effects, and why they are particularly problematic.     

Anthropogenic and natural causes of twentieth century temperature change

We analyse spatio-temporal patterns of near-surface temperature change to provide an attribution of twentieth century climate change. We apply an ``optimal detection' methodology to seasonal and annual data averaged over a range of spatial and temporal scales. We find that solar effects may have contributed significantly to the warming in the first half of the century although this result is dependent on the reconstruction of total solar irradiance that is used. In the latter half of the century, we find that anthropogenic increases in greenhouses gases are largely responsible for the observed warming, balanced by some cooling due to anthropogenic sulphate aerosols, with no evidence for significant solar effects.