Hot climates, high sensitivity

Concluding paragraph: One sure solution to the problem posed by uncertainty of climate sensitivity in hot climates is simply not to go there. Unfortunately, it looks increasingly like Nature will step in to answer some of our questions for us, and I doubt we’ll like the answer. The highest emission scenario currently being considered by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5 (8), which would bring CO2 concentrations up to 2,000 ppm, which is in the upper reaches of the range considered in ref. 2. Even this scenario can be considered somewhat optimistic, in that it assumes that the annual growth in CO emissions rate (which has been hovering around 3% for decades) will tail off by 2060 and that the emissions rate will cease growing altogether by 2100, whereafter emissions will trend to zero; unrestrained growth could eas- ily dump twice as much carbon into the atmosphere. It is not known if there are actually enough recoverable fossil fuels to emit that much CO2. Hoping that we run out of fossil fuels before bringing on a climate catastrophe does not seem like sound climate policy, but at present it seems to be the only one we have.