<
https://theconversation.com/will-the-earth-warm-by-2-c-or-5-5-c-either-way-its-bad-and-trying-to-narrow-it-down-may-be-a-distraction-229497>
"Climate change is usually discussed in terms of rising temperatures.
But scientists often use a different measure, known as “equilibrium climate
sensitivity”. This is defined as the global mean warming caused by a doubling
of pre-industrial carbon dioxide (CO₂) levels in the atmosphere.
We use this measure to describe the range of potential temperature increases on
longer timescales, and to compare how well climate models reproduce observed
warming.
But the predicted range of rising temperature has remained stubbornly wide,
somewhere between 2°C and 5.5°C of warming, as assessed in several generations
of reports issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This is
despite concerted efforts to narrow it down.
Measuring long-term climate sensitivity is central to future predictions, but
we are already seeing the effects of warming across the world with extremes in
weather, even at the low end of the range. We argue efforts to boil down
Earth’s response to climate change to one number may be unhelpful.
The continued uncertainty could be seen as a failure of climate models to
converge on the correct value. Using equilibrium climate sensitivity as a
metric for “precisely” predicting the amount of warming expected from a given
amount of greenhouse gases is, at best, ambiguous."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
