Finally, there are periodic interruptions from volcanoes, which blast sulfur—a gas that has an anti-greenhouse effect and tends to cool the planet— into the atmosphere. The eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991 reduced global temperatures by about 0.2°C for a period of two years, equivalent to a decade’s worth of greenhouse warming. The longer your

Still, since climate models rely on specific assumptions about the amount of atmospheric CO2, this can significantly complicate forecasts made for fifty or one hundred years out and affect them at the margin in the nearer term, depending on how political and economic decisions influence CO2 emissions. Last, there is the structural uncertainty in

That the models can’t reproduce the past is a big red flag—it erodes confidence in their projections of future climates. In particular, it greatly complicates sorting out the relative roles of natural variability and human influences in the warming that has occurred since 1980.

Overall, the predictions for the four cities were reasonably good, but were toward the lower end of Hansen’s range. His global temperature predictions are harder to evaluate because they articulated a plethora of scenarios that relied on different assumptions, but they were also somewhat too high.76 Even the most…

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