The Earth’s energy balance is key to understanding climate and climate variations that are caused by natural and anthropogenic changes in the atmospheric composition. Despite abundant observational evidence for changes in the energy balance over the past decades the formal detection of climate warming and its attribution to human influence has so far relied mostly on the difference between spatio-temporal warming patterns of natural and anthropogenic origin. In this article an alternative attribution method is presented that relies on the principle of conservation of energy, without assumptions about spatial warming patterns. Based on a massive ensemble of simulations with an intermediate-complexity climate model it is demonstrated that known changes in the global energy balance and in radiative forcing tightly constrain the magnitude of anthropogenic warming. Since the mid-twentieth century, greenhouse gases contributed 0.85 °C of warming, with 95% confidence intervals 0.6–1.1 °C, about half of which was offset by the cooling effects of aerosols, with a total observed change in global temperature of about 0.56 °C.

The observed trends are extremely unlikely, less than 5% probability, to be caused by internal variability, even if current models were found to strongly underestimate it. The method used in this article is complementary to optimal fingerprinting attribution and produces consistent results, thus suggesting an even higher confidence that human-induced causes dominate the observed warming.

Anthropogenic and natural warming inferred from changes in Earth’s energy balance, Markus Huber and Reto Knutti, Nature Geoscience (2011) doi:10.1038/ngeo1327, Published online 04 December 2011