Is future climate predictable with statistics?

Abstract

The purpose of this note is to briefly introduce the statistical models and methods used in climate sciences to estimate, from observations, the sensitivity of the Earth's climate to Greenhouse Gases. First the context of climatology is described with an explanation of how statistics can interact with the use of climate models. A description of the main models used, which are original variants of Error-in-Variables models, follows. Then a few issues for which methodological progresses would be helpful are mentioned. This includes the inference of large covariance matrices and uncertainty quantification.