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Overestimate of committed warming

Nature volume 547, pages E16–E17 (2017)Cite this article

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Arising from C. W. Snyder Nature 538, 226–228 (2016); doi:10.1038/nature19798

Palaeoclimate variations are an essential component in constraining future projections of climate change as a function of increasing abundances of anthropogenic greenhouse gases1. The Earth system sensitivity (ESS) describes the multi-millennial response of Earth (in terms of the change in global-mean temperature) to a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentrations. A recent study2 used a correlation of inferred temperatures and radiative forcing from greenhouse gases over the past 800,000 years3 to estimate that the ESS from present-day CO2 concentrations is about 9 °C and to imply a long-term commitment of 3–7 °C even if greenhouse gas concentrations remain at present-day levels. However, we demonstrate that the methodology of ref. 2 does not reliably estimate the ESS in the presence of orbital forcing of ice-age cycles and therefore conclude that the inferred2 present-day committed warming is considerably overestimated. There is a Reply to this Comment by Snyder, C. W. Nature 547, 10.1038/nature22804 (2017).

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Figure 1: Glacial–interglacial cycles in a simple model with varying Earth system sensitivity.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York, 10025, New York, USA

    Gavin A. Schmidt & Kate Marvel

  2. Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, 92093, California, USA

    Jeff Severinghaus, Ralph F. Keeling & Margaret Leinen

  3. Atmosphere and Ocean Research Institute, University of Tokyo, Kashiwa, Japan

    Ayako Abe-Ouchi

  4. Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, Yokohama 236-0001, Japan

    Ayako Abe-Ouchi

  5. Department of Geosciences, Earth and Environmental Systems Institute, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, 16802, USA

    Richard B. Alley

  6. Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University, Palisades, New York, 10964, New York, USA

    Wallace Broecker

  7. College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences, Oregon State University, Corvallis, 97331, Oregon, USA

    Ed Brook

  8. CSIRO Climate Science Centre, Aspendale, Victoria, Australia

    David Etheridge

  9. National Institute for Polar Research, Tachikawa, Tokyo 190-8518, Japan

    Kenji Kawamura

  10. Department of Polar Science, SOKENDAI (The Graduate University for Advanced Studies), Tachikawa, 190-8518, Tokyo, Japan

    Kenji Kawamura

  11. Institute of Biogeosciences, Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, Yokosuka, 237-0061, Japan

    Kenji Kawamura

  12. Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics, Columbia University, New York, 10025, New York, USA

    Kate Marvel

  13. Climate and Environmental Physics, Physics Institute, University of Bern, Sidlerstrasse 5, CH-3012 Bern, Switzerland

    Thomas F. Stocker

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  1. Gavin A. Schmidt
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Contributions

G.A.S. and J.S. jointly conceived this Comment, G.A.S. and K.M. developed the simple model, and all authors contributed equally to the writing.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Gavin A. Schmidt.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

This file contains Supplementary Text, Supplementary Figure 1, Supplementary Table 1 and a Supplementary Reference (PDF 1204 kb)

Supplementary Data

This zipped file contains the simple model code and the Python notebook. (ZIP 72 kb)

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Schmidt, G., Severinghaus, J., Abe-Ouchi, A. et al. Overestimate of committed warming. Nature 547, E16–E17 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature22803

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