Category Archives: climate sensitivity

Regional temperature this century

climate sensitivity, GCMs, projections, temperature

Some of the biggest questions about the future climate we have are: “how much could the climate change this century?”, “how reliable are climate projections?” and “what could happen on the way to 2100?” Also, most people want to know about regional change rather than change to the global mean climate. We have recently produced two papers relevant to these questions in terms of temperature change, now available (one on limits to temperature change this century and another on regional projections and variability).

Guest post by Michael Grose, CSIRO
Continue reading Regional temperature this century →

Reconciling estimates of climate sensitivity

climate sensitivity, GCMs, SSTs, temperature

Climate sensitivity characterises the response of the climate to changes in radiative forcing and can be measured in many different ways. However, estimates derived from observations of historical global temperatures have tended to be lower than those suggested by state-of-the-art climate simulators. Are the models too sensitive?

A new study largely explains the difference – it is because the comparison has not been done ‘like-with-like’.

The implications for understanding historical global temperature change are also significant. It is suggested that changes in global air temperature are actually ~24% larger than measured by the HadCRUT4 global temperature dataset. Continue reading Reconciling estimates of climate sensitivity →

Back-of-the-envelope attribution of global temperature changes

climate sensitivity, energy balance, temperature

Many of those skeptical about the causes of climate change suggest that the complex global climate models (GCMs) often used to make attribution statements are not trustworthy. Here I highlight that GCMs are not needed to roughly attribute nearly all of the observed warming (at least) to changes in greenhouse gases. Continue reading Back-of-the-envelope attribution of global temperature changes →

On Mora et al.'s Reply

climate sensitivity, emergence, journals, uncertainty, variability

Yesterday saw the publication of our Comment on Mora et al., along with Mora et al.’s Reply and an associated ‘News & Views’ piece. Although the Editors deserve credit for commissioning a News & Views piece on this exchange – a first for a Comment in Nature – there are still errors in Mora et al.’s Reply. A previous post summarised the issues with the original paper, and Doug McNeall also discusses the main issues. Continue reading On Mora et al.'s Reply →

Comments on the GWPF climate sensitivity report

climate sensitivity, GCMs, IPCC AR5, observations, projections, temperature, uncertainty

Guest post by Piers Forster, with comments from Jonathan Gregory & Ed Hawkins

Lewis & Crok have circulated a report, published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), criticising the assessment of equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) and transient climate response (TCR) in both the AR4 and AR5 IPCC assessment reports.

Climate sensitivity remains an uncertain quantity. Nevertheless, employing the best estimates suggested by Lewis & Crok, further and significant warming is still expected out to 2100, to around 3°C above pre-industrial climate, if we continue along a business-as-usual emissions scenario (RCP 8.5), with continued warming thereafter. However, there is evidence that the methods used by Lewis & Crok result in an underestimate of projected warming. Continue reading Comments on the GWPF climate sensitivity report →