Energy budget constraints on historical radiative forcing

Timothy Andrews () and Piers M. Forster
Additional contact information
Timothy Andrews: Met Office Hadley Centre
Piers M. Forster: University of Leeds

Nature Climate Change, 2020, vol. 10, issue 4, 313-316

Abstract: Abstract Radiative forcing is a fundamental quantity for understanding anthropogenic and natural drivers of past and future climate change1, yet significant uncertainty remains in our quantification of radiative forcing and its model representation2–4. Here we use instrumental measurements of historical global mean surface temperature change and Earth’s total heat uptake, alongside estimates of the Earth’s radiative response, to provide a top-down energy budget constraint on historical (1861–1880 to near-present) effective radiative forcing of 2.3 W m−2 (1.7–3.0W m−2; 5–95% confidence interval). This represents a near 40% reduction in the 5–95% uncertainty range assessed by the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report2. Although precise estimates of effective radiative forcing in models do not widely exist, our results suggest that the effective radiative forcing may be too small in as many as one-third of climate models in the fifth phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project. Improving model representation of radiative forcing should be a priority for modelling centres. This will reduce uncertainties in climate projections that have persisted for decades4,5.

Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-020-0696-1 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcli:v:10:y:2020:i:4:d:10.1038_s41558-020-0696-1

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/nclimate/

DOI: 10.1038/s41558-020-0696-1

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Climate Change is currently edited by Bronwyn Wake

More articles in Nature Climate Change from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().