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ABSTRACT

Hansen et al. 1998

Hansen, J., Mki. Sato, A. Lacis, R. Ruedy, I. Tegen, and E. Matthews, 1998: Perspective: Climate forcings in the industrial era. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci., 95, 12753-12758.

The forcings that drive long-term climate change are not known with an accuracy sufficient to define future climate change. Anthropogenic greenhouse gases, which are well-measured, cause a strong positive (warming) forcing. But other, poorly measured, anthropogenic forcings, especially changes of atmospheric aerosols, clouds, and land-use patterns, cause a negative forcing that tends to offset greenhouse warming. One consequence of this partial balance is that the natural forcing due to solar irradiance changes may play a larger role in long-term climate change than inferred from comparison with greenhouse gases alone. Current trends in greenhouse gas climate forcings are smaller than in popular "business as usual" or 1%/yr CO2 growth scenarios. The summary implication is a paradigm change for long-term climate projections: uncertainties in climate forcings have supplanted global climate sensitivity as the predominant issue.

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