We examine the response of the Community Earth System Model Versions 1 and 2 (CESM1 and CESM2) to abrupt quadrupling of atmospheric CO2 concentrations (4xCO2) and to 1% annually increasing CO2 concentrations (1%CO2). Different estimates of equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) for CESM1 and CESM2 are presented. All estimates show that the sensitivity of CESM2 has increased by 1.5 K or more over that ...

Climate model emulators are widely used to generate temperature projections for climate scenarios, including in the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Sixth Assessment Report. Here we evaluate the performance of a two-layer energy balance model in emulating historical and future temperature projections from Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 models. We find that emulation ...

The latest generation of coupled models, the sixth Coupled Models Intercomparison Project (CMIP6), is used to study the changes in the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) in a warming climate. For the four future scenarios studied, the sea surface temperature variability increases in most CMIP6 models, but to varying degrees. This increase is linked to a weakening of the east‐west temperature gradient ...

One of the most intriguing facets of the climate system is that it exhibits variability across all temporal and spatial scales; pronounced examples are temperature and precipitation. The structure of this variability, however, is not arbitrary. Over certain spatial and temporal ranges, it can be described by scaling relationships in the form of power laws in probability density distributions and ...