Sentences with phrase «relative uncertainty in forcing»

It would clearly be inappropriate to regress surface temperature changes on forcing changes for the reasons you give, since relative uncertainty in forcing changes is much larger than that in temperature changes.

Not exact matches

Indeed, the main quandary faced by climate scientists is how to estimate climate sensitivity from the Little Ice Age or Medieval Warm Period, at all, given the relative small forcings over the past 1000 years, and the substantial uncertainties in both the forcings and the temperature changes.

This figure gives a sense of the wide uncertainty distribution in the total anthropogenic forcing relative to just the GHG forcing (which also includes methane, N2O, etc) which is a prime reason the instrumental record doesn't inherently give good constraints on sensitivity.

Indeed, the main quandary faced by climate scientists is how to estimate climate sensitivity from the Little Ice Age or Medieval Warm Period, at all, given the relative small forcings over the past 1000 years, and the substantial uncertainties in both the forcings and the temperature changes.

There is the possibility that the relative importance of CO2 as a climate forcer increases as it transcends the other controllers of Earth's energy balance (some of which may be masked more in ice age studies — like uncertainties around the amount of ice age aerosol climate forcing, ice age thermohaline stability and as always insolation differences throughout the Pleistocene).

The first step in being truly objective is to openly acknowledge the large degree of uncertainty which exists today on the relative importance of natural and anthropogenic climate forcing components and, hence, on the validity of any long - term projections of future impact of anthropogenic factors.

Based on an extensive literature review, we suggest that (1) climate warming occurs with great uncertainty in the magnitude of the temperature increase; (2) both human activities and natural forces contribute to climate change, but their relative contributions are difficult to quantify; and (3) the dominant role of the increase in the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases (including CO2) in the global warming claimed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is questioned by the scientific communities because of large uncertainties in the mechanisms of natural factors and anthropogenic activities and in the sources of the increased atmospheric CO2 concentration.

Pleistocene climate oscillations yield a fast - feedback climate sensitivity of 3 ± 1 °C for a 4 W m − 2 CO2 forcing if Holocene warming relative to the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) is used as calibration, but the error (uncertainty) is substantial and partly subjective because of poorly defined LGM global temperature and possible human influences in the Holocene.