Climate sensitivity to ocean sequestration of heat and carbon

Ocean ventilation is a crucial process leading to heat and anthropogenic carbon being sequestered from the atmosphere. The rate by which the global ocean sequesters heat and carbon has a profound effect on the transient global warming. This climate response is empirically defined in terms of a climate index, the transient climate response to emissions (TCRE). Here, we provide a theoretical framework to understand how the TCRE can be interpreted in terms of a product of three differential terms: the dependence of surface warming on radiative forcing, the fractional radiative forcing contribution from atmospheric CO₂ and the dependence of radiative forcing from atmospheric CO₂ on cumulative carbon emissions. This framework is used to diagnose two models, an Earth System Model of Intermediate Complexity, configured as an idealised coupled atmosphere and ocean, and an IPCC-class Earth System Model. In both models, the centennial trends in the TCRE are controlled by the response of the ocean, which acts to sequester both heat and carbon; there is a decrease in the dependence of radiative forcing from CO₂ on carbon emissions, which is partly compensated by an increase in the dependence of surface warming on radiative forcing. On decadal timescales, there are larger changes in the TCRE due to changes in ocean heat uptake and changes in non-CO₂ radiative forcing linked to other greenhouse gases and aerosols. Our framework may be used to interpret the response of different climate models and used to provide traceability between simple and complex climate models.