Regional climate change in the 21^st century will result from the interplay between human-induced changes and internal climate variability. Competing effects from greenhouse gas warming and aerosol cooling have historically caused multidecadal forced climate variations overlapping with internal variability. Despite extensive historical observations, disentangling the contributions of internal and forced variability remains debated, largely due to the uncertain magnitude of anthropogenic aerosols. Here, we show that, after removing CO₂-congruent variability, multidecadal temperature variability in instrumental data is largely attributable to internal processes of oceanic origin. This follows from an emergent relationship, identified in historical climate model simulations, between the driver of variability in oceanic regions and the land-ocean variance ratio in the mid-latitudes. Thus, climate models with higher residual (non-CO₂) forced variability, largely linked to volcanic and anthropogenic aerosols, exhibit more spatially coherent and amplified temperature patterns over land compared to observations. In contrast, models with higher internal variability agree better with the instrumental data. Our results underscore that internal modes of ocean-driven variability may be too weak in many climate models, and that current projections may be underestimating the range of internal variability in regions with high oceanic influence.
Hébert et al. (Mon,) studied this question.