Researchers from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory published an article, "Near-term acceleration in the rate of temperature change," in Nature Climate Change today in which they compared past rates of temperature change over 40-year periods with future projections. They predict that global average temperature will be increasing at a rate of 0.25 C° per decade by 2020. That rate of change would be "unprecedented for at least the past 1,000 years." If average global temperature began to rise at this rate, it would vindicate the climate models. If not, then what?
The prognosticated warm up has not yet started. As I noted earlier the private research group Remote Sensing Systems has pointed out that the climate models are all running too hot for most of the earth. As RSS reported:
"Climate models cannot explain this warming if human-caused increases in greenhouse gases are not included as input to the model simulation." But the folks at RSS significantly further note, "The troposphere has not (emphasis RSS) warmed as fast as almost all climate models predict."
RSS
The good news is that the authors have made a falsifiable prediction to which we can know the answer in five years or so.
