Extended Data Fig. 2: The effect of equilibrium climate sensitivity uncertainty on future temperature projections.
From: Large uncertainty in future warming due to aerosol forcing
a) The 90% confidence range in global mean surface temperature change depicted in (b) as a function of ECS uncertainty and mean ECS sampled as described in the methods. b) The global surface mean temperature change relative to 1850 under SSP1-2.6 and sampled from an ensemble of simulations24 consistent with historical temperatures (1850–2019), ocean heat content change (1971–2018) and CO2 concentration (1750–2014) assuming three different reduced ECS uncertainty estimates: low (mauve); medium (orange) and high (blue). The 90% confidence range for each subset at the end of the century is indicated to the right of the axis. Observed surface temperatures averaged across four available datasets are shown in black. The underlying heatmap shows the average ECS of the ensemble members that produce a given temperature change each year where the ensemble density is greater than 10%. The colormap is centred around the median ECS in the ensemble and ranges between the 10th-90th percentiles.
