"Greenhouse gases thrust into the atmosphere mainly by burning fossil fuels are warming Earth's surface more quickly than previously understood, according to new climate models set to replace those used in current UN projections, scientists said Tuesday."

This is interesting insofar as the Greenhouse Effect takes place in the troposphere not at the surface.

"We have better models now," said Boucher. "They have better resolution, and they represent current climate trends more accurately."

Surely 'better models' showing 'more warming' will only make the divergence worse?


CMIP5 models vs Reality

This all seems so depressingly familiar - we have a new report to produce ergo we must makes things appear worse than we thought.

An example of this is the story of a 2m sea level rise being plausible by 2100 (also covered by the BBC here).

The Jevrejeva et al. 2013 sea level reconstruction says this...


Circa 2mm per year - 160mm by 2100

NASA, on the other hand, says circa 3.3mm per year - 264mm by 2100.

Thus in order to get to 2m by 2100, sea level rise would have to do this...



Even the IPCC thinks such an increase implausible "It is very likely that the mean rate of global averaged sea level rise was 1.7 [1.5 to 1.9] mm/yr between 1901 and 2010 and 3.2 [2.8 to 3.6] mm/yr between 1993 and 2010.Tide gauge and satellite altimeter data are consistent regarding the higher rate during the latter period. It is likely that similarly high rates occurred between 1920 and 1950.”

A few 'experts' sharing their opinions doesn’t necessarily make good science. And so it goes with CMIP6. As Roy Spencer notes...

So, once again, we see that the observed rate of warming — when we ignore the natural fluctuations in the climate system (which, along with severe weather events dominate 'climate change' news) — is only about one-half of that projected by climate models at this point in the 21st Century. This fraction is consistent with the global energy budget study of Lewis & Curry (2018) which analyzed 100 years of global temperatures and ocean heat content changes, and also found that the climate system is only about 1/2 as sensitive to increasing CO2 as climate models assume.

It will be interesting to see if the new climate model assessment (CMIP6) produces warming more in line with the observations. From what I have heard so far, this appears unlikely. If history is any guide, this means the observations will continue to need adjustments to fit the models, rather than the other way around.

Like the BBC, it appears as though phys.org is perfectly at ease in promoting alarm. I hope no young children are reading.