Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask Her Majesty’s Government, further to the Written Answer by Baroness Neville-Rolfe on 12 December 2016 (HL3624), whether the criticism set out in the briefing paper <i>Statistical Models and the Global Temperature Record</i> that integrated models are "not consistent with the notion of a climate that is in a steady state" also applies to linear trend models.

As detailed in the briefing paper Statistical Models and the Global Temperature Record by the Chief Scientist of the Met Office, neither integrated nor linear models are consistent with a climate that is in a steady state. Further, these methods do not explicitly include any description of the physical processes affecting global temperatures and therefore have limited capability in providing information on such processes.