Projection of global mean surface air temperature changes in next 40 years: Uncertainties of climate models and an alternative approach

Abstract

The Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) of the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) concluded that the climate projection using climate models that took account of both human and natural factors provided credible quantitative estimates of future climate change; however, the mismatches between the IPCC AR4 model ensembles and the observations, especially the multi-decadal variability (MDV), have cast shadows on the confidence of the model-based decadal projections of future climate. This paper reports an evaluation of many individual runs of AR4 models in the simulation of past global mean temperature. We find that most of the individual model runs fail to reproduce the MDV of past climate, which may have led to the overestimation of the projection of global warming for the next 40 years or so. Based on such an evaluation, we propose an alternative approach, in which the MDV signal is taken into account, to project the global mean temperature for the next 40 years and obtain that the global warming during 2011-2050 could be much smaller than the AR4 projection. © 2011 Science China Press and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.