2022/10/21 by Haozhe He, Ryan J. Kramer, He, Haozhe +5 · 1 citation
Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Environmental Science · #Atmospheric and Environmental Gas Dynamics #Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics (physics.ao-ph) #Climate Change Policy and Economics #Climate variability and models #FOS: Physical sciences
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2210.12244
openalex publication_date 2022/10/21 · openalex created_date 2022/10/31 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
When evaluating the effect of CO2 changes on the earth's climate, it is widely assumed that instantaneous radiative forcing from a doubling of a given CO2 concentration (IRF2xCO2) is constant and that variances in climate sensitivity arise from differences in radiative feedbacks, or a dependence of these feedbacks on the climatological base-state. In this paper, we show that the IRF2xCO2 is not constant, but also depends on the climatological base-state, increasing by ~25% for every doubling of CO2, and has increased by ~10% since the pre-industrial era primarily due to stratospheric cooling, implying a proportionate increase in climate sensitivity. This base-state dependence also explains about half of the inter-model spread in IRF2xCO2, a problem that has persisted among climate models for nearly three decades.