Why Radiative Forcing Might Fail as a Predictor of Climate Change

Radiative forcing has been widely used as a metric of climate change, i.e. as a measure by which various contributors to a net surface temperature change can be quantitatively compared. The extent to which this concept is valid for spatially inhomogeneous perturbations to the climate system is tested. A series of climate model simulations involving ozone changes of different spatial structure reveals that the climate sensitivity parameter k is highly variable: for an ozone increase in the northern hemisphere lower stratosphere, it is more than twice as large as for a homogeneous CO2 perturbation. A global ozone perturbation in the upper troposphere, however, causes a significantly smaller surface temperature response than CO2. The variability of the climate sensitivity parameter is shown to be mostly due to the varying strength of the stratospheric water vapour feedback. The variability of the sea-ice albedo feedback modifies climate sensitivity of perturbations with the same vertical structure but a different horizontal structure. This feedback is also the origin of the comparatively larger climate sensitivity to perturbations restricted to the northern hemisphere extratropics. As cloud feedback does not operate independently from the other feedbacks, quantifying its effect is rather difficult. However, its effect on the variability of k for horizontally and vertically inhomogeneous perturbations within one model framework seems to be comparatively small