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Industrial CO 2 emissions as a proxy for anthropogenic influence on lower tropospheric temperature trends
Author(s) -
de Laat A. T. J.,
Maurellis A. N.
Publication year - 2004
Publication title -
geophysical research letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.007
H-Index - 273
eISSN - 1944-8007
pISSN - 0094-8276
DOI - 10.1029/2003gl019024
Subject(s) - environmental science , troposphere , radiative forcing , greenhouse gas , atmospheric sciences , climatology , global temperature , climate change , forcing (mathematics) , proxy (statistics) , surface air temperature , satellite , climate model , global warming , geology , oceanography , machine learning , aerospace engineering , computer science , engineering
Surface temperature trends during the last two decades show a significant increase which appears to be anthropogenic in origin. We investigate global temperature changes using surface as well as satellite measurements and show that lower tropospheric temperature trends for the period 1979–2001 are spatially correlated to anthropogenic surface CO 2 emissions, which we use as a measure of industrialization. Furthermore, temperature trends for the regions not spatially correlated with these CO 2 emissions are considerably smaller or even negligible for some of the satellite data. We also show, using the same measure, that two important climate models do not reproduce the geographical climate response to all known forcings as found in the observed temperature trends. We speculate that the observed surface temperature changes might be a result of local surface heating processes and not related to radiative greenhouse gas forcing.