Radiative Forcing and Climate Change

By K. Shine. 2015

687 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Aviation causes climate change as a result of its emissions of CO2, oxides of nitrogen, aerosols, and water vapor. One simple method of quantifying the climate impact of past emissions is radiative forcing. The radiative forcing due to changes in CO2 is best characterized, but there are formidable difficulties in estimating the non-CO2 forcings – this is particularly the case for possible aviation-induced changes in cloudiness (AIC). The most recent comprehensive assessment gave a best estimate of the 2005 total radiative forcing due to aviation of about 55–78 mW m−2 depending on whether AIC was included or not, with an uncertainty of at least a factor of 2. The aviation CO2 radiative forcing represents about 1.6% of the total CO2 forcing from all human activities. It is estimated that, including the non-CO2 effects, aviation contributes between 1.3 and 14% of the total radiative forcing due to all human activities. Alternative methods for comparing the future impact of present-day aviation emissions are presented – the perception of the relative importance of the non-CO2 emissions, relative to CO2, depends considerably on the chosen method and the parameters chosen within those methods. Keywords: carbon dioxide; climate change; global temperature change potential; global warming potential; radiative forcing

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Automotive Engineering, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0ec78387d7d61571eac2c73286c576e5de803268

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In Atmospheric Science

1. J. Dufresne
2. M. Marchand
3. Masa Kageyama
4. Y. Balkanski
5. P. Braconnot
6. Stephen A. Klein
7. M. Zelinka
8. Sandrine Bony

In Global and Planetary Change

1. A. Rey
2. J. Dufresne
3. T. Ball
4. Keelan Smith
5. M. Marchand
6. Karen Dobbie
7. Y. Balkanski
8. F. Conen

Citations in the corpus

• Implementation of the CMIP6 Forcing Data in the IPSL‐CM6A‐LR Model (2020, background): “(2016) and in the IPCC Third Assessment Report (Ramaswamy et al., 2001).”
• Exchange of greenhouse gases between soil and atmosphere: interactions of soil physical factors and biological processes (2018, background): “Although the absolute quantities of these gases being emitted is small compared with that of CO2, they are far more effective in absorbing infrared radiation and thus contributing to global warming: 1 kg of CH4 has a warming potential 23 times greater than 1 kg of CO2, over a 100-year period, while ”