I
think volcanic forcing is on a warming trend, because volcanic activity is weighted towards the beginning of the 30 year period.
Therefore by the same logic, B scenario temperatures should have come close to those of A from ~ 2003 onwards, and until the
next volcanic forcing.
You end up with NH ocean being 3C warmer than SH oceans plus «super recovery»
from volcanic forcing in the NH, but that is only a fraction of the ocean area.
The sensitivity, shown in Supplementary Table 6, of TCR estimation using the difference method to choice of base period when using a 2000 — 09 final period is explicable primarily by poor matching of
volcanic forcing when base periods other than 1861 — 80 are used.
Constraining ECS from the observed responses to individual volcanic eruptions is difficult because the response to short -
term volcanic forcing is strongly nonlinear in ECS, yielding only slightly enhanced peak responses and substantially extended response times for very high sensitivities (Frame et al., 2005; Wigley et al., 2005a).
Your value is however an instantaneous number, while you'd indispensably be required to use an integrated value which reflects the counterbalancing long - term effects of the strong
volcanic forcing pulses (which remain in the system, yet unaccounted in your analysis).
Our analyses suggest, rather, that
volcanic forcing drives the coupled ocean - atmosphere system more subtly towards a state in which multi-year El Niño - like conditions are favoured, followed by a weaker rebound into a La Niña - like state.»
Since the data show southern Greenland temperatures over the last 150 years, it would be most useful to look at model simulations for exactly that period, run with the best guesses for CO2, solar and
volcanic forcing etc..
Annually - resolved ice core and tree - ring chronologies provide opportunities for understanding
past volcanic forcing and the consequent climatic effects and impacts on human populations.
The Hansen paper is an extreme case, combining a
strong volcanic forcing with a model with high sensitivity, and so probably provides an upper bound for the volcanic influence on temperature.
It is well known that
volcanic forcing appears to have an efficacy materially below one, at least when used in simple climate models: see the discussion in Lewis and Curry 2014.
Thus the RCP scenarios assume the long - term
average volcanic forcing in the future, and they hold it constant, which is reasonable because as you say we can't predict the next eruption.