2009/07/20 by Rasmus Benestad, Gavin A. Schmidt · 1 citation
Environmental Science · Energy · #Climate variability and models #Global Energy and Sustainability Research #Atmospheric and Environmental Gas Dynamics
paper · pdf · doi:10.1029/2008jd011639
openalex publication_date 2009/07/20 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/23
We use a suite of global climate model simulations for the 20th century to assess the contribution of solar forcing to the past trends in the global mean temperature. In particular, we examine how robust different published methodologies are at detecting and attributing solar‐related climate change in the presence of intrinsic climate variability and multiple forcings. We demonstrate that naive application of linear analytical methods such as regression gives nonrobust results. We also demonstrate that the methodologies used by Scafetta and West (2005, 2006a, 2006b, 2007, 2008) are not robust to these same factors and that their error bars are significantly larger than reported. Our analysis shows that the most likely contribution from solar forcing a global warming is 7 ± 1% for the 20th century and is negligible for warming since 1980.