Comment on "Aerosol radiative forcing and climate sensitivity deduced from the Last Glacial Maximum to Holocene transition", by P. Chylek and U. Lohmann, Geophys. Res. Lett., 2008

• Main Authors: J. C. Hargreaves, J. D. Annan
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Copernicus Publications 2009
• Subjects: Environmental pollution; TD172-193.5; Environmental protection; TD169-171.8; Environmental sciences; GE1-350; ice core
• Online Access: https://doaj.org/article/b58993d360c743c79abb84f3e2c0dc8a

In a recent paper, Chylek and Lohmann (2008) used data from the Vostok ice core together with simple energy balance arguments to simultaneously estimate both the dust radiative forcing effect and the climate sensitivity, generating surprisingly high and low values for these respective parameters. However, their results depend critically on their selection of single unrepresentative data points from time series which exhibit a large amount of short-term variability, and are highly unstable with respect to other arbitrarily selected data points. When temporal averages are used in accordance with accepted norms within the paleoclimate community, the results obtained are entirely unremarkable and in line with previous analyses.