Still think climate change is a hoax?

[robkelk]

Recent warming over the past 100 years is not part of a natural process, studies find

In one of three new studies published in the journals Nature and Nature Geoscience, researchers found that previous periods of climate change such as the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warming Period were regional and not a global phenomenon.

In contrast, the warming that has occurred over the past century has been far-reaching and global in nature.

"In this paper, what we do is look at climate over the past 2,000 years — and traditionally the understanding of climate over this period is that there were globally coherent periods of climate variability," said Nathan Steiger, co-author of the paper and an associate researcher at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University. "But what we show is that these periods are not globally coherent, as previously thought."

I think 2,000 years is a pretty good baseline - that should be long enough to filter out any natural causes of climate change. And over those 2,000 years, the researchers were not able to find any event that affected the entire planet at the same time, the way the current event is affecting the entire world now.

In a second study, researchers examined Earth's rate of surface warming — the global mean temperature — and its drivers. They found that the rate of warming over periods of at least 20 years was fastest during the late 20th century.

"We find that at pre-industrial times … major volcanic eruptions were the major drivers of temperature fluctuations," said co-author Raphael Neukom, a scientist at the Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of Bern. But external forces such as variations in the sun's output did not have "a significant influence" on temperatures.

I've already posted a link to solar output fluctuations to this forum, although not to this particular thread - it shouldn't be too difficult to go look at those numbers yourself.

The third paper also concluded that volcanoes played a role in climatic upheaval in the past.

It's this agreement between the three separate studies that the teams of researchers believe is an important indicator of the climate state the planet is currently experiencing.

"The basic conclusion is that what's happening today is anomalous, and we understand why it's anomalous — it's not a mystery," said Gavin Schmidt, a climatologist and director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who was not involved with the study.

But, he said, while the findings may not be entirely new, it's encouraging to have the new research to support other studies, and to offer it up to people who are "grasping at straws to avoid" dealing with climate change.

And thus we see independent teams arriving at the relatively same conclusion.

Nature is a peer-reviewed journal - any glaring flaws in the methodology should have been spotted, and would have blocked publication of any of the studies. The fact that all three were published should tell you something.