Abstract
Surprises, by the very definition of the word, deal with unforeseen aspects of an issue. In the context of global warming, nearly all assessments recognise a wide range of uncertainty owing to a variety of processes that are not yet fully quantifiable, such as the feedback effects of clouds, soil organic matter changes, photosynthetic enhancement, changes in species composition or populations and alterations in the extent of snow and ice fields with climate changes. These feedback mechanisms could amplify or damp by up to several times projections made using preliminary calculations that neglect their proper interaction. Such assessments try to estimate these uncertainties and typically have suggested that if carbon dioxide (or its radiative equivalent in methane, chlorofluorocarbons, nitrous oxides etc.) were to double and be held fixed indefinitely (i.e. an ‘equilibrium’ experiment), then globally-averaged surface air temperatures would rise by about 1.5–4.5°C (Table 1) (National Academy of Sciences, 1978, 1987; Houghton et al., 1990, 1992). This canonical range reflects the best estimate of the subjective judgements (i.e. intuition) of broad cross-sections of knowledgeable scientists across a wide range of institutions over the uncertainties associated with these feedback processes. They are not surprises, strictly speaking, as variation within this range is anticipated, even though we cannot assign more than subjective or intuitive probability as to whether the actual climatic sensitivity to equilibrium C02 doubling would be nearer the higher or lower end of the range. Scientific intuition and some calculations have even suggested a modest chance (perhaps 10 per cent) for temperature warming above the upper 4.5°C limit or below the 1.5°C lower limit (Jager, 1987) — and this would constitute a ‘surprise’, as most of the knowledgeable scientific community consider it much more probable that the actual sensitivity will turn out within the canonical 1.5–4.5°C range
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Schneider, S.H. (1996). The Future of Climate: Potential for Interaction and Surprises. In: Downing, T.E. (eds) Climate Change and World Food Security. NATO ASI Series, vol 37. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-61086-8_4
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