Climate sensitivity and response

Abstract Results from climate change simulations indi-cate a reasonably robust proportionality between global mean radiative forcing and global mean surface air temperature response. The ‘‘constant’ ’ of proportional-ity is a measure of the overall strength of climate feed-back processes and hence of global climate sensitivity. Geographically, however, temperature response patterns are generally not proportional to, nor do they resemble, their parent forcing patterns. Temperature response patterns, nevertheless, exhibit a remarkable additivity whereby the sum of response patterns for different forcings closely resembles the response pattern for the sum of the forcings. The geographical distribution of contributions to the climate sensitivity/feedback are obtained diagnosticall