Other
Scientific paper
Dec 2008
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2008agufm.a34a..08t&link_type=abstract
American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2008, abstract #A34A-08
Other
0414 Biogeochemical Cycles, Processes, And Modeling (0412, 0793, 1615, 4805, 4912), 0429 Climate Dynamics (1620), 1225 Global Change From Geodesy (1222, 1622, 1630, 1641, 1645, 4556), 1615 Biogeochemical Cycles, Processes, And Modeling (0412, 0414, 0793, 4805, 4912)
Scientific paper
In order to speed progress in reducing uncertainty in climate projections, the processes that most strongly influence those projections must be identified. It is of some importance, therefore, to assess the relative strengths of various climate feedbacks and to determine the degree to which various earth system models (ESMs) agree in their simulations of these processes. Climate feedbacks have been traditionally quantified in terms of their impact on the radiative balance of the planet, whereas carbon cycle responses have been assessed in terms of the size of the perturbations to the surface fluxes of carbon dioxide. In this study we introduce a diagnostic strategy for unifying the two approaches, which allows us to directly compare the strength of carbon-climate feedbacks with other conventional climate feedbacks associated with atmospheric and surface changes. Applying this strategy to a highly simplified model of the carbon-climate system demonstrates the viability of the approach. In the simple model we find that even if the strength of the carbon-climate feedbacks is very large, the uncertainty associated with the overall response of the climate system is likely to be dominated by uncertainties in the much larger feedbacks associated with clouds. This does not imply that the carbon cycle itself is unimportant, only that changes in the carbon cycle that are associated with climate change have a relatively small impact on global temperatures. This new, unified diagnostic approach is suitable for assessing feedbacks in even the most sophisticated earth system models. It will be interesting to see whether our preliminary conclusions are confirmed when output from the more realistic models is analyzed. This work was carried out at the University of California Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under Contract W-7405-Eng-48.
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