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 School of Geography and the Environment

Knowledge of the long-term response of Earth’s climate to a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide may be less useful for policy makers than commonly assumed.

ECI lead researcher: Dr Dave Frame | e:

In October 2007, Dr Dave Frame, ECI Oxford Martin School Research fellow co-authored this paper, published in Science, reviewing the mathematical underpinning of the commonly researched question in climate modelling: What is the long term equilibrium warming to a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide? This question of climate sensitivity has become pertinent to much of the current work on future climate forecasts, by asking what would happen to climate if you double CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere.

Through this paper, Allen and Frame suggest that it is not mathematically robust to set a threshold value for greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere. Consequently they suggest that we should not set climate policy around stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations at a peak value proposed by an inherently uncertain sensitivity value, and based around emissions concentrations that we might not even reach. More sensibly, we should move towards an adaptive climate policy with constant revisions of our target in view of observed temperature changes.

Links:

Further publications by Dave Frame in 2007.

  • D. J. Frame, N. E. Faull, M. M. Joshi & M. R. Allen, Probabilistic climate forecasts and inductive problems, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, doi:10.1098/rsta.2007.2069 2007.
  • D. Frame and M. Allen, Climate Change and Global Risk, Chapter in Global Catastrophic Risks, N. Bostrom and M. Cirkovic eds. Oxford University Press: Oxford, forthcoming, 2007.
  • C. G. Knight, S. H. E. Knight, N. Massey, T. Aina, C. Christensen, D. J. Frame, J. A. Kettleborough, A. Martin, S. Pascoe, B. Sanderson, D. A. Stainforth, M. R. Allen, Association of parameter, software and hardware variation with large scale behavior across 57,000 climate models, PNAS, July 2007.
  • M. Allen, P. Pall, D. Stone, P. Stott, D. Frame, S.-K. Min, T. Nozawa, and S. Yukimoto. 2007. Scientific challenges in the attribution of harm to human influence on climate. University of Pennsylvania Law Review, 155, 6, 1353-1400, 2007.
  • M. Boykoff, D. Frame and S. Randalls, Stabilize this! How the discourse of ‘climate stabilization’ became and remains entrenched in climate science-policy/practice interactions, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, submitted, 2007.
  • C. Piani, T. Aina, C. Christensen, D. Frame, N. Faull and M. Allen, Regional probabilistic climate forecasts from a multi-thousand, multi-model ensemble of simulations, Journal of Geophysical Research, accepted, 2007.
  • B. M. Sanderson, R. Knutti, T. Aina, C. M. Christensen, N. E. Faull, D. J. Frame, W. J. Ingram, C. Piani, D. A. Stainforth, D. A. Stone and M. R. Allen, Constraints on model response to greenhouse gas forcing and the rose of sub-grid scale processes, Journal of Climate, in press, 2007.