Tag Archives: Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity

The Last Glacial Maximum

Posted on May 16, 2021 by ...and Then There's Physics

There’s an interesting paper by Seltzer et al. called [w]idespread six degrees Celsius cooling on land during the Last Glacial Maximum, which I became aware of through a Twitter thread by Werner Aeschbach. The reason it’s interesting is that it … Continue reading →

Posted in Climate change, Climate sensitivity, Global warming, Research | Tagged , , , , , | 7 Comments

Climate sensitivity – narrowing the range

Posted on July 22, 2020 by ...and Then There's Physics

Since I’ve discussed climate sensitivity on a number of occasions, it seems worth highlighting the new paper that assesses climate sensitivity using multiple lines of evidence. The authors include many who will be familiar to my regular readers. The key … Continue reading →

Posted in Climate change, Climate sensitivity, Philosophy for Bloggers, Research, Science | Tagged , , , , , | 98 Comments

Can climate sensitivity be really high?

Posted on June 13, 2020 by ...and Then There's Physics

The answer to the question in my post title is – unfortunately – yes. The generally accepted likely range for equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) is 2oC – 4.5oC. This doesn’t mean that it has to fall within this range, it … Continue reading →

Posted in Climate change, Climate sensitivity, Research, Science, The philosophy of science | Tagged , , , , | 36 Comments

Climate sensitivity in CMIP6 GCMs

Posted on January 5, 2020 by ...and Then There's Physics

Anyone who is aware of what’s going on in climate science should have heard that the latest generation of climate models, known as CMIP6, seem to be suggesting a somewhat higher climate sensitivity than suggested by the previous CMIP5 models. … Continue reading →

Posted in Climate sensitivity, Gavin Schmidt, Research, Scientists, The scientific method | Tagged , , , , , , , | 63 Comments

Climate sensitivity and decadal temperature variability

Posted on July 28, 2019 by ...and Then There's Physics

There are some who argue that natural/internal variability can play a role in driving long-term warming, and – hence – could explain a substantial fraction of recent warming. This, however, creates a bit of a paradox; if the system responds … Continue reading →

Posted in Climate sensitivity, Research, The scientific method | Tagged , , , , , | 80 Comments

The time evolution of climate sensitivity

Posted on September 20, 2018 by ...and Then There's Physics

I wanted to just post this figure from a new paper by Philip Goodwin called On the time evolution of climate sensitivity and future warming. It uses a modified energy balance approach in which multiple climate feedbacks evolve independently over … Continue reading →

Posted in Climate sensitivity, Global warming, Research | Tagged , , , | 228 Comments

The ECS is probably above 2K

Posted on September 1, 2018 by ...and Then There's Physics

I have quite a large conference starting tomorrow, so will probably be too busy to write. To keep things ticking over I thought I would post this seminar given by Andrew Dessler, discussing his recent work on constraining the Equilibrium … Continue reading →

Posted in Climate change, Climate sensitivity, Research | Tagged , , | 110 Comments

ECS from a modified energy balance approach

Posted on February 4, 2018 by ...and Then There's Physics

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 , , , , , , , | 144 Comments

Confounding ECS estimates

Posted on January 30, 2018 by ...and Then There's Physics

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 ...and Then There's Physics

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 , , , , | 151 Comments