The Azimuth Project
Climate sensitivity (Rev #5, changes)

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The climate sensitivity is the increase in temperature that would be caused by doubling the concentration of CO₂ in the Earth’s atmosphere. The IPCC currently estimates a range of 2 to 4.5 °C for the overall climate sensitivity. See:

• IPCC AR4 Working Group I, Section 8.6.

for model estimates and

• IPCC AR4 Working Group I, Section 9.6.

for observational estimates.

References

An excellent review article on climate sensitivity is:

• Reto Knutti and Gabriele C. Hegerl, The equilibrium sensitivity of the Earth’s temperature to radiation changes, Nature Geoscience 1 (2008), 735–748.

Also see:

• J.D. Annan and J.C. Hargreaves, On the generation and interpretation of probabilistic estimates of climate sensitivity, 2009.

For nonlinear aspects of climate sensitivity, see:

• I. Zaliapin and M. Ghil, Another look at climate sensitivity, Nonlinear Processes in Geophysics 16 (2010), 113-122.