Category Archives: Climate sensitivity

low-probability, high-impact outcomes

Posted on June 11, 2018 by

There’s an interesting Earth System Dynamics Discussion paper presenting a a simple proposal to improve the contribution of IPCC WG1 to the assessment and communication of climate change risks. Essentially, one can estimate the risk of some outcome by considering … Continue reading →

Posted in Climate change, Climate sensitivity, IPCC, Scientists, Severe Events | Tagged , , , , , , | 143 Comments

RCP8.5

Posted on May 10, 2018 by

There’s been a lengthy discussion on Twitter about RCP8.5. I think it was initiated by Roger Pielke Jr, who continues in his campaign to police the scientific community: RCP 8.5 is by far the favorite in climate impact studies (graph).I … Continue reading →

Posted in Climate change, Climate sensitivity, ClimateBall, Policy, Research, Scientists | Tagged , , , , | 270 Comments

Lewis and Curry, again

Posted on April 27, 2018 by

I should probably say something about the new Lewis & Curry paper. It’s mostly an update to their earlier paper that I’ve discussed before. Bottom line; there are reasons to be cautious. The basic formalism is that one can use … Continue reading →

Posted in Climate sensitivity, Judith Curry, Research, Science, The scientific method | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 686 Comments

ECS from a modified energy balance approach

Posted on February 4, 2018 by

Andrew Dessler’s paper (technically Dessler and Forster), which he mentioned in this comment, has now appeared as a pre-print. Essentially, they use an energy balance approach to estimate equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS), but – as I mentioned in this post … Continue reading →

Posted in Climate sensitivity, Global warming, Research, Science, The scientific method | Tagged , , , , , , , | 142 Comments

Confounding ECS estimates

Posted on January 30, 2018 by

Kate Marvel and colleagues have just published an interesting paper on how [i]nternal variability and disequilibrium confound estimates of climate sensitivity from observations. Essentially they compare three different ways of estimating Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity (ECS): atmosphere-only simulations with observed sea … Continue reading →

Posted in Climate change, Climate sensitivity, Research | Tagged , , , , , | 193 Comments

Narrowing the climate sensitivity range?

Posted on January 20, 2018 by

There have been a couple of recent papers presenting analyses that claim to have narrowed the likely range for equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS). One is Dessler et al. (currently a discussion paper under review) which suggests that the 500hPa tropical … Continue reading →

Posted in Climate change, Climate sensitivity, Policy, Research, Science | Tagged , , , , | 150 Comments

Guest post: A ‘new’ measurement of climate sensitivity?

Posted on January 17, 2018 by

This is a guest post by Mark Richardson, who is currently a Caltech Postdoctoral Scholar at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Mark has a particular interest in the role of clouds in climate change. This post is a response to … Continue reading →

Posted in Climate change, Climate sensitivity, Global warming, The scientific method | Tagged , , , | 149 Comments