Holden, P., Edwards, N.R., Ridgewell, A. et al. (10 more authors) (2018) Climate–carbon cycle uncertainties and the Paris Agreement. Nature Climate Change, 8. pp. 609-613. ISSN 1758-678X
Abstract
The Paris Agreement aims to address the gap between existing climate policies and policies consistent with “holding the increase in global average temperature to well below 2 C”. The feasibility of meeting the target has been questioned both in terms of the possible requirement for negative emissions and ongoing debate on the sensitivity of the climate–carbon-cycle system. Using a sequence of ensembles of a fully dynamic three-dimensional climate–carbon-cycle model, forced by emissions from an integrated assessment model of regional-level climate policy, economy, and technological transformation, we show that a reasonable interpretation of the Paris Agreement is still technically achievable. Specifically, limiting peak (decadal) warming to less than 1.7 °C, or end-of-century warming to less than 1.54 °C, occurs in 50% of our simulations in a policy scenario without net negative emissions or excessive stringency in any policy domain. We evaluate two mitigation scenarios, with 200 gigatonnes of carbon and 307 gigatonnes of carbon post-2017 emissions respectively, quantifying the spatio-temporal variability of warming, precipitation, ocean acidification and marine productivity. Under rapid decarbonization decadal variability dominates the mean response in critical regions, with significant implications for decision-making, demanding impact methodologies that address non-linear spatio-temporal responses. Ignoring carbon-cycle feedback uncertainties (which can explain 47% of peak warming uncertainty) becomes unreasonable under strong mitigation conditions.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2018 Nature Publishing Group. This is an author produced version of a paper subsequently published in Nature Climate Change. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher's self-archiving policy. |
Keywords: | Climate and Earth system modelling; Climate-change mitigation |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Science (Sheffield) > School of Mathematics and Statistics (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 02 Jul 2018 09:42 |
Last Modified: | 17 Apr 2024 15:24 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Nature Publishing Group |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1038/s41558-018-0197-7 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:132681 |