Category Archives: Climate sensitivity

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

Galactic cosmic rays

Posted on December 22, 2017 by

There’s a recent Nature Communications paper by Svensmark et al. called [i]ncreased ionization supports growth of aerosols into cloud condensation nuclei. The basic idea is that cosmic rays (energetic particles typically accelerated by shock waves) can influence the growth of … Continue reading →

Posted in Climate change, Climate sensitivity, ClimateBall, Global warming, Science, Sound Science (tm) | Tagged , , , , , , , | 10 Comments

What if global warming ends up being greater than we thought?

Posted on December 17, 2017 by

I recently wrote a post about the Brown & Caldeira paper which suggests that climate sensitivity may be on the high side of the range. Rather predictably, Nic Lewis has a guest post on Climate Etc in which he looks … Continue reading →

Posted in Climate change, Climate sensitivity, ClimateBall, Global warming, GRRRROWTH, Science | Tagged , , , , , , | 71 Comments

More about Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity

Posted on December 14, 2017 by

It’s currently the AGU Fall Meeting and there was a session on Climate sensitivity and feedbacks. It included talks by Kate Marvel and Kyle Armour, and I noticed that the Convener, Andrew Dessler, had tweeted This leads to one of … Continue reading →

Posted in Climate sensitivity, Global warming, IPCC, Science, The scientific method | Tagged , , , , , , | 34 Comments