Efficacy of climate forcings in transient CMIP6 simulations

Abstract

For effective radiative forcing (ERF) to be an ideal metric for comparing the strength of different climate drivers (such as CO2 and aerosols), the ratio of radiative forcing to global-mean temperature change must be the same for each driver. Typically, this ratio is divided by the same ratio for CO2 and termed efficacy. Previously it has been shown that efficacy is close to unity in abrupt perturbation experiments for a range of climate drivers, but efficacy with respect to CO2 has not been investigated in transient realistic simulations. Here, we analyse transient simulations from CMIP6 experiments and show comparable results between transient and abrupt perturbation experiments. We demonstrate that aerosol efficacy is not significantly different from unity, however inter-model differences in aerosol experiments are notably large.