Climate Sensitivity

Climate sensitivity is a measure of how responsive the temperature of the climate system is to a change in the radiative forcing.

Although climate sensitivity is usually used in the context of radiative forcing by carbon dioxide, it is thought of as a general property of the climate system: the change in surface air temperature (ΔT_s) following a unit change in radiative forcing (RF), and thus is expressed in units of °C/(W/m2). For this to be useful, the measure must be independent of the nature of the forcing (e.g. from greenhouse gases or solar variation); to first order this is indeed found to be so.

The climate sensitivity specifically due to CO₂ is often expressed as the temperature change in °C associated with a doubling of the concentration of carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere.

For a coupled atmosphere-ocean global climate model the climate sensitivity is an emergent property: it is not a model parameter, but rather a result of a combination of model physics and parameters. By contrast, simpler energy-balance models may have climate sensitivity as an explicit parameter.

The terms represented in the equation relate radiative forcing of any cause to linear changes in global surface temperature change.

It is also possible to estimate climate sensitivity from observations; however, this is difficult due to uncertainties in the forcing and temperature histories.