The results suggest that, when it comes to the climate, both the doom-mongers and optimists are wrong. On the other hand, they have prompted a heated debate over how certain you can be about uncertainty.
‘People are quite rightly looking at what we’ve done, because we’re claiming quite a big reduction in uncertainty, based on a pretty simple analysis,’ said lead author Professor Peter Cox of the University of Exeter in the UK.
The climate is a complex beast. To make predictions about how much temperatures will rise in the future, scientists employ hugely detailed computer simulations, which rely on swathes of experimental data as input.
But there is a big unknown in these simulations: how much warming do you get for a certain amount of CO2? This simple parameter is known as the climate’s sensitivity, and it dominates our uncertainty about future global warming.
Normally, climate sensitivity is estimated by looking at historical data on temperature and greenhouse gases – either measurements of global warming or records of past climates, such as ice cores and tree rings. Given a rise in CO2 and a concurrent rise in temperature, scientists can judge how much the former affects the latter.
Big range
For the past 25 years or so, studies based on this method have led the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to conclude that the sensitivity of the Earth to a doubling in CO2 falls in a ‘likely’ range of 1.5°C to 4.5°C, with a central estimate of 3°C.
Prof. Cox believes this degree of uncertainty isn’t good enough. ‘I think it’s slightly embarrassing that we’ve had a range that is so large for so long,’ he said.
‘I think it’s slightly embarrassing that we’ve had a range that is so large for so long.’ – Prof. Peter Cox, University of Exeter, UK
According to Prof. Cox, it is difficult to reduce the uncertainty using conventional methods because the historical records aren’t enough to work out how much heat has been put into the system by human activities. Although scientists know how much heat has been added by increasing CO2 levels, he says, they know rather less about the compensating cooling effects of aerosol particles – for instance sulphates, which are produced by volcanoes and the burning of fossil fuels.
To avoid this problem, Prof. Cox and colleagues ignore the historical warming trend altogether, and instead picture the climate as a spring. The length of the spring is the global temperature, and the weights on the end are the net heating due to CO2 and aerosols.
Crucially, to work out the sensitivity using this new method, Cox and his co-authors don’t actually need to know how much weight there is. All they need to do is measure the spring’s stiffness, and this is betrayed by how quickly the spring oscillates – or in real terms, how much temperatures have varied from year to year.
A ‘stiff’ climate equals a small sensitivity, while a ‘slack’ climate equals a big sensitivity. In their paper published in the journal Nature, Prof. Cox and colleagues estimate the sensitivity to be in the ‘likely’ range of 2.2°C to 3.4°C – less than half the range given by the IPCC.
Sensitive figures
To be clear, this range is not necessarily how much warming anyone should expect. It only reflects how much warming there would be for a doubling of CO2 levels since the baseline period of pre-industrialisation – although we’re about halfway to that threshold already.
Nevertheless, the researchers’ results appear to simultaneously exclude the very worst- and best-case scenarios. ‘I sort of see this as good news, in that our range says values above 4°C are unlikely, and so we’re not yet too late to avoid the 2oC limit set by the Paris Agreement,’ said Prof. Cox.
But not everyone is on board with the new statistics. Climate scientist Professor Tapio Schneider of Caltech in California, US, believes the researchers have mistakenly assumed that their springy relationship is linear, when it could be more complicated.
This view is not shared by Dr James Annan of Blue Skies Research in the UK. On his blog he describes himself as a ‘fan’ of the new approach, albeit ‘not uncritically’.
Professor Reto Knutti of ETH Zürich in Switzerland points out that Prof. Cox and colleagues are not the first to try an alternative method to cut the uncertainty surrounding climate sensitivity, and ‘it’s not obvious why theirs should be much better than others’.
‘So while I do find those emergent constraints promising, and I hope we will be able to narrow the range eventually, there is a danger of finding spurious and not robust correlations – the result being that error bars are too small,’ he added.
Prof. Cox admits that his group’s results will probably not be the last word, but he is hopeful that they can move the science of climate uncertainty forwards, beyond the IPCC range.
‘I think there’s good reason to believe climate scientists are now ready to reduce the long-standing uncertainty in ECS (equilibrium climate sensitivity). It is high-time that we did that,’ he said.
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The study: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25450
Equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) remains one of the most important unknowns in climate change science. ECS is defined as the global mean warming that would occur if the atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration were instantly doubled and the climate were then brought to equilibrium with that new level of CO2. Despite its rather idealized definition, ECS has continuing relevance for international climate change agreements, which are often framed in terms of stabilization of global warming relative to the pre-industrial climate. However, the ‘likely’ range of ECS as stated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has remained at 1.5–4.5 degrees Celsius for more than 25 years1. The possibility of a value of ECS towards the upper end of this range reduces the feasibility of avoiding 2 degrees Celsius of global warming, as required by the Paris Agreement. Here we present a new emergent constraint on ECS that yields a central estimate of 2.8 degrees Celsius with 66 per cent confidence limits (equivalent to the IPCC ‘likely’ range) of 2.2–3.4 degrees Celsius. Our approach is to focus on the variability of temperature about long-term historical warming, rather than on the warming trend itself. We use an ensemble of climate models to define an emergent relationship2between ECS and a theoretically informed metric of global temperature variability. This metric of variability can also be calculated from observational records of global warming3, which enables tighter constraints to be placed on ECS, reducing the probability of ECS being less than 1.5 degrees Celsius to less than 3 per cent, and the probability of ECS exceeding 4.5 degrees Celsius to less than 1 per cent.
via Watts Up With That?
March 16, 2018 at 02:52PM
Iowa Climate Science Education 
How can a “settled science” have uncertainty?
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Let’s start with CO2, why not! If CO2 increases, as they claim, so which of the other gasses in the atmosphere are reduced or replaced? the total atmosphere as we know it, contains a wide variety of gasses making up 100% of the total atmosphere. So if CO2 increases or doubles, which gas is reduced to a lesser amount? I hear nobody coming up with an argument about that. We all seem to think that it OK to go over 100%!? Furthermore (I just discovered this word) CO2 is heavier then air, so that being the case most of it is around ground level (the highest density that is) that is good for us and good for plants and tree’s. If it was up in the stratosphere it would be of no concern to anybody and totally useless. So talking about the increase of CO2 is, as far as I am concerned, a total load of, you know what! CO2 can be up to 100 times of what it is now and it would do this planet the world of good and it would do you no harm at all. Also CO2 is a cooling gas because of it’s inherent properties, so how is it possible that a cooling gas can be attributed to the increase in temperature of this planet? Does anybody know the incredibly small amount of CO2 in our atmosphere? Does anybody knows that if there was no CO2 you would not be able to take your next breath? Still want to get rid of CO2 do you?!
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Reblogged this on Rangitikei Enviromental Health Watch.
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