Climate sensitivity

Summary

Climate sensitivity measures how much the global mean surface temperature changes in response to a given radiative forcing. Its most common form, the equilibrium climate sensitivity, is the warming that eventually follows a doubling of the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It combines the direct effect of the forcing with feedbacks, such as those of water vapour, clouds and ice. It is one of the key numbers of climate science, because it sets the scale of future warming for a given path of emissions.