These data represent monthly averaged values of selected variables for the Data Distribution Centre (DDC) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). (see also http://www.ipcc-data.org/) The model output prepared for IPCC Fourth Assessment climate of the 20th Century experiment (20C3M). These datasets are available in netCDF and GRIB format. This experiment has a spinup for 80 years with conditions for 1871. For this experiment there is only one run available. Model output data for CMIP3 in higher temporal resolutions and further variables are available in ESGF at https://esgf-node.llnl.gov/search/cmip3/.