A Fair Plan to Safeguard Earth’s Climate. 3: Outlook for Global Temperature Change throughout the 21st Century

Abstract

We apply Singular Spectrum Analysis to four datasets of observed global-mean near-surface temperature from start year t o through 2012: HadCRU (t o = 1850), NOAA (t o = 1880), NASA (t o = 1880), and JMA (t o = 1891). For each dataset, SSA reveals a trend of increasing temperature and several quasi-periodic oscillations (QPOs). QPOs 1, 2 and 3 are predictable on a year-by-year basis by sine waves with periods/amplitudes of: 1) 62.4 years/0.11˚C; 2) 20.1 to 21.4 years/0.04˚C to 0.05˚C; and 3) 9.1 to 9.2 years/0.03˚C to 0.04˚C. The remainder of the natural variability is not predictable on a year-by-year basis. We represent this noise by its 90 percent confidence interval. We combine the predictable and unpredictable natural variability with the temperature changes caused by the 11-year solar cycle and humanity, the latter for both the Reference and Revised-Fair-Plan scenarios for future emissions of greenhouse gases. The resulting temperature departures show that we have moved from the first phase of learning-Ignorance-through the second phase-Uncertainty-and are now entering the third phase-Resolution-when the human-caused signal is much larger than the natural variability. Accordingly, it is now time to transition to the post-fossil-fuel age by phasing out fossil-fuel emissions from 2020 through 2100.

Fair Plan 10: Post-Trump Global-Warming Mitigation

“…It should be noted that these linear-in-time emission intensities are applied to the global emissions, not just to the emissions of the Developed Countries, as in our 10 antecedent Fair Plan papers [7]- [16]. In those papers, the emission intensities for the Developing Countries were larger in the beginning years, and smaller in the later years than the linear intensities, this so that: 1) the total cumulative traded-adjusted CO 2 emissions of the Developing Countries equaled the total trade-adjusted CO 2 emissions of the Developed Countries-the first Fairness, where trade-adjusted emissions are the CO 2 emissions generated by the Developing Countries in the production of goods and services for the Developed Countries, which emissions are debited to the Developed Countries, not the Developing Countries-the second Fairness; and 2) the maximum global-mean near-surface air temperature was kept below the 2˚C limit adopted by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change "to prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system" [3].…”

Fair Plan 7: Earth’s Climate Future = Humanity’s Choice

“…This enhancement makes it possible to obtain statistically significant results with the modern Fourier method (SSA) that would not be statistically significant with the classical Fourier analysis. Figure 1 shows that the HadCRU temperature data consist of: (1) a trend or oscillation (red curve); (2) three Quasi-Periodic Oscillations (QPOs, orange, green & blue lines) that are quasi-predictable on a year-to-year basis; and (3) other QPOs that are not predictable on a year-to-year basis but which, together with the residual stochastic variability, can be characterized by the 90% confidence interval of their Normal (Gaussian) probability distribution (band between the purple dashed lines) [10].…”

Fair Plan 4: Safeguarding the Climate of “This Island Earth”

“…We found that phase-out during 2020-2100 is optimal. In FP3 [7] we added to the human-caused temperature changes through 2100 the natural temperature changes caused by three quasi-periodic oscillations that are predictable on a year-to-year basis by sine waves, and random variations that are not predictable on a year-to-year basis, but are represented by their 90% confidence interval. In this our fourth Fair Plan paper we do not consider these natural temperature variations, and we again examine the entire millennium.…”

“…We have published three papers on how we can safeguard the Earth's climate [5]- [7]. These papers are described in the following section, as is how this paper differs from them.…”