Figure TS.2. The concentrations and radiative forcing by (a) carbon dioxide (CO₂), (b) methane (CH₄), (c) nitrous oxide (N₂O) and (d) the rate of change in their combined radiative forcing over the last 20,000 years reconstructed from antarctic and Greenland ice and firn data (symbols) and direct atmospheric measurements (panels a,b,c, red lines). The grey bars show the reconstructed ranges of natural variability for the past 650,000 years. The rate of change in radiative forcing (panel d, black line) has been computed from spline fits to the concentration data. The width of the age spread in the ice data varies from about 20 years for sites with a high accumulation of snow such as Law Dome, Antarctica, to about 200 years for low-accumulation sites such as Dome C, Antarctica. The arrow shows the peak in the rate of change in radiative forcing that would result if the anthropogenic signals of CO₂, CH₄, and N₂O had been smoothed corresponding to conditions at the low-accumulation Dome C site. The negative rate of change in forcing around 1600 shown in the higher-resolution inset in panel d results from a CO₂ decrease of about 10 ppm in the Law Dome record. {Figure 6.4}