Over the past 30 years, the climate research community has made valiant efforts to answer the “climate sensitivity” question: What is the long-term equilibrium warming response to a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide? Earlier this year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (1) concluded that this sensitivity is likely to be in the range of 2° to 4.5°C, with a 1-in-3 chance that it is outside that range. The
lower bound of 2°C is slightly higher than the 1.6°C proposed in the 1970s (2).
26 OCTOBER 2007 VOL 318 SCIENCE
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