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Politics : Politics of Energy
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To: Hawkmoon who wrote (50605)5/2/2014 3:12:18 PM
From: Wharf Rat  Read Replies (1) of 86356
 
"there apparently wasn't 97% consensus on climate sensitivity.."

There still isn't. That's why it's given as a range. There is a consensus on that, and it's still close to Arrhenius' original figure..

1.5 to 4.5 degrees Celsius for a doubling of CO2. We have another 160 PPM to go (and then 40 years to equilibrate), and temperature has already gone up 0.8 degrees C, (and will go up more, cuz the fast equilibrium takes 40 years)) while CO2 has gone up 120 ppm. We won't have a consensus on the value until CO2 is at 560 ppm, and there prolly won't be anybody around to see if it is linear between 560 and 1120.

Climate Change: The 40 Year Delay Between Cause and Effect
skepticalscience.com

The reason the planet takes several decades to respond to increased CO2 is the thermal inertia of the oceans. Consider a saucepan of water placed on a gas stove. Although the flame has a temperature measured in hundreds of degrees C, the water takes a few minutes to reach boiling point. This simple analogy explains climate lag. The mass of the oceans is around 500 times that of the atmosphere. The time that it takes to warm up is measured in decades. Because of the difficulty in quantifying the rate at which the warm upper layers of the ocean mix with the cooler deeper waters, there is significant variation in estimates of climate lag. A paper by James Hansen and others [iii] estimates the time required for 60% of global warming to take place in response to increased emissions to be in the range of 25 to 50 years. The mid-point of this is 37.5 which I have rounded to 40 years.

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