Climate Models Fail To Simulate

Past & Present NH Temperatures

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Reconstructions Of Northern Hemisphere Temperatures Indicate Medieval Period Was As Warm As Recent Decades

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Abrantes et al., 2017 

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Otto and Roberts, 2016

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Other NH Reconstructions Indicate Pre-Industrial Temps Were Highly Variable, 1940s As Warm As 2000s

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Schneider et al., 2015

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Stoffel et al., 2015

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New Paper: Models Need ‘Forcing’ Adjustment…Underestimate Past Warmth, Internal Variability…Instrumental Record ‘Biased’

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Büntgen et al., 2017

Spanning the period 1186-2014 CE, the new reconstruction reveals overall warmer conditions around 1200 and 1400, and again after ~1850. The coldest reconstructed summer in 1258 (-4.4°C wrt 1961-1990) followed the largest known volcanic eruption of the CE. The 20th century is characterized by pronounced summer cooling in the 1970s, subsequently rising temperatures until 2003, and a slowdown of warming afterwards. Little agreement is found with climate model simulations that consistently overestimate recent summer warming and underestimate pre-industrial temperature changes.

[W]hen it comes to disentangling natural variability from anthropogenically affected variability the vast majority of the instrumental record may be biased. … Although the causes of the recently measured slowdown in global and regional warming during the last decade are still debated (Karl et al. 2015; Fyfe et al. 2016), our study provides the first long-term proxy evidence for this temperature decline over the western Mediterranean basin. This finding is in line with local, regional and sub-continental meteorological observations, and consistent with the observations by Gleisner et al. (2015) that the post-2003 pause in rising mean surface temperatures is most strongly expressed at mid-latitudes.

The reconstructed long-term variability exceeds the pre-industrial multi-decadal to centennial variability in four state-of-the-art climate model simulations. This mismatch between the proxy reconstructions and the four model simulations is in line with a general tendency of state-of-the-art climate model simulations to underestimate the amplitude of reconstructed natural low-frequency temperature variability during the last millennium (Bothe et al. 2013; Fernández-Donado et al. 2013; Phipps et al. 2013; Luterbacher et al. 2016; Ljungqvist et al. 2012). Such disagreement might indicate that the role of internal unforced variability is greater than expected (Goosse 2017; Matsikaris et al. 2016), and/or that the climate sensitivity to the prescribed forcings needs adjustment. … [S]tate-of-the-art climate models are usually driven by a relatively dampened amplitude of long-term changes in solar activity (Schmidt et al. 2011,2012).