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Decadal global temperature variability increases strongly with climate sensitivity

Nature Climate Change volume 9, pages 598–601 (2019)Cite this article

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Abstract

Climate-related risks are dependent not only on the warming trend from GHGs, but also on the variability about the trend. However, assessment of the impacts of climate change tends to focus on the ultimate level of global warming1, only occasionally on the rate of global warming, and rarely on variability about the trend. Here we show that models that are more sensitive to GHGs emissions (that is, higher equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS)) also have higher temperature variability on timescales of several years to several decades2. Counter-intuitively, high-sensitivity climates, as well as having a higher chance of rapid decadal warming, are also more likely to have had historical ‘hiatus’ periods than lower-sensitivity climates. Cooling or hiatus decades over the historical period, which have been relatively uncommon, are more than twice as likely in a high-ECS world (ECS = 4.5 K) compared with a low-ECS world (ECS = 1.5 K). As ECS also affects the background warming rate under future scenarios with unmitigated anthropogenic forcing, the probability of a hyper-warming decade—over ten times the mean rate of global warming for the twentieth century—is even more sensitive to ECS.

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Fig. 1: Decadal variability in global temperature.
Fig. 2: Emergent relationship between ECS and warming trends.
Fig. 3: Varying window lengths.
Fig. 4: Probability of warming and cooling.

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Data availability

The datasets generated during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Code availability

The Python code used to produce the figures in this paper is available is available via Code Ocean28 at https://doi.org/10.24433/CO.6887733.v1.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the European Research Council ECCLES project, grant agreement number 742472 (F.J.M.M.N. and P.M.C.); the EU Horizon 2020 Research Programme CRESCENDO project, grant agreement number 641816 (P.M.C. and M.S.W.); and the NERC CEH National Capability fund (C.H.). We also acknowledge the World Climate Research Programme’s Working Group on Coupled Modelling, which is responsible for CMIP, and we thank the climate modelling groups (listed in Supplementary Table 1) for producing and making available their model output.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Engineering, Mathematics and Physical Science, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK

    Femke J. M. M. Nijsse, Peter M. Cox & Mark S. Williamson

  2. Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, Wallingford, UK

    Chris Huntingford

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  1. Femke J. M. M. Nijsse
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  2. Peter M. Cox
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  3. Chris Huntingford
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  4. Mark S. Williamson
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Contributions

All authors contributed towards the design of the study and aided in writing the manuscript. F.J.M.M.N. led on the theoretical analysis; C.H. led on the time-series data.

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Correspondence to Femke J. M. M. Nijsse.

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Peer review information: Nature Climate Change thanks Patrick Brown and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary Information

Supplementary Figs. 1–5, Table 1 and references.

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Nijsse, F.J.M.M., Cox, P.M., Huntingford, C. et al. Decadal global temperature variability increases strongly with climate sensitivity. Nat. Clim. Chang. 9, 598–601 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-019-0527-4

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