We have published a new paper titled “Spread in the magnitude of climate model interdecadal global temperature variability traced to disagreements over high-latitude oceans“. Here is a brief summary:

Natural unforced variability in global mean surface air temperature (GMST) is of the same order of magnitude as current externally forced changes in GMST on decadal timescales. Thus, understanding the precise magnitude of unforced GMST variability is relevant for both the attribution of past climate changes to human causes as well to the prediction of climate change on policy-relevant timescales.

Climate models could be useful for estimating the true magnitude of unforced GMST variability provided that they more-or-less converge on the same answer. Unfortunately, current models show substantial disagreement on the magnitude of natural GMST variability, highlighting a key uncertainty in contemporary climate science. This large model spread must be narrowed in the future if we are to have confidence that models can be trusted to give useful insights on natural variability.

Since it is known that unforced GMST variability is heavily influenced by tropical Pacific surface temperatures, it might be tempting to suppose that the large inter-model spread in the simulated magnitude of GMST variability is due to model disagreement in the amount of simulated tropical Pacific variability. Perhaps surprisingly, our study shows that this is not the case and that the spread in the magnitude of model-simulated GMST variability is linked much more strongly to model disagreements over high-latitude oceans. Our findings suggesting that improving the simulation of air-sea interaction in these high-latitude ocean regions could narrow the range of simulated GMST variability, advance our fundamental understanding of natural variability, and appreciably improve our ability to forecast global warming on policy-relevant timescales.