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Contributions of solar and greenhouse gases forcing during the present warm period

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Abstract

Due to the dramatic increase in the global mean surface temperature (GMST) during the twentieth century, the climate science community has endeavored to determine which mechanisms are responsible for global warming. By analyzing a millennium simulation (the period of 1000–1990 ad) of a global climate model and global climate proxy network dataset, we estimate the contribution of solar and greenhouse gas forcings on the increase in GMST during the present warm period (1891–1990 ad). Linear regression analysis reveals that both solar and greenhouse gas forcing considerably explain the increase in global mean temperature during the present warm period, respectively, in the global climate model. Using the global climate proxy network dataset, on the other hand, statistical approach suggests that the contribution of greenhouse gas forcing is slightly larger than that of solar forcing to the increase in global mean temperature during the present warm period. Overall, our result indicates that the solar forcing as well as the anthropogenic greenhouse gas forcing plays an important role to increase the global mean temperature during the present warm period.

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Acknowledgments

We acknowledge Dr. S.-Y. Yim at IPRC for providing the ERIK simulation data sets. This work is supported by Korea Ministry of Environment as “Climate Change Correspondence Program” and S.-W. Yeh is also supported from the Brain Korea 21 Plus Project in Department of Marine Sciences and Convergent Technology of Hanyang University.

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Correspondence to Sang-Wook Yeh.

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Responsible editor: S. Hong.

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Lim, HG., Yeh, SW., Kim, JW. et al. Contributions of solar and greenhouse gases forcing during the present warm period. Meteorol Atmos Phys 126, 71–79 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00703-014-0324-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00703-014-0324-6

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