Last edited 14 Apr 2025

Adjustments in relation to effective radiative forcing

Climate Change 2021 – The Physical Science Basis, Annex VII: Glossary, written by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and published by Cambridge University Press in 2023, defines Adjustments (in relation to effective radiative forcing) The response to an agent perturbing the climate system that is driven directly by the agent, independently of any change in global surface temperature. For example, carbon dioxide and aerosols, by altering internal heating and cooling rates within the atmosphere, can each cause changes to cloud cover and other variables thereby producing an effective radiative forcing even in the absence of any surface warming or cooling. Adjustments are usually rapid in the sense that they begin to occur right away, before climate feedbacks which are driven by global surface warming (although some adjustments may still take significant time to proceed to completion, for example those involving vegetation or ice sheets).’

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