Von Storch: models are falsified
Aug 12, 2013
Bishop Hill in Climate: Models, Climate: Surface, Climate: Zorita, Climate: von Storch

Roddy Campbell points us to this discussion paper by Hans von Storch et al, which looks at the divergence between climate models and observations:

In recent years, the increase in near-surface global annual mean temperatures has emerged as considerably smaller than many had expected. We investigate whether this can be explained by contemporary climate change scenarios. In contrast to earlier analyses for a ten-year period that indicated consistency between models and observations at the 5% confidence level, we find that the continued warming stagnation over fifteen years, from 1998 -2012, is no longer consistent with model projections even at the 2% confidence level. Of the possible causes of the inconsistency, the underestimation of internal natural climate variability on decadal time scales is a plausible candidate, but the influence of unaccounted external forcing factors or an overestimation of the model sensitivity to elevated greenhouse gas concentrations cannot be ruled out. The first cause would have little impact of the expectations of longer term anthropogenic climate change, but the second and particularly the third would.

That seems quite important to me. Note also that "the heat's all in the deep oceans" doesn't seem to be on the table as an explanation.

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