University research on global warming announced as a runner up in Science Magazines 2020 Breakthroughs of the Year

An international team of researchers including SMMI expert Professor Gavin Foster have had their research featured as a runner up in Science Magazines 2020 Breakthroughs of the Year. 

The article by Sherwood et al. 2020 entitled ‘An Assessment of Earth’s Climate Sensitivity Using Multiple Lines of Evidence’ was a multinational effort to tackle this issue from a number of angles, including looking at past climates which is Gavin’s area of expertise.

Gavin said “How hot the future will be depends on how much CO2 we emit and how sensitive the Earth system is to changes in the level of CO2 in the atmosphere.  This later property is often expressed as the equilibrium climate sensitivity – the amount of warming for a doubling of CO2. Despite decades of research we have been unable to narrow in on the true value of this property and instead have been left with a broad range of 1.5 to 4.5 oC per doubling since the parameter was first estimated in the late 1970s.  As part of a multinational effort we tackled this issue from a number of angles, including looking at past climates which is my area of expertise.  The real advance was to combine a number of different independent ways to calculate climate sensitivity in a sophisticated statistical model to come up with a much narrower value of 2.6 to 3.9 oC per CO2 doubling.  This rules out some of the worse-case scenarios for future warming, but also guarantees warming will be extreme enough to cause considerable disruption, flooding coastal cities, causing extreme heat waves etc.  Knowing climate sensitivity better will however allow an accurate assessment of what is needed to adequately mitigate against these changes and reach internationally agreed climate targets.”