Tag Archives: Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity

No, it probably isn’t mostly due to changes in clouds!

I haven’t done a paper debunk for a while, but a reader got in touch to ask about a recent paper by Hans Rolf-Dübal and Fritz Vahrenholt, so I thought I would have a quick look. The paper is Radiative … Continue reading

Posted in Climate change, Climate sensitivity, Global warming, Greenhouse effect | Tagged , , , , , | 34 Comments

The Last Glacial Maximum

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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