Climate model simulations of the equilibrium climatic response to increased carbon dioxide

作者：Michael E. Schlesinger, John F. B. Mitchell · 发表于：Reviews of Geophysics · 年份：1987 · DOI：10.1029/rg025i004p00760 · 被引用次数：484 · 研究领域：Atmospheric and Environmental Gas Dynamics、Climate variability and models、Atmospheric Ozone and Climate

The first assessments of the potential climatic effects of increased CO2 were performed using simplified climate models, namely, energy balance models (EBMs) and radiative‐convective models (RCMs). A wide range of surface temperature warming has been obtained by surface EBMs as a result of the inherent difficulty of these models in specifying the behavior of the climate system away from the energy balance level. RCMs have given estimates of ΔTs for a CO2 doubling that range from 0.48° to 4.2°C. This response can be characterized by ΔTs = ΔRTG0/(1 ‐ f), where ΔRT is the radiative forcing at the tropopause due to the CO2 doubling (∼4 W m−2), G0 is the gain of the climate system without feedbacks (∼0.3°C/(W m−2)), and f is the feedback. The feedback processes in RCMs include water vapor feedback (f is 0.3 to 0.4), moist adiabatic lapse rate feedback (f is −0.25 to −0.4), cloud altitude feedback (f is 0.15 to 0.30), cloud cover feedback (f is unknown), cloud optical depth feedback (f is 0 to −1.32), and surface albedo feedback (f is 0.14 to 0.19). However, these feedbacks can be predicted credibly only by physically based models that include the essential dynamics and thermodynamics of the feedback processes. Such physically based models are the general circulation models (GCMs). The earliest GCM simulations of CO2‐induced climate change were performed without the annual insolation cycle. These “annual mean” simulations gave for a CO2 doubling a global mean surface air temperatur...