HOW NATURAL IS THE RECENT CENTENNIAL WARMING? AN ANALYSIS OF 2249 SURFACE TEMPERATURE RECORDS

Horst-Joachim Lüdecke (), Rainer Link () and Friedrich-Karl Ewert ()
Additional contact information
Horst-Joachim Lüdecke: European Institute for Climate and Energy (EIKE), P. O. Box 11011, 07722 Jena, Germany
Rainer Link: European Institute for Climate and Energy (EIKE), P. O. Box 11011, 07722 Jena, Germany
Friedrich-Karl Ewert: European Institute for Climate and Energy (EIKE), P. O. Box 11011, 07722 Jena, Germany

International Journal of Modern Physics C (IJMPC), 2011, vol. 22, issue 10, 1139-1159

Abstract: We evaluate to what extent the temperature rise in the past 100 years was a trend or a natural fluctuation and analyze 2249 worldwide monthly temperature records from GISS (NASA) with the 100-year period covering 1906–2005 and the two 50-year periods from 1906 to 1955 and 1956 to 2005. No global records are applied. The data document a strong urban heat island effect (UHI) and a warming with increasing station elevation. For the period 1906–2005, we evaluate a global warming of 0.58°C as the mean for all records. This decreases to 0.41°C if restricted to stations with a population of less than 1000 and below 800 meter above sea level. About a quarter of all the records for the 100-year period show a fall in temperatures. Our hypothesis for the analysis is, as generally in the papers concerned with long-term persistence of temperature records, that the observed temperature records are a combination of long-term correlated records with an additional trend, which is caused for instance by anthropogenicCO2, the UHI or other forcings. We apply the detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA) and evaluate Hurst exponents between 0.6 and 0.65 for the majority of stations, which is in excellent agreement with the literature and use a method only recently published, which is based on DFA, synthetic records and Monte Carlo simulation. As a result, the probabilities that the observed temperature series are natural have values roughly between 40% and 90%, depending on the stations characteristics and the periods considered. "Natural" means that we do not have within a defined confidence interval a definitely positive anthropogenic contribution and, therefore, only a marginal anthropogenic contribution cannot be excluded.

Keywords: Surface temperatures; 2249 records; global warming; natural probabilities; detrended fluctuation analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S0129183111016798
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wsi:ijmpcx:v:22:y:2011:i:10:n:s0129183111016798

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from

DOI: 10.1142/S0129183111016798

Access Statistics for this article

International Journal of Modern Physics C (IJMPC) is currently edited by H. J. Herrmann

More articles in International Journal of Modern Physics C (IJMPC) from World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tai Tone Lim ().