O.k., mistermack, you had trouble with the link -
Here it is again:
http://www.grida.no/publications/other/ ... /index.htm
Click on Technical Summary and go to Section E.
I think you should read the whole thing, but Section E addresses the human causation issue you brought up.
E. The Identification of a Human Influence on Climate Change
Sections B and C characterised the observed past changes in climate and in forcing agents, respectively. Section D examined the capabilities of climate models to predict the response of the climate system to such changes in forcing. This Section uses that information to examine the question of whether a human influence on climate change to date can be identified.
This is an important point to address. The SAR concluded that "the balance of evidence suggests that there is a discernible human influence on global climate". It noted that the detection and attribution of anthropogenic climate change signals will be accomplished through a gradual accumulation of evidence. The SAR also noted uncertainties in a number of factors, including internal variability and the magnitude and patterns of forcing and response, which prevented them from drawing a stronger conclusion.
E.1 The Meaning of Detection and Attribution
Detection is the process of demonstrating that an observed change is significantly different (in a statistical sense) than can be explained by natural variability. Attribution is the process of establishing cause and effect with some defined level of confidence, including the assessment of competing hypotheses. The response to anthropogenic changes in climate forcing occurs against a backdrop of natural internal and externally forced climate variability. Internal climate variability, i.e., climate variability not forced by external agents, occurs on all time-scales from weeks to centuries and even millennia. Slow climate components, such as the ocean, have particularly important roles on decadal and century time-scales because they integrate weather variability. Thus, the climate is capable of producing long time-scale variations of considerable magnitude without external influences. Externally forced climate variations (signals) may be due to changes in natural forcing factors, such as solar radiation or volcanic aerosols, or to changes in anthropogenic forcing factors, such as increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases or aerosols. The presence of this natural climate variability means that the detection and attribution of anthropogenic climate change is a statistical "signal to noise" problem. Detection studies demonstrate whether or not an observed change is highly unusual in a statistical sense, but this does not necessarily imply that we understand its causes. The attribution of climate change to anthropogenic causes involves statistical analysis and the careful assessment of multiple lines of evidence to demonstrate, within a pre-specified margin of error, that the observed changes are:
unlikely to be due entirely to internal variability;
consistent with the estimated responses to the given combination of anthropogenic and natural forcing; and
not consistent with alternative, physically plausible explanations of recent climate change that exclude important elements of the given combination of forcings.
E.2 A Longer and More Closely Scrutinised Observational Record
Figure 14: Global mean surface air temperature anomalies from 1,000 year control simulations with three different climate models, - Hadley, Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory and Hamburg, compared to the recent instrumental record. No model control simulation shows a trend in surface air temperature as large as the observed trend. If internal variability is correct in these models, the recent warming is likely not due to variability produced within the climate system alone. [Based on Figure 12.1]
Three of the last five years (1995, 1997 and 1998) were the warmest globally in the instrumental record. The impact of observational sampling errors has been estimated for the global and hemispheric mean temperature record. There is also a better understanding of the errors and uncertainties in the satellite-based (Microwave Sounding Unit, MSU) temperature record. Discrepancies between MSU and radiosonde data have largely been resolved, although the observed trend in the difference between the surface and lower tropospheric temperatures cannot fully be accounted for (see Section B). New reconstructions of temperature over the last 1,000 years indicate that the temperature changes over the last hundred years are unlikely to be entirely natural in origin, even taking into account the large uncertainties in palaeo-reconstructions (see Section B).
E.3 New Model Estimates of Internal Variability
The warming over the past 100 years is very unlikely to be due to internal variability alone, as estimated by current models. The instrumental record is short and covers the period of human influence and palaeo-records include natural forced variations, such as those due to variations in solar irradiance and in the frequency of major volcanic eruptions. These limitations leave few alternatives to using long "control" simulations with coupled models for the estimation of internal climate variability. Since the SAR, more models have been used to estimate the magnitude of internal climate variability, a representative sample of which is given in Figure 14. As can be seen, there is a wide range of global scale internal variability in these models. Estimates of the longer time-scale variability relevant to detection and attribution studies is uncertain, but, on interannual and decadal time-scales, some models show similar or larger variability than observed, even though models do not include variance from external sources. Conclusions on detection of an anthropogenic signal are insensitive to the model used to estimate internal variability, and recent changes cannot be accounted for as pure internal variability, even if the amplitude of simulated internal variations is increased by a factor of two or perhaps more. Most recent detection and attribution studies find no evidence that model-estimated internal variability at the surface is inconsistent with the residual variability that remains in the observations after removal of the estimated anthropogenic signals on the large spatial and long time-scales used in detection and attribution studies. Note, however, the ability to detect inconsistencies is limited. As Figure 14 indicates, no model control simulation shows a trend in surface air temperature as large as the observed trend over the last 1,000 years.
NOTE: that is the technical SUMMARY - so, if you don't think it's detailed enough, you need to look at the IPCC report in toto and read it.
and this isn't a site FOR anything .
