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Climate projection

Testing climate assumptions

Nature Climate Change volume 4, pages 248–249 (2014)Cite this article

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Studies often assume that climate is equally sensitive to emissions of warming greenhouse gases and cooling sulphate aerosols. Now, research illustrates that this is not true in models and that without this assumption recent assessments would have produced higher estimates of future temperatures.

How bad can it be? When discussing anthropogenic climate change this question stimulates heated debate — in the scientific literature as much as anywhere else. It is an important question for climate policy and climate economics, but at its heart it is a question of climate physics. Partly as an attempt to provide a generic answer, substantial research efforts are directed towards quantifying the sensitivity of the earth's climate to increasing greenhouse gases. Yet recent studies have painted conflicting pictures. Some conclude that the climate is unlikely to be highly sensitive1,2 whereas others conclude that it is unlikely to have a low sensitivity3,4. Which are right? Writing in Nature Climate Change, Drew Shindell reports5 that removing a key simplifying assumption would have led some recent studies to conclude that climate is more sensitive than they did.

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Figure 1: The geographical distribution of aerosols.

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  1. David Stainforth is at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, London School of Economics, London WC2A 2AE, UK,

    David A. Stainforth

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  1. David A. Stainforth
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Correspondence to David A. Stainforth.

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Stainforth, D. Testing climate assumptions. Nature Clim Change 4, 248–249 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2172

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