Wood Romances

Paleoclimate studies offer some very useful information to help scientists understand where our climate is headed given our current concentrations of greenhouse gases. As I have shared in previous posts, the earth has warmed by 1.2°C above the 1850-1900 mean, with about 2°C total warming built into current CO2 levels, given an energy imbalance exceeding 0.8 W/m^2 and ECS of ~3°C for doubling CO2. However, this only considers rapid feedbacks operating on time scales of decades or so. Long term, over time scales of thousands of years, the Earth's climate system is sensitive enough to these forcings to cause drastic changes to the climate system. Earth System Sensitivity (ESS) is frequently estimated to be about 1.5xECS, so 2°C warming on time scales of decades will be amplified to 3°C warming on time scales of thousands of years.  The difference between the last glacial maximum (LGM) and the Holocene Thermal Maximum (HTM) is only ~4-6°C, but that difference in global average temperat...