Related papers: Antarctic ice sheet - climate feedbacks under high…
Complex ocean systems such as the Antarctic Circumpolar Current play key roles in the climate, and current models predict shifts in their strength and area under climate change. However, the physical processes underlying these changes are…
Aims: The long-term carbon cycle for planets with a surface entirely covered by oceans works differently from that of the present-day Earth because inefficient erosion leads to a strong dependence of the weathering rate on the rate of…
As a consequence of greenhouse forcing, all state of the art general circulation models predict a positive temperature trend that is greater for the troposphere than the surface. This predicted positive trend increases in value with…
Climate sensitivity is defined as the change in global mean equilibrium temperature after a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentration and provides a simple measure of global warming. An early estimate of climate sensitivity, 1.5-4.5{\deg}C,…
Satellite altimeter observations retrieved since 1993 show that the global mean sea level is rising at an unprecedented rate (3.4mm/year). With almost three decades of observations, we can now investigate the contributions of anthropogenic…
Climatologists have calculated that a complete melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet would cause global sea levels to rise by some 7.2 meters (23.6 feet). This article investigates the possibility of physically removing this excess water from…
The Early Anthropogenic Hypothesis considers that greenhouse gas concentrations should have declined during the Holocene in absence of humankind activity, leading to glacial inception around the present. It partly relies on the fact that…
Our ability to predict the future of Arctic sea ice is limited by ice's sensitivity to detailed surface conditions such as the distribution of snow and melt ponds. Snow on top of the ice decreases ice's thermal conductivity, increases its…
Observations suggest that the earth's surface has been warming relative to the troposphere for the last 25 years; this is not only difficult to explain but also contrary to the results of climate models. We provide new evidence that the…
This paper reports observations of regional and global upper stratosphere temperature (UST) and surface temperature, as well as various climate drivers including greenhouse gases (GHGs), ozone, aerosols, solar variability, snow cover…
Since the beginning of satellite observations, the Arctic sea ice extent has shown a downward trend. The decline has been weaker in the March maximum than in the September minimum and masked by inter-annual fluctuations. One of the less…
Projections from global climate models reveal a significant inter-model spread in future rainfall changes in the tropical Atlantic by the end of the 21st century, including alterations to the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) and…
How strong are quantitative contributions of the key natural modes of climate variability and the anthropogenic factor characterized by the changes of the radiative forcing of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to the trends of the surface…
The ice-albedo feedback is a potentially important de-stabilizing effect for the climate of terrestrial planets. It is based on the positive feedback between decreasing surface temperatures, an increase of snow and ice cover and an…
Atmospheric general circulation models (AGCMs) are known to have a warm and isotopically enriched bias over Antarctica. We test here the hypothesis that these biases are partly consequences of a too diffusive advection. Exploiting the…
The long-term carbon cycle is vital for maintaining liquid water oceans on rocky planets due to the negative climate feedbacks involved in silicate weathering. Plate tectonics plays a crucial role in driving the long-term carbon cycle…
Earlier meta-analyses of the economic impact of climate change are updated with more data, with three new results: (1) The central estimate of the economic impact of global warming is always negative. (2) The confidence interval about the…
Molecular oxygen in our atmosphere has increased from less than a part per million in the Archean Eon, to a fraction of a percent in the Proterozoic, and finally to modern levels during the Phanerozoic. The ozone layer formed with the early…
We compare the performance of a recently proposed empirical climate model based on astronomical harmonics against all available general circulation climate models (GCM) used by the IPCC (2007) to interpret the 20th century global surface…
Observed changes such as increasing global temperatures and the intensification of the global water cycle in the 20th century are also robust results of coupled general circulation models. In spite of this success model-to-model variability…