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Topic: Climate sensitivity

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	Climate sensitivity - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		In practice, the evaluation of the equilibrium climate sensitivity from models requires very long simulations with coupled global climate models, or it may be deduced from observations.
		Schlesinger and Andronova (using simple climate models) found that it could lie between 1 and 10 °C, with a 54 percent likelihood that the climate sensitivity lies outside the IPCC range [3].
		Climate sensitivity is not the same as the expected climate change at, say 2100: the TAR reports this to be an increase of 1.4 to 5.8 °C over 1990.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Climate_sensitivity (651 words)

	Encyclopedia :: encyclopedia : Climate change
		In recent usage, especially in the context of environmental policy, the term "climate change" is often used to refer only to the ongoing changes in modern climate, including the average rise in surface temperature known as global warming.
		Many climate states, including the Pacific decadal oscillation, the North Atlantic oscillation, and the Arctic oscillation, have been recognized as modes within the climate system, owing their existence at least in part, to different ways that heat can be stored in the oceans and move between different reservoirs.
		In their impact on climate, orbital variations are in some sense an extension of solar variability, because slight variations in the Earth's orbit lead to changes in the distribution and abundance of sunlight reaching the Earth surface.
	www.hallencyclopedia.com /Climate_change (2051 words)

	Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-09-09)
		The “transient climate response”, TCR, is the temperature change at the time of CO doubling and the “equilibrium climate sensitivity”, T2x, is the temperature change after the system has reached a new equilibrium for doubled CO, i.e., after the “additional warming commitment” has been realised.
		Although the definition of equilibrium climate sensitivity is straightforward, it applies to the special case of equilibrium climate change for doubled CO and requires very long simulations to evaluate with a coupled model.
		The effective climate sensitivity is a measure of the strength of the feedbacks at a particular time and it may vary with forcing history and climate state.
	www.grida.no /climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/345.htm (651 words)

	IPCC Workshop on Climate Sensitivity, Paris, France, 26-29 July 2004
		Climate sensitivity is broadly defined as the change in global mean temperature produced by a given radiative forcing of the climate system.
		Climate sensitivity has played a central role throughout the history of IPCC in interpretation of model outputs, in evaluation of future climate changes expected from various scenarios, and it is closely linked to attribution of currently observed climate changes.
		Within international climate modeling projects, the development of new models together with both formal and informal model intercomparison exercises that are currently taking place by various groups suggest that a renewed focus on the reasons for different model estimates of climate sensitivity may be particularly useful at this time.
	www.climatescience.gov /Library/ipcc/workshop26-29july2004.htm (1299 words)

	RealClimate » Climate sensitivity and aerosol forcings
		This gives a range of climate sensitivity that is much larger than the IPCC range (1.5 to 4.5 deg C for a doubling of CO), and which therefore translates to wider bounds on possible climate projections both at the high end and low end.
		Climate sensitivity is indeed uncertain, but the classic IPCC range (in my opinion) is still a good 'likely' estimate.
		Any suggestion that climate sensitivities are significantly larger (or much smaller) need to be accompanied by an explantion of how forcings and temperature response at the peak of the last ice age (for instance) can be dealt with or explained away.
	www.realclimate.org /index.php?p=168#more-168 (12127 words)

	Climate sensitivity may be higher than many think, researchers say
		"The size and impacts of anthropogenically induced climate change strongly depend on the climate sensitivity – the change in equilibrium surface warming due to a doubling of the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere," said Michael Schlesinger, a UI atmospheric scientist.
		If the climate sensitivity is less than 1.5 degrees Centigrade, then climate change may not be a serious problem, Schlesinger said.
		The researchers found that, as a result of natural variability and uncertainty in the radiative forcing, the climate sensitivity could lie between 1 and 10 degrees Centigrade.
	www.news.uiuc.edu /scitips/01/06globewarm.html (508 words)

	RealClimate » Climate sensitivity: Plus ça change…
		We have discussed climate sensitivity frequently in previous posts and we have often referred to the constraints on its range that can be derived from paleo-climates, particularly the last glacial maximum (LGM).
		In international assessments of the climate issue, the consensus-estimate of 1.5 degrees C to 4.5 degrees C for climate sensitivity has remained unchanged for two decades.
		If the high climate sensitivity effect of the ice ages is a result of the hysteresis effect as proposed by Oerlemans and Van den Dool (1978), then the present observed sensitivity of 1K/2xCO2 cannot be much higher.
	www.realclimate.org /index.php?p=274 (18558 words)

	Climate Change and Greenhouse Gases
		Climate model calculations indicate that to good approximation the global warming influence of the several greenhouse gases is equal for equal forcing [Wang et al., 1991, 1992], lending support to the utility of the concept of climate forcing and response.
		In principle, empirical inferences of climate sensitivity would be of great value, but development of such inferences is confounded by the natural variability of the climate system [Santer et al., 1996], by local or regional effects that can be different from the global effects, and by the simultaneous working of multiple transient forcings and responses.
		The complexity of the long-term coupling of CO and climate is enhanced by the extent to which climate variability is hypothesized to have influenced past atmospheric CO concentrations.
	www.agu.org /eos_elec/99148e.html (7729 words)

	ScienceDaily: Adaptive-Decision Strategy Offsets Uncertainties In Climate Sensitivity (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-09-09)
		By objectively estimating the likelihood of the climate sensitivity having any particular value that is, by its probability distribution the crafting of robust, adaptive climate-change policy could be greatly facilitated, Schlesinger said.
		Climate Sensitivity May Be Higher Than Many Think, Researchers Say (June 5, 2001) -- In the wake of mounting evidence of global warming, decision-makers are wrestling with related policy issues.
		Climate Change: 50 Years Past And Possible Futures (September 24, 2002) -- A new NASA-funded study used a computer climate model to simulate the last 50 years of climate changes, projects warming over the next 50 years regardless of whether or not nations curb their...
	www.sciencedaily.com /releases/2001/10/011003064020.htm (1869 words)

	Climate Change \| Climate Sensitivity
		The degree to which feedback processes influence the final climatic response is a measure of the sensitivity of the climate system.
		, the climate sensitivity, which is determined by the net affect of the climate feedback processes.
		Despite extensive climate modelling over the last 2 decades to understand the problem of contemporary global warming (see chapter 6), it is this parameter that is proving hard to define numerically.
	www.global-climate-change.org.uk /2-8.php (689 words)

	ScienceDaily: Climate Sensitivity May Be Higher Than Many Think, Researchers Say
		Adaptive-Decision Strategy Offsets Uncertainties In Climate Sensitivity (October 3, 2001) -- The uncertainty of climate change because of global warming is much greater than previously thought, and as a result, policy-makers should adopt a robust, adaptive-decision strategy to cope with...
		Climate model -- Climate models use quantitative methods to simulate the interactions of the atmosphere, oceans, land surface, and ice.
		Climate -- The climate is the weather averaged over a long period of time.
	www.sciencedaily.com /releases/2001/06/010605075634.htm (1778 words)

	Climate: The Sensitivity Question
		The measurement, called climate sensitivity, indicates how surface temperatures respond depending on how much greenhouse gas is pumped into the atmosphere by humans.
		For example, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's third assessment report, published in 2001, concluded climate sensitivity was between 2.7 degrees and 8.1 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees and 4.5 degrees Celsius).
		Climate is a weekly series examining the potential human impact on global climate change, by veteran environmental reporter Dan Whipple.
	www.spacedaily.com /news/oped-05ze.html (1081 words)

	SCOPE 27 - Climate Impact Assessment, Chapter 4, Identifying Climate Sensitivity
		Households may be sensitive in terms of income and expenditures for food, housing, transportation, clothing and medical care (Crocker et al., 1975) and at the individual level, nutrition (Escudero, Chapter 10, this volume) and migration (Warrick, 1980) may be major indicators of climate sensitivity.
		While the sensitivities shown in Table 4.4 should be regarded as tentative, they do give an indication of how the GNP of an industrialized nation may be affected by widespread anomalous weather conditions.
		Both factors are sensitive to an adequate supply of water at hydroelectric stations during the critical summer and autumn periods, and the severity of the winter.
	www.icsu-scope.org /downloadpubs/scope27/chapter04.html (3914 words)

	James' Empty Blog: Climate sensitivity is 3C (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-09-09)
		Remember that climate sensitivity is generally defined as the equilibrium globally-averaged surface temperature rise for a doubled concentration of atmospheric CO - so it's a simple benchmark to describe the sensitivity of the global climate to the sort of perturbation we are imposing.
		If climate sensitivity is very low, we would expect a modest short-term cooling, but if sensitivity is high, a greater cooling is expected, and it should take longer to recover.
		So all these diverse methods generate pdfs for climate sensitivity that peak at about 3C, but which have a long tail reaching to values as high as 6C or beyond at the 95% confidence level (and some are even worse).
	julesandjames.blogspot.com /2006/03/climate-sensitivity-is-3c.html (2693 words)

	Department of Atmospheric Sciences - Faculty
		Climate change, particularly the role of water and clouds; atmospheric chemistry, including stratospheric ozone depletion; remote sensing; climate change policy.
		Climate analysis, climate and hydrological modeling, satellite remote sensing, mission planning, statistical methods in at mospheric science.
		Variability and predictability of climate on seasonal to millennial timescales; coupled ocean-atmosphere interaction; large-scale dynamics of the atmosphere and the oceans.
	www.met.tamu.edu /personnel/faculty/North/PUBLICATIONS7-04.htm (443 words)

	EdGCM: Climate Modeling for Research and Education - The Last Ice Age - Part I
		MTG Climate used EdGCM to recreate the climatic conditions of 21 thousand years ago, when our planet was at the peak of the last Ice Age (i.e.
		The causes of this thermic fluctuation are today debated, but the theory that receives the most consents is the astronomical one, which has already been discussed in these papers (see the reference at the end of this article).
		Close to Scandinavia, ice reached the maximum thickness of about 3000 meters and it got thinner towards east where it reached the Barents Sea and the peninsula of Kara, while more down south, in the principal alpine valleys the thickness of the ice was about 1800 meters.
	edgcm.columbia.edu /outreach/showcase/21k.html (854 words)

	Energy Citations Database (ECD) - Energy and Energy-Related Bibliographic Citations
		Estimates are made of the effect of changes in tropospheric water vapor on the climate sensitivity to doubled carbon dioxide (CO{sub 2}) using a coarse resolution atmospheric general circulation model coupled to a slab mixed layer ocean.
		The sensitivity of the model to doubled CO{sub 2} is found as the difference between the equilibrium responses for control and doubled CO{sub 2} cases.
		The contribution of water vapor in layers of equal mass to the climate sensitivity varies by about a factor of 2 with height, with the largest contribution coming from layers between 450 and 750 mb, and the smallest from layers above 230 mb.
	www.osti.gov /energycitations/product.biblio.jsp?osti_id=355577 (357 words)

	Empirical determination of Earth's climate sensitivity: Abstract (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-09-09)
		Should Earth experience the forcing of a doubled CO, which may be expected around the middle of this century, a sensitivity at the high end of this range would result in dramatic and severe consequences.
		Present uncertainty in total forcing is so great as to preclude a meaningful empirical estimate of climate sensitivity from the temperature record and forcing over the industrial period.
		Such target uncertainties provide a basis for specification of research required for meaningful empirical determination of Earth's climate sensitivity and/or for evaluation of climate models by their performance over the industrial period.
	www.ecd.bnl.gov /steve/abstracts/Empirical.html (399 words)

	Climate Sensitivity (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-09-09)
		These initial estimates of climate sensitivity are simply computed as the change in temperature between a "control" integration and an increased carbon dioxide.
		There is a control and a double-CO2 run, and the "sensitivity" is calculated at each point by taking the difference in temperature at 900 hPa (not quite the surface, but close enough for me)[png][eps].
		The difference, besides the lower boundary, is that my perturbed climate here was given double preindustrial CO2, i.e., 560 ppmv, instead of 710 ppmv.
	www.atmos.ucla.edu /~brianpm/research/sensitivity.html (209 words)

	GlobalWarming.y2u.co.uk - Global Warming - What you need to know ! (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-09-09)
		Sometimes the term "anthropogenic climate change" is used to indicate the presumption of human influence.
		In the 2001 IPCC report on climate change, the possible changes in cloud cover were highlighted as one of the dominant uncertainties in predicting future climate change.
		Climate models that pass the above tests while only modelling the direct effects of increases in solar activity will have attributed too much of the historical warming to greenhouse gas forcing, and will predict larger increases in temperature in the future.
	globalwarming.y2u.co.uk (3537 words)

	WorldChanging: Another World Is Here: Brand Sensitivity to Climate
		Specifically, as global warming and climate disruption become more widely-recognized public concerns, brands that are linked to climate misbehavior can have their value plummet.
		Such is the conclusion of the UK's Carbon Trust, a government-sponsored initiative to study the social and economic factors related to a need to reduce greenhouse gases.
		The report also weakens, a bit, one of the common refrains among Viridian-type environmentalists: that the energy companies will be the next cigarette companies for the public (and state governments looking to fatten their coffers).
	www.worldchanging.com /archives/003276.html#more (719 words)

	Climate Response Research
		Simulations with NCAR's global climate models CCM2 and CCM3 indicated that climate sensitivity to land surface biophysical changes associated with historical land cover change is of the same order of magnitude as that suggested for elevated greenhouse gases (Chase et al.
		Sensitivity of a general circulation model to global changes in leaf area index.
		Climate experiments with CLIMRAMS include United States, U.S. Great Plains, and Rocky Mountain regional responses to altered regional land use patterns, with a focus on the response of Colorado Front Range montane and alpine climates to historical land use changes in the adjacent Great Plains.
	culter.colorado.edu /~kittel/Area_ClimateResponse.html (775 words)

	Local Climate Sensitivity of the Three Gorges Dam
		Two simulations, control and land use change, were performed for an eight week period (2 April-16 May 1990) to determine the net sensitivity of the local climate around the Three Gorges Dam.
		The analysis indicates that the large reservoir acts as a potential evaporating surface that decreases the surface temperature, cools the lower atmosphere, decreasing upward motion, and increasing sinking air mass.
		This numerical study represents an initial methodology for quantification of the impact of the Three Gorges Dam on the local climate and a more comprehensive, fine-scale set of multi-season simulations with additional observational data is needed for a more complete analysis.
	repositories.cdlib.org /lbnl/LBNL-57135 (238 words)

	Climate Sensitivity Research Lounge (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-09-09)
		The Climate Sensitivity Research Lounge is the main website for the climate sensitivity research group at UCLA run by Professor Alex Hall.
		The primary goal of the group's research is to understand what controls the sensitivity of the climate system to external forcing.
		Additionally, the site has a Climate Sensitivity Publication Exchange where researchers can share the recent climate sensitivity publications with colleagues.
	serc.carleton.edu /resources/614.html (127 words)

	marklynas.org: Climate sensitivity (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-09-09)
		I'd like this site to develop into something of a debating hall about climate change and other related issues, and for that reason it's designed to be fully interactive.
		Climate 'sensitivity' is simply a shorthand term: it means the temperature rise associated with a doubling of pre-industrial levels of CO2, i.e.
		After three days' of worrying scientific papers on the climate, the Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change conference has concluded with a 'steering committee' report summarising the conclusions of the assembled experts: that we're...
	www.marklynas.org /wind/message/678.html (246 words)

	On contrail climate sensitivity
		In equilibrium climate change simulations with a global climate model we estimate the climate sensitivity parameter to contrail cirrus to be 0.43 K/(Wm), only about 60% of the corresponding value for a CO forcing.
		The spatial pattern of the surface temperature response is much smoother than the forcing pattern of contrails with little correlation between both.
		As the thermal inertia of the climate system causes a marked delay of the transient response, only about 30% of the equilibrium surface warming to be expected from some aircraft induced radiative forcing is actually realised for aviation increase rates typical for the 1990s.
	www.agu.org /pubs/crossref/2005/2005GL022580.shtml (235 words)

	PCMDI > Publications > Reviewed Literature
		Boyle, J. S., 1993: Sensitivity of dynamical quantities to horizontal resolution for a climate simulation using the ECMWF (cycle 33) model.
		In Climate Change 1995: The Science of Climate Change, J.T. Houghton, L.G. Meira Filho, B.A. Callander, N. Harris, A. Kattenberg, and K Maskell eds., Cambridge University Press, New York, 572 pp.
		Taylor, K.E., and S.J. Ghan, 1992: An analysis of cloud liquid water feedback and global climate sensitivity in a general circulation model.
	www-pcmdi.llnl.gov /publications/reviewed_literature.php (3045 words)

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