Including the efficacy of land ice changes in deriving climate
sensitivity from paleodata
Abstract. The influence of long-term processes in the climate system, such as land ice changes, has to be compensated for when comparing climate sensitivity derived from paleodata with equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) calculated by climate models, which is only generated by a CO2 change. Several recent studies found that the impact these long-term processes have on global temperature cannot be quantified directly through the global radiative forcing they induce. This renders the approach of deconvoluting paleotemperatures through a partitioning based on radiative forcings inaccurate. Here, we therefore implement an efficacy factor ε[LI], that relates the impact of land ice changes on global temperature to that of CO2 changes, in our calculation of climate sensitivity from paleodata. We apply our new approach to a proxy-inferred paleoclimate dataset, and find an equivalent ECS of 5.6 ± 1.3 K per CO2 doubling. The substantial uncertainty herein is generated by the range in ε[LI] we use, which is based on a multi-model assemblage of simulated relative influences of land ice changes on the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) temperature anomaly (46 ± 14 %). The low end of our ECS estimate, which concurs with estimates from other approaches, tallies with a large influence for land ice changes. To separately assess this influence, we analyse output of the PMIP3 climate model intercomparison project. From this data, we infer a functional intermodel relation between global and high-latitude temperature changes at the LGM with respect to the pre-industrial climate, and the temperature anomaly caused by a CO2 change. Applying this relation to our dataset, we find a considerable 64 % influence for land ice changes on the LGM temperature anomaly. This is even higher than the range used before, and leads to an equivalent ECS of 3.8 K per CO2 doubling. Together, our results suggest that land ice changes play a key role in the variability of Late Pleistocene temperatures.