RxPG News Feed for RxPG News

Medical Research Health Special Topics World
  Home
 
   Health
 Aging
 Asian Health
 Events
 Fitness
 Food & Nutrition
 Happiness
 Men's Health
 Mental Health
 Occupational Health
 Parenting
 Public Health
 Sleep Hygiene
 Women's Health
 
   Healthcare
 Africa
 Australia
 Canada Healthcare
 China Healthcare
 India Healthcare
 New Zealand
 South Africa
 UK
 USA
 World Healthcare
 
 Latest Research
 Aging
 Alternative Medicine
 Anaethesia
 Biochemistry
 Biotechnology
 Cancer
 Cardiology
 Clinical Trials
 Cytology
 Dental
 Dermatology
 Embryology
 Endocrinology
 ENT
 Environment
 Epidemiology
 Gastroenterology
 Genetics
 Gynaecology
 Haematology
 Immunology
 Infectious Diseases
 Medicine
 Metabolism
 Microbiology
 Musculoskeletal
 Nephrology
 Neurosciences
 Obstetrics
 Ophthalmology
 Orthopedics
 Paediatrics
 Pathology
 Pharmacology
 Physiology
 Physiotherapy
 Psychiatry
 Radiology
 Rheumatology
 Sports Medicine
 Surgery
 Toxicology
 Urology
 
   Medical News
 Awards & Prizes
 Epidemics
 Launch
 Opinion
 Professionals
 
   Special Topics
 Ethics
 Euthanasia
 Evolution
 Feature
 Odd Medical News
 Climate

Last Updated: Sep 15, 2017 - 4:49:58 AM
Research Article
Latest Research Channel

subscribe to Latest Research newsletter
Latest Research

   EMAIL   |   PRINT

Scientists develop new approach to support future climate projections


Nov 28, 2012 - 5:00:00 AM

 

Scientists have developed a new approach for evaluating past climate sensitivity data to help improve comparison with estimates of long-term climate projections developed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The sensitivity of global temperature to changes in the Earth's radiation balance (climate sensitivity) is a key factor for understanding past natural climate changes as well as potential future climate change.

Many palaeoclimate studies have measured natural climate changes to calculate climate sensitivity, but a lack of consistent methodologies produced a wide range of estimates as to the exact value of climate sensitivity, which hindered results.

Now a team of international scientists including Eelco Rohling, Professor of Ocean and Climate Change at the University of Southampton, have developed a more consistent definition of climate sensitivity in prehistoric times. When the scientists evaluated previously published estimates for climate sensitivity from a variety of geological episodes over the past 65 million years, they found that the estimates varied over a very wide range of values, with some very high values among them (high values would imply a very strong temperature response to a change in radiative forcing, for example, due to CO2 increase).

The team discovered that this wide range was almost entirely due to the fact that different researchers used different definitions.

Professor Rohling, who is currently based at the National Oceanography Centre Southampton but will join the Australian National University next year, says: Consistent intercomparison is a top priority, because it is central to using past climate sensitivity estimates in assessing the credibility of future climate projections.

Once we had developed the framework and we had elaborated all the different assumptions and uncertainties, we applied it to climate reconstruction data from the last 65 million years. This caused a much narrower range of estimates, and this range was now defined in such a way that we could directly compare it with estimates in the IPCC assessment for their longer-term (several centuries) outlook.

The scientists found that the likely range of climate sensitivity consistently has been of the order of 2.2 to 4.8 degrees C per doubling of CO2, which closely agrees with the IPCC estimates.

Professor Rohling adds: Our study only documents what the climate sensitivity has been over the last 65 million years, and how realistic the estimates of the IPCC are in that context. It finds that those estimates are fully coherent with what nature has done in the (natural) past before human-based effects. Hence, it strongly endorses the IPCC's long-term climate projections based on such values: nature shows us it always has, and so likely will again, respond in a way close to what the models suggest, as far as warming is concerned.


Subscribe to Latest Research Newsletter

Enter your email address:


 Feedback
For any corrections of factual information, to contact the editors or to send any medical news or health news press releases, use feedback form

Top of Page

 
Contact us

RxPG Online

Nerve

Online ACLS Certification

 

    Full Text RSS

© All rights reserved by RxPG Medical Solutions Private Limited (India)