Slow climate mode reconciles historical and model-based estimates of climate sensitivity

Science Advances

Volumn 3, Issue 7, 2017, Pages

  Proistosescu, Cristian ^a   Huybers, Peter J ^a  

^a HARVARD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

CLIMATE CHANGE;

BAYESIAN METHODOLOGY; CLIMATE SENSITIVITY; CREDIBLE INTERVAL; HISTORICAL OBSERVATION; HISTORICAL RECORDS; INTERANNUAL; INTERGOVERNMENTAL PANEL ON CLIMATE CHANGES; MODEL-BASED OPC;

CLIMATE MODELS;

ARTICLE; CLIMATE CHANGE; CONSENSUS; RADIATIVE FORCING; WARMING;

EID: 85031929344     PISSN: None     EISSN: 23752548     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.1602821     Document Type: Review

References (52)

1. G. Flato, J. Marotze, B. Abiodun, P. Braconnot, S. C. Chou, W. Collins, P. Cox, F. Driouech, S. Emori, V. Eyring, C. Forest, P. Gleckler, E. Guilyardi, C. Jakob, V. Kattsov, C. Reason, M. Rummukainen, Evaluation of climate models, in Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, T. F. Stocker, D. Qin, G.-K. Plattner, M. Tignor, S. K. Allen, J. Boschung, A. Nauels, Y. Xia, V. Bex, P. M. Midgley, Eds. (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2013), chap. 9, pp. 741-866.
2. PALAEOSENS Project Members, Making sense of palaeoclimate sensitivity. Nature 491, 683-691 (2012).
3. J. M. Gregory, R. J. Stouffer, S. C. B. Raper, P. A. Stott, N. A. Rayner, An observationally based estimate of the climate sensitivity. J. Climate 15, 3117 (2002).
4. G. H. Roe, K. C. Armour, How sensitive is climate sensitivity? Geophys. Res. Lett. 38, L14708 (2011).
5. A. Otto, F. E. L. Otto, O. Boucher, J. Church, G. Hegerl, P. M. Forster, N. P. Gillett, J. Gregory, G. C. Johnson, R. Knutti, N. Lewis, U. Lohmann, J. Marotzke, G. Myhre, D. Shindell, B. Stevens, M. R. Allen, Energy budget constraints on climate response. Nat. Geosci. 6, 415-416 (2013).
6. T. Masters, Observational estimate of climate sensitivity from changes in the rate of ocean heat uptake and comparison to CMIP5 models. Climate Dynam. 42, 2173-2181 (2014).
7. N. Lewis, J. A. Curry, The implications for climate sensitivity of AR5 forcing and heat uptake estimates. Climate Dynam. 45, 1009-1023 (2015).
8. P. M. Forster, Inference of climate sensitivity from analysis of Earth's energy budget. Annu. Rev. Earth Planet. Sci. 44, 85-106 (2016).
9. K. von Schuckmann, M. D. Palmer, K. E. Trenberth, A. Cazenave, D. Chambers, N. Champollion, J. Hansen, S. A. Josey, N. Loeb, P.-P. Mathieu, B. Meyssignac, M. Wild, An imperative to monitor Earth's energy imbalance. Nat. Clim. Change 6, 138-144 (2016).
10. J. M. Gregory, W. J. Ingram, M. A. Palmer, G. S. Jones, P. A. Stott, R. B. Thorpe, J. A. Lowe, T. C. Johns, K. D. Williams, A new method for diagnosing radiative forcing and climate sensitivity. Geophys. Res. Lett. 31, L03205 (2004).
11. J. Murphy, Transient response of the Hadley Centre coupled ocean-atmosphere model to increasing carbon dioxide. Part III: Analysis of global-mean response using simple models. J. Climate 8, 496-514 (1995).
12. C. A. Senior, J. F. B. Mitchell, The time-dependence of climate sensitivity. Geophys. Res. Lett. 27, 2685-2688 (2000).
13. M. Winton, K. Takahashi, I. M. Held, Importance of ocean heat uptake efficacy to transient climate change. J. Climate 23, 2333-2344 (2010).
14. I. M. Held, M. Winton, K. Takahashi, T. Delworth, F. Zeng, G. K. Vallis, Probing the fast and slow components of global warming by returning abruptly to preindustrial forcing. J. Climate 23, 2418-2427 (2010).
15. C. M. Bitz, K. M. Shell, P. R. Gent, D. A. Bailey, G. Danabasoglu, K. C. Armour, M. M. Holland, J. T. Kiehl, Climate sensitivity of the community climate system model, version 4. J. Climate 25, 3053-3070 (2012).
16. K. C. Armour, C. M. Bitz, G. H. Roe, Time-varying climate sensitivity from regional feedbacks. J. Climate 26, 4518-4534 (2013).
17. T. Andrews, J. M. Gregory, M. J. Webb, The dependence of radiative forcing and feedback on evolving patterns of surface temperature change in climate models. J. Climate 28, 1630-1648 (2015).
18. J. M. Gregory, T. Andrews, Variation in climate sensitivity and feedback parameters during the historical period. Geophys. Res. Lett. 43, 3911-3920 (2016).
19. K. C. Armour, Projection and prediction: Climate sensitivity on the rise. Nat. Clim. Change 6, 896-897 (2016).
20. K. E. Taylor, R. J. Stouffer, G. A. Meehl, An overview of CMIP5 and the experiment design. Bull. Am. Meteorol. Soc. 93, 485-498 (2012).
21. C. Zhou, M. D. Zelinka, S. A. Klein, Impact of decadal cloud variations on the Earth's energy budget. Nat. Geosci. 9, 871-874 (2016).
22. M. A. A. Rugenstein, J. M. Gregory, N. Schaller, J. Sedlácek, R. Knutti, Multiannual ocean-atmosphere adjustments to radiative forcing. J. Climate 29, 5643-5659 (2016).
23. O. Geoffroy, D. Saint-Martin, D. J. L. Olivié, A. Voldoire, G. Bellon, S. Tytéca, Transient climate response in a two-layer energy-balance model. Part I: Analytical solution and parameter calibration using CMIP5 AOGCM experiments. J. Climate 26, 1841-1857 (2013).
24. B. E. J. Rose, K. C. Armour, D. S. Battisti, N. Feldl, D. D. B. Koll, The dependence of transient climate sensitivity and radiative feedbacks on the spatial pattern of ocean heat uptake. Geophys. Res. Lett. 41, 1071-1078 (2014).
25. K. Caldeira, N. P. Myhrvold, Projections of the pace of warming following an abrupt increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration. Environ. Res. Lett. 8, 034039 (2013).
26. 2 forcing in atmosphere-ocean general circulation models. Clim. Change 140, 287-305 (2017).
27. R. M. MacKay, M. K. W. Ko, Normal modes and the transient response of the climate system. Geophys. Res. Lett. 24, 559-562 (1997).
28. R. Knutti, M. A. A. Rugenstein, Feedbacks, climate sensitivity and the limits of linear models. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. 373, 20150146 (2015).
29. Supplementary Materials are provided in the online version of this paper.
30. A. Jarvis, The magnitudes and timescales of global mean surface temperature feedbacks in climate models. Earth Syst. Dynam. 2, 213-221 (2011).
31. E.-S. Chung, B. J. Soden, An assessment of direct radiative forcing, radiative adjustments, and radiative feedbacks in coupled ocean-atmosphere models. J. Climate 28, 4152-4170 (2015).
32. P. M. Forster, T. Richardson, A. C. Maycock, C. J. Smith, B. H. Samset, G. Myhre, T. Andrews, R. Pincus, M. Schulz, Recommendations for diagnosing effective radiative forcing from climate models for CMIP6. J. Geophys. Res. Atmos. 121, 12460-12475 (2016).
33. G. H. Roe, M. B. Baker, Why is climate sensitivity so unpredictable? Science 318, 629-632 (2007).
34. T. Andrews, J. M. Gregory, M. J. Webb, K. E. Taylor, Forcing, feedbacks and climate sensitivity in CMIP5 coupled atmosphere-ocean climate models. Geophys. Res. Lett. 39, L09712 (2012).
35. P. M. Forster, T. Andrews, P. Good, J. M. Gregory, L. S. Jackson, M. Zelinka, Evaluating adjusted forcing and model spread for historical and future scenarios in the CMIP5 generation of climate models. J. Geophys. Res. Atmos. 118, 1139-1150 (2013).
36. G. Myhre, D. Shindell, F.-M. Bréon, W. Collins, J. Fuglestvedt, J. Huang, D. Koch, J.-F. Lamarque, D. Lee, B. Mendoza, T. Nakajima, A. Robock, G. Stephens, T. Takemura, H. Zhang, Anthropogenic and natural radiative forcing, in Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: Anthropogenic and Natural Radiative Forcing, T. F. Stocker, D. Qin, G.-K. Plattner, M. Tignor, S. K. Allen, J. Boschung, A. Nauels, Y. Xia, V. Bex, P. M. Midgley, Eds. (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2013), chap. 8, pp. 659-740.
37. J. Hansen, G. Russell, A. Lacis, I. Fung, D. Rind, P. Stone, Climate response times: Dependence on climate sensitivity and ocean mixing. Science 229, 857-859 (1985).
38. M. B. Baker, G. H. Roe, The shape of things to come: Why is climate change so predictable? J. Climate 22, 4574 (2009).
39. K. C. Armour, J. Marshall, J. R. Scott, A. Donohoe, E. R. Newsom, Southern Ocean warming delayed by circumpolar upwelling and equatorward transport. Nat. Geosci. 9, 549-554 (2016).
40. J. R. Kummer, A. E. Dessler, The impact of forcing efficacy on the equilibrium climate sensitivity. Geophys. Res. Lett. 41, 3565-3568 (2014).
41. K. Marvel, G. A. Schmidt, R. L. Miller, L. S. Nazarenko, Implications for climate sensitivity from the response to individual forcings. Nat. Clim. Change 6, 386-389 (2016).
42. M. Richardson, K. Cowtan, E. Hawkins, M. B. Stolpe, Reconciled climate response estimates from climate models and the energy budget of Earth. Nat. Clim. Change 6, 931-935 (2016).
43. M. E. Mann, S. Rahmstorf, B. A. Steinman, M. Tingley, S. K. Miller, The likelihood of recent record warmth. Sci. Rep. 6, 19831 (2016).
44. G. A. Meehl, W. M. Washington, W. D. Collins, J. M. Arblaster, A. Hu, L. E. Buja, W. G. Strand, H. Teng, How much more global warming and sea level rise? Science 307, 1769-1772 (2005).
45. T. M. L. Wigley, The climate change commitment. Science 307, 1766-1769 (2005).
46. C. Proistosescu, A. Rhines, P. Huybers, Identification and interpretation of nonnormality in atmospheric time series. Geophys. Res. Lett. 43, 5425-5434 (2016).
47. B. Carpenter, A. Gelman, M. D. Hoffman, D. Lee, B. Goodrich, M. Betancourt, M. A. Brubaker, J. Guo, P. Li, A. Riddell, Stan: A probabilistic programming language. J. Stat. Softw. 76, 10.18637/jss.v076.i01 (2016).
48. M. D. Hoffman, A. Gelman, The No-U-turn sampler: Adaptively setting path lengths in Hamiltonian Monte Carlo. J. Mach. Learn. Res. 15, 1593-1623 (2014).
49. 2 concentrations. Nat. Clim. Change 5, 138-142 (2015).
50. C. P. Morice, J. J. Kennedy, N. A. Rayner, P. D. Jones, Quantifying uncertainties in global and regional temperature change using an ensemble of observational estimates: The HadCRUT4 data set. J. Geophys. Res. 117, D08101 (2012).
51. M. D. Greenberg, Advanced Engineering Mathematics (Prentice-Hall, 1988).
52. J. Hansen, M. Sato, R. Ruedy, L. Nazarenko, A. Lacis, G. A. Schmidt, G. Russell, I. Aleinov, M. Bauer, S. Bauer, N. Bell, B. Cairns, V. Canuto, M. Chandler, Y. Cheng, A. Del Genio, G. Faluvegi, E. Fleming, A. Friend, T. Hall, C. Jackman, M. Kelley, N. Kiang, D. Koch, J. Lean, J. Lerner, K. Lo, S. Menon, R. Miller, P. Minnis, T. Novakov, V. Oinas, J. Perlwitz, J. Perlwitz, D. Rind, A. Romanou, D. Shindell, P. Stone, S. Sun, N. Tausnev, D. Thresher, B. Wielicki, T. Wong, M. Yao, S. Zhang, Efficacy of climate forcings. J. Geophys. Res. 110, D18104 (2005).