Climate sensitivity wrangles don’t change the big picture on emissions

The sources of data that scientists can use to determine climate sensitivity include ice cores, the cylinders these researchers are holding at the Vostok station in Antarctica. Image credit: Todd Sowers, Columbia University

How much does the world warm up in response to a certain amount of greenhouse gases like CO2 in the atmosphere? It’s a simple question, but its answer depends on whether you mean short-term or long-term warming, and estimates vary according to the methods used. Scientists are currently intensively debating long-term ‘climate sensitivity’, which begs prompts the question: might we be pushing too hard to cut climate CO2 emissions, if this is uncertain?

The answer is no, according to Joeri Rogelj from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, ETH Zurich, and his coworkers. They looked at how a range of climate sensitivity values affected their 21st century warming projections in a paper published in Environmental Research Letters last week. “When taking into account all available evidence, the big picture doesn’t change,” Joeri told me. The ‘carbon budget’ of greenhouse gases we could still emit today and in the future is very limited whatever the climate sensitivity, he explained. “Keeping the so-called carbon budget in line with warming below 2°C still requires a decarbonisation of  global society over the first half of this century.”

Climate sensitivity is the measure of how much the world will eventually warm when it reaches equilibrium after a doubling of CO2 in the air. Today, we have upset the normal equilibrium where the Sun’s energy flowing into the atmosphere matches the flow the Earth radiates back out of it. Now more is coming in than leaving, and that’s heating the planet up. Think of the atmosphere as a series of pipes, with energy flowing through them like a liquid. The Earth is a reservoir in the system, filled by an incoming pipe and drained by an outgoing one. CO2 acts like a blockage in the outgoing pipe – it slows the outward energy flow and causes a build-up in the reservoir. When the reservoir gets fuller it can put enough pressure on the blockage for the outward flow through it to again match the incoming flow. Then we’d be at equilibrium, but with a fuller reservoir – a warmer planet. The more CO2 we emit, the worse the blockage gets and the hotter we get before reaching equilibrium.

Volcano cloud over tree-ring temperatures clears

Pennsylvania State University’s Michael Mann thinks he has found the reason behind key outstanding disagreements between the historical temperature record based on tree rings and climate models for the same period. Credit: Pennylvania State University

The sudden chills violent volcano eruptions cast over the world centuries ago effectively erased themselves from the historical climate record produced by examining tree-rings. So suggests a team led by Michael Mann from Pennsylvania State University, who famously used 1,000 years of tree-ring measurements in the “hockey stick” graph showing how unusual today’s temperatures are. Michael warns the skipped years could affect scientists’ estimates of how much the world warms in response to greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, known as its climate sensitivity. But other than the volcano years, the scientist notes that tree-ring data is a remarkably accurate match with the climate models they used for comparison. “Interestingly, the effect has little influence on long-term trends, including conclusions about how previous temperatures compares to modern ones,” he told me. “Instead, it appears only to have implications for how strong past short-term cooling events were.”

A tree’s age can usually be told from the rings that form across its trunk representing each year’s growth. How thick each ring is shows how much the tree grew in the year in question, which is influenced by the temperatures that tree experienced. That means examining the thickness of rings in old trees can provide a way to tell temperatures back through history. Many challenges have already been overcome in turning this simple-sounding idea into a history of the world’s temperature, but Michael was still troubled by one particular detail.