Exclusive: Climate change
ZHAO Zongci, LUO Yong, HUANG Jianbin
This paper is a summary and review of studies on attribution of global warming, an issue getting more and more attention from policy makers and public. After a brief introduction to the global warming research in terms of methods and tools of attribution analysis, this paper summarizes the achievements of scientific research on evidences of human influence on global warming in recent years. Using the global climate models with human influence and using fingerprint detection and attribution, it is found that human influence was virtually certain to be the main cause of global warming in the past century, especially the last 50 years. The evidences of global warming in five spheres (atmosphere, hydrosphere, lithosphere, biosphere and cryosphere) of the earth system, such as increased heat waves, weakened cold wave, lower atmosphere warming, land and ocean warming, global sea level rising caused by both thermostatic expansion of sea water and ice melting, the accelerated melting of ice, snow and permafrost, the increased acidity of ocean, and extended plant growth season, are all closely related to the human influence.