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On the generation and interpretation of probabilistic estimates of climate sensitivity.
- Source :
- Climatic Change; Feb2011, Vol. 104 Issue 3/4, p423-436, 14p, 1 Chart, 2 Graphs
- Publication Year :
- 2011
-
Abstract
- The equilibrium climate response to anthropogenic forcing has long been one of the dominant, and therefore most intensively studied, uncertainties in predicting future climate change. As a result, many probabilistic estimates of the climate sensitivity ( S) have been presented. In recent years, most of them have assigned significant probability to extremely high sensitivity, such as P( S > 6 C) > 5%. In this paper, we investigate some of the assumptions underlying these estimates. We show that the popular choice of a uniform prior has unacceptable properties and cannot be reasonably considered to generate meaningful and usable results. When instead reasonable assumptions are made, much greater confidence in a moderate value for S is easily justified, with an upper 95% probability limit for S easily shown to lie close to 4°C, and certainly well below 6°C. These results also impact strongly on projected economic losses due to climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
Details
- Language :
- English
- ISSN :
- 01650009
- Volume :
- 104
- Issue :
- 3/4
- Database :
- Complementary Index
- Journal :
- Climatic Change
- Publication Type :
- Academic Journal
- Accession number :
- 57360829
- Full Text :
- https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-009-9715-y