Detection and Attribution of Climate Change to Different Causes

Résumé 0

According to the last IPCC report, the most part of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations. This statement relies on a long process of demonstration that consisted in evaluating the ability of the successive generations of climate models to reproduce and interpret the climate variability of the last decades. The more and more numerous statistical analyses aiming at detecting and attributing climate change to natural and anthropogenic causes have reinforced the assessment of experts. The recent detection and attribution studies of observed climate change in France also allow to find an anthropogenic contribution at a sub-regional scale. The first aim of these studies is to look for signals of climate change and identify their sources. But, by analysing the consistency between model simulations and observations at a time scale consistent with the one of climate change projection, these analyses also contribute a lot to model validation in the context of the anthropogenic climate change assessment.