Getting things right

Last Monday, I was asked by a journalist whether a claim in a new report from a small NGO made any sense. The report was mostly focused on the impacts of climate change on food production – clearly an important topic, and one where public awareness of the scale of the risk is low. However, the study was based on a mistaken estimate of how large global warming would be in 2020. I replied to the journalist (and indirectly to the NGO itself, as did other scientists) that no, this did not make any sense, and that they should fix the errors before the report went public on Thursday. For various reasons, the NGO made no changes to their report. The press response to their study has therefore been almost totally dominated by the error at the beginning of the report, rather than the substance of their work on the impacts. This public relations debacle has lessons for NGOs, the press, and the public.

The erroneous claim in the study was that the temperature anomaly in 2020 would be 2.4ºC above pre-industrial. This is obviously very different from the IPCC projections:

which show trends of about 0.2ºC/decade, and temperatures at 2020 of around 1-1.4ºC above pre-industrial. The claim is thus at least 1ºC above what it should have been, and implied trends over the next decade an order of magnitude higher than otherwise expected.

How they made this mistake is quite instructive though. The steps they followed were as follows:

  • Current CO2 is 390 ppm
  • Growth in CO2 is around 2 ppm/yr, and so by 2020 there will be ~410 ppm

So far so good. The different IPCC scenarios give a range of 412-420 ppm.

  • They then calculated the CO2-eq to be 490 ppm.
  • The forcing from 490 ppm with respect to the pre-industrial is 5.35*log(490/280)=3 W/m2.
  • Given a climate sensitivity of 3ºC for 2xCO2 (i.e. 3.7 W/m2), a forcing of 3 W/m2 translates to 3*3/3.7=2.4ºC

The first error is in misunderstanding what CO2-eq means and is used for. Unfortunately, there are two mutually inconsistent definitions out there (and they have been confused before). The first, used by policymakers in relation to the Kyoto protocol, relates the radiative impact of all the well-mixed greenhouse gases (i.e. CO2, CH4, N2O, CFCs) to an equivalent amount of CO2 for purposes of accounting across the basket of gases. Current GHG amounts under this definition are ~460 ppm, and conceivably could be 490 ppm by 2020.

However, the other definition is used when describing the total net forcing on the climate system. In that case, it is not just the Kyoto gases that must be included but also ozone, black carbon, sulphates, land use, nitrates etc. Coincidentally, all of the extra GHGs and aerosols actually cancel out to a large extent and so the CO2-eq in this sense is quite close to the actual value of CO2 all on its own (i.e. in IPCC 2007, the radiative forcing from CO2 was 1.7 W/m2, and the net radiative forcing was also 1.7 W/m2 (with larger uncertainties of course), implying the CO2-eq was equal to actual CO2 concentrations).

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