Experiments with six CMIP6 models were used to assess the climate feedback parameter for net historical, historical greenhouse gas (GHG) and anthropogenic aerosol forcings. The net radiative feedback is found to be more amplifying (higher effective climate sensitivity) for aerosol than GHG forcing, and hence also more amplifying for net historical (GHG + aerosol) than GHG only. We demonstrate that this difference is consistent with their different latitudinal distributions. Historical aerosol forcing is most pronounced in northern extratropics, where the boundary layer is decoupled from the free troposphere, so the consequent temperature change is confined to low altitude and causes low-level cloud changes. This is caused by change in stability which also affects upper-tropospheric clearsky emission, both affecting shortwave and longwave radiative feedbacks. This response is a feature of extratropical forcing generally, regardless of its sign or hemisphere.

Effective radiative forcing includes a contribution by rapid adjustments, i.e. changes in temperature, water vapour and clouds that modify the energy budget. Cloud adjustments in particular have been shown to depend strongly on forcing agent. We perform idealised atmospheric heating experiments to demonstrate a relationship between cloud adjustment and the vertical profile of imposed radiative heating: boundary-layer heating causes a positive cloud adjustment, while free-tropospheric heating yields a negative adjustment. This dependence is dominated by the shortwave effect of changes in low clouds. Much of the variation in cloud adjustment among realistic forcing agents such as CO2, CH4, solar forcing, and black carbon is explained by the “characteristic altitude” of the heating profile, through its effect on tropospheric stability.