Historic Minuscule Simulations - Climate Change: Identification and Projections - page 103

radiative forcing, and not in terms of emission or concentration of GHGs,
aerosols, land use and other consequences of human activity.
However, the RCPs do not only address the future, they dictate to the
participants of the CMIP5 the reconstruction of past radiative forcing over
the historic period.
Figure 9.4. The IPCC's RCPs
Under the heading “History”, the left part of the lines in Figure 9.4 show
this reconstruction, which we will be examining here. We will return to the
right section regarding long term climatic projections in the following
chapter.
To focus on the nature of the RCPs itself: they describe a global radiative
forcing, in Wm -2 . In other words, the RCPs integrate the model of all the
machinery of radiative forcing: the greenhouse effect mechanisms, albedo
variations, volcanic activity and solar activity reduced to the energy factor.
The global value indicated is the sum of all the reconstituted or anticipated
radiative forcing from day to day over the Earth's surface, to within a grid of
0.5 degrees latitude and longitude. The input data supplied to the CMIP5