Uncertainty in Climate Science: Not Cause for Inaction

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that Earth's climate is non-stationary with a rising mean during the Industrial Era, and shows that uncertainties do not negate the clear evidence of anthropogenic global warming.

Contribution

It introduces a simple stochastic climate model that captures natural and anthropogenic forcings, confirming the robustness of observed global warming despite uncertainties.

Findings

Climate distribution is non-stationary with a rising mean.

Uncertainties in the model are insufficient to obscure the observed warming.

Natural variability cannot explain the current temperature rise.

Abstract

Using observational data and an elementary rigorous statistical fact it is easily shown that the distribution of Earth's climate is non-stationary. Examination of records of hundreds of local Industrial Era temperature histories in the Northern Hemisphere were used to show this fact. Statistically, the mean of the ensemble has been rising during the Industrial Era. All of this confirms what climate scientists already know. The issue of predictions under uncertainties was tackled as well: a simple balance model was tuned to track an ensemble of climate records. Stochastic parametrizations were created to capture natural and anthropogenic CO2 forcings. The resulting stochastic model was then tested against historical data and then used to make future predictions. This exercise confirmed as well climate science attribution to significant global warming during the Industrial Era to anthropogenic activities. The variability of the model due to uncertainties is simply not large enough to obfuscate a clear rise in the mean temperature in the Industrial Era. Further, even if the variance of the natural CO2 contribution is greatly increased artificially (in the model), the fluctuations cannot account for the current change in the historical mean. These outcomes weaken the factual validity of the US administration, 2016-2020, claims that there are too many uncertainties in climate and climate science to make climate predictions, and further that contemporary reports of floods, extreme weather, even a rising global mean temperature are simply manifestations of a climate that always fluctuates within a nature-derived statistical distribution.