Therefore, an individual paper (or blog post) that comes up with a narrow range is not a problem unless it claims to be the authoritative source for the climate sensitivity estimate.
A summary of evidence from multiple sources should have a lower confidence interval when the sources that it summaries if the source accurately reflect the evidence that they have. If it’s the other way around that means that those sources have made mistakes.
If I ask 3 people for a number and one tells me it’s between 11-12, one tells me 14-15 and one tells me 17-19 my conclusion would be that as a group they don’t really know what they are talking about.
Yes, maybe the IPCC should have concluded that we have no idea about climate sensitivity. But they needed to put some sort of estimate range that could be fed into their scenario analyses.
Anyway, I found an infographic of different climate sensitivity estimates here:
PS: I have no idea if the infographic accurately reflects all recent studies. The author is a global warming skeptic who has received money from oil and coal industries, so that should be cause for skepticism. But I think such an infographic would be hard to fudge. If anybody has a better source, I’d be happy to hear.
UPDATE: Added it to post at end of discussion of climate sensitivity estimates.
A summary of evidence from multiple sources should have a lower confidence interval when the sources that it summaries if the source accurately reflect the evidence that they have. If it’s the other way around that means that those sources have made mistakes.
If I ask 3 people for a number and one tells me it’s between 11-12, one tells me 14-15 and one tells me 17-19 my conclusion would be that as a group they don’t really know what they are talking about.
Yes, maybe the IPCC should have concluded that we have no idea about climate sensitivity. But they needed to put some sort of estimate range that could be fed into their scenario analyses.
Anyway, I found an infographic of different climate sensitivity estimates here:
http://www.cato.org/blog/still-another-low-climate-sensitivity-estimate-0
Direct link to image:
http://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/wp-content/uploads/gsr_042513_fig1.jpg
PS: I have no idea if the infographic accurately reflects all recent studies. The author is a global warming skeptic who has received money from oil and coal industries, so that should be cause for skepticism. But I think such an infographic would be hard to fudge. If anybody has a better source, I’d be happy to hear.
UPDATE: Added it to post at end of discussion of climate sensitivity estimates.