New study in Science shows climate sensitivity overestimated

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From Oregon State University  some news the team and especially Kevin Trenberth just really don’t want to hear. I covered this on a tip from Dr. Pat Michaels back on Nov 9th titled: Climate sensitivity- lowering the IPCC “fat tail” and now the official press release makes the publication well known. Their estimate is 2.4C for a doubling of CO2, which is still higher than Spencer and others have estimated but significantly lower than IPCC’s projections. A link to the paper follows below.

Figure 3A. Marginal posterior probability distributions for a doubling of CO2, estimated from land 265 and ocean, land only, and ocean only temperature reconstructions using the standard assumptions 266 (1 × dust, 0 × wind stress, 1 × sea level correction of ΔSSTSL = 0.32 K, see SOM).

Climate sensitivity to CO2 more limited than extreme projections

CORVALLIS, Ore. – A new study suggests that the rate of global warming from doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide may be less than the most dire estimates of some previous studies – and, in fact, may be less severe than projected by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report in 2007.

Authors of the study, which was funded by the National Science Foundation and published online this week in the journal Science, say that global warming is real and that increases in atmospheric CO2 will have multiple serious impacts.

However, the most Draconian projections of temperature increases from the doubling of CO2 are unlikely.

“Many previous climate sensitivity studies have looked at the past only from 1850 through today, and not fully integrated paleoclimate date, especially on a global scale,” said Andreas Schmittner, an Oregon State University researcher and lead author on the Science article. “When you reconstruct sea and land surface temperatures from the peak of the last Ice Age 21,000 years ago – which is referred to as the Last Glacial Maximum – and compare it with climate model simulations of that period, you get a much different picture.

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