Only one third as warm

Alarmist science says that a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide will lead to an atmospheric temperature rise of 3.3 degrees Celsius. However:

New research from Stephen Schwartz of Brookhaven National Lab [suggests] that the Earth’s climate is only about one-third as sensitive to carbon dioxide as the IPCC assumes. Schwartz’s study is “in press” at the Journal of Geophysical Research and you can download a preprint of the study here.

According to Schwartz’s results, which are based on the empirical relationship between trends in surface temperature and ocean heat content, doubling the CO₂ concentration in the atmosphere would result in a 1.1^oC increase in average temperature (0.1–2.1^oC, two standard deviation uncertainty range).

Got that? If Schwartz's research is correct -- and like other warmists, he's using the deservedly maligned climate models to read this crystal ball -- a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide will see temperature increases above natural warming just one-third warmer than warmists insist on. Warmists' crystal balls predict there carbon dioxide levels will be roughly double that of the pre-Industrial Revolution era sometime around 2070; If Schwartz's research is right, we can look forward to a 0.6 degree Celsius surcharge in 2070 due to that doubling.

If he's right, seems a reasonable price to pay for the industry that keeps us all alive.

Joel Schwartz at Planet Gore highlights three more important points of Stephen Schwartz's research:

• Aerosols have a relatively small effect on temperature. A doubling of CO₂ has an estimated climate “forcing” of 2.7 watts per square centimeter (W/cm²). In contrast, actual aerosol concentrations during the 20^th Century had a forcing of -0.3 W/cm² with a large uncertainty range that could mean either net cooling or net warming from aerosols.
• The response time, or “time constant”, of the climate to greenhouse gas forcing is relatively small—only five years. In other words, there’s hardly any additional warming “in the pipeline” from previous greenhouse gas emissions. This is in contrast to the IPCC, which predicts that the Earth’s average temperature will rise an additional 0.6^oC during the 21^st Century even if greenhouse gas concentrations stopped increasing.

Schwartz is careful to include the appropriate caveats to his results. But he also shows that his estimates are consistent with much of the previous literature on the subject.

That last point is important. Although Schwartz is using the same system of climate models as other warmists, unlike those other models Schwartz's is able to explain the rising and falling and rising and falling of temperatures over the twentieth century, and the temperature decline since 1998.

Joel Schwartz has the summary at Planet Gore: Overcoming the "Consensus" in One Fell Swoop.
Stephen Schwartz has the full research paper here: Heat Capacity, Time Constant & Sensitivity of Earth's Climate System [pdf].