Climate Change is Causing Accelerated 21st Century Surface Warming

Pro: The Earth is Warming Dramatically

Earth Warming at Highest Rate Ever

The rate at which the Earth is currently warming due to man-made greenhouse gas emissions is higher than any rate previously observed, a new study found.

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Researchers from the University of Maryland reconstructed Earth’s temperatures and found that temperature changes caused by things such as volcanic aerosols, greenhouse gases and random fluctuations were accurately depicted.

Using the models, researchers were able to determine the contributions of several influences on global temperatures, including natural causes, such as fluctuations in solar heating and the cooling effect caused by airborne particles from volcanic eruptions, as well as the human-caused influences of greenhouse gas emissions.

While volcanic eruptions were responsible for temperature variations before 1850, greenhouse gases became the dominant influence on climate change later on.

According to the study, the results suggest that current climate models correctly represent the contributions of various influences on the global climate and are capable of correctly predicting future global warming.https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2019-07-24/study-earth-warming-at-rate-higher-than-ever-previously-recorded

Ocean temperatures hit record high as rate of heating accelerates

The heat in the world’s oceans reached a new record level in 2019, showing “irrefutable and accelerating” heating of the planet.

The world’s oceans are the clearest measure of the climate emergency because they absorb more than 90% of the heat trapped by the greenhouse gases emitted by fossil fuel burning, forest destruction and other human activities.

The new analysis shows the past five years are the top five warmest years recorded in the ocean and the past 10 years are also the top 10 years on record. The amount of heat being added to the oceans is equivalent to every person on the planet running 100 microwave ovens all day and all night.https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jan/13/ocean-temperatures-hit-record-high-as-rate-of-heating-accelerates

Con: Most Observed Warming is Natural

Almost half of the global warming in the 21^st century is due to El Niño events

A major uncertainty in figuring out how much of recent warming has been human-caused is knowing how much nature has caused. The IPCC is quite sure that nature is responsible for less than half of the warming since the mid-1900s, but some climate scientists, politicians, activists, and various green energy pundits go even further, behaving as if warming is 100% human-caused.

If we look at the warming over the 19-year period 2000-2018, we see the record El Nino event during 2015-16 which caused increased sea surface temperature in the Pacific Ocean, which in turn increased air temperature globally:

That event created a “warm spike” in the global temperature record in 2015 and 2016, and caused increased warming trends.

Climate Scientist Dr. Roy Spencer of the University of Alabama, Huntsville, performed a calculation to remove the effect of the 2015/2016 El Niño event.

The result:

The observed trend in HadCRUT4 surface temperatures is nearly cut in half compared to the CMIP5 climate model average warming over the same period, and the UAH tropospheric temperature trend is almost zero.
The observed rate of warming — when we ignore the natural fluctuations in the climate system is only about one-half of that projected by climate models at this point in the 21st Century.

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