On the generation and interpretation of probabilistic estimates of climate sensitivity |
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| Authors: | J D Annan J C Hargreaves |
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| Institution: | 1. Research Institute for Global Change, Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, 3173-25 Showa-machi Kanazawa-ku, Yokohama, Kanagawa, 236-0001, Japan
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| 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?>?6C)?>?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. |
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