A future perspective of historical contributions to climate change

Skeie, Ragnhild Bieltvedt; Peters, Glen P.; Fuglestvedt, Jan S.; Andrew, Robbie M.

doi:10.1007/s10584-021-02982-9

Cited by 10 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 36 publications

(56 reference statements)

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“…Assessments based only on contemporary annual or future projected emissions will mask the fact that cumulative CO 2 emissions result in the vast majority of global warming globally ( figure 1b ) and for developed countries [ 57 ], and that a significant amount of warming caused by the biggest historical emitters is from emissions that occurred before even 1990: US (25% of total cumulative CO 2 emissions), EU28 (22%) and China (13%) (OurWorldInData.org). In order to accurately evaluate contributions towards climate change, a consistent approach to temperature should be applied to both CO 2 and CH 4 , with the same base year.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Using CO 2 -we, temperature effects can be explored over any period of interest without the need to run a multi-component climate model. The concept of relating emissions targets to historical contribution to temperature is not new and has been proposed to the UNFCCC by Brazil [ 58 ]; a discussion of this context can be found in ref [ 57 ]. Different approaches to equitable mitigation have been explored using models, e.g.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Methane and the Paris Agreement temperature goals

Cain

Jenkins

Allen

et al. 2021

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A.

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Meeting the Paris Agreement temperature goal necessitates limiting methane (CH 4 )-induced warming, in addition to achieving net-zero or (net-negative) carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) emissions. In our model, for the median 1.5°C scenario between 2020 and 2050, CH 4 mitigation lowers temperatures by 0.1°C; CO 2 increases it by 0.2°C. CO 2 emissions continue increasing global mean temperature until net-zero emissions are reached, with potential for lowering temperatures with net-negative emissions. By contrast, reducing CH 4 emissions starts to reverse CH 4 -induced warming within a few decades. These differences are hidden when framing climate mitigation using annual ‘CO 2 -equivalent’ emissions, including targets based on aggregated annual emission rates. We show how the different warming responses to CO 2 and CH 4 emissions can be accurately aggregated to estimate warming by using ‘warming-equivalent emissions', which provide a transparent and convenient method to inform policies and measures for mitigation, or demonstrate progress towards a temperature goal. The method presented (GWP*) uses well-established climate science concepts to relate GWP100 to temperature, as a simple proxy for a climate model. The use of warming-equivalent emissions for nationally determined contributions and long-term strategies would enhance the transparency of stocktakes of progress towards a long-term temperature goal, compared to the use of standard equivalence methods. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue ‘Rising methane: is warming feeding warming? (part 2)’.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Methane and the Paris Agreement temperature goals

Cain

Jenkins

Allen

et al. 2021

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A.

Self Cite

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“…On the global emulator side, the first progress towards this direction has already been achieved with the Open Simple Climate Models (OpenSCM) initiative, which aims to bring different global emulators together and to provide standardized output for them. A uniform interface for emissionsdriven runs, OpenSCM Runner (Nicholls et al, 2021b), is available and the implementations for MAGICC (Meinshausen et al, 2011(Meinshausen et al, , 2020, FaIR (Smith et al, 2018;Leach et al, 2021), and CICERO-SCM (Skeie et al, 2017(Skeie et al, , 2021 are fully functional. Additionally, more global emulators have expressed their interest in joining this initiative.…”

Section: Constraints On Regional Scalementioning

confidence: 99%

From emission scenarios to spatially resolved projections with a chain of computationally efficient emulators: coupling of MAGICC (v7.5.1) and MESMER (v0.8.3)

et al. 2022

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Abstract. Producing targeted climate information at the local scale, including major sources of climate change projection uncertainty for diverse emissions scenarios, is essential to support climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts. Here, we present the first chain of computationally efficient Earth system model (ESM) emulators that allow for the translation of any greenhouse gas emission pathway into spatially resolved annual mean temperature anomaly field time series, accounting for both forced climate response and natural variability uncertainty at the local scale. By combining the global mean, emissions-driven emulator MAGICC with the spatially resolved emulator MESMER, ESM-specific and constrained probabilistic emulated ensembles can be derived. This emulator chain can hence build on and extend large multi-ESM ensembles such as the ones produced within the sixth phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6). The main extensions are threefold. (i) A more thorough sampling of the forced climate response and the natural variability uncertainty is possible, with millions of emulated realizations being readily created. (ii) The same uncertainty space can be sampled for any emission pathway, which is not the case in CMIP6, where only a limited number of scenarios have been explored and some of the most societally relevant strong mitigation scenarios have been run by only a small number of ESMs. (iii) Other lines of evidence to constrain future projections, including observational constraints, can be introduced, which helps to refine projected ranges beyond the multi-ESM ensembles' estimates. In addition to presenting results from the coupled MAGICC–MESMER emulator chain, we carry out an extensive validation of MESMER, which is trained on and applied to multiple emission pathways for the first time in this study. By coupling MAGICC and MESMER, we pave the way for rapid assessments of any emission pathway's regional climate change consequences and the associated uncertainties.

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“…The implementation for MAGICC is fully functioning and employed throughout this study. FaIR (Smith et al, 2018;Leach et al, 2021) and CICERO-SCM (Skeie et al, 2017(Skeie et al, , 2021 ulators are available within the OpenSCM framework, assessing the implications of their forced global warming distribution differences for regional scale realizations will be straightforward.…”

Section: Exploring Regional Climate Change Uncertainty Beyond the Magicc-mesmer Couplingmentioning

confidence: 99%

From emission scenarios to spatially resolved projections with a chain of computationally efficient emulators: MAGICC (v7.5.1) – MESMER (v0.8.1) coupling

Beusch

Nicholls

Gudmundsson

et al. 2021

Preprint

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Abstract. Producing targeted climate information at the local scale, including major sources of climate change projection uncertainty for diverse emissions scenarios, is essential to support climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts. Here, we present the first chain of computationally efficient Earth System Model (ESM) emulators allowing to rapidly translate greenhouse gas emission pathways into spatially resolved annual-mean temperature anomaly field time series, accounting for both forced climate response and natural variability uncertainty at the local scale. By combining the global-mean, emissions-driven emulator MAGICC with the spatially resolved emulator MESMER, ESM-specific as well as constrained probabilistic emulated ensembles can be derived. This emulation chain can hence build on and extend large multi-ESM ensembles such as the ones produced within the 6th phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6). The main extensions are threefold. (i) A more thorough sampling of the forced climate response and the natural variability uncertainty is possible with millions of emulated realizations being readily created. (ii) The same uncertainty space can be sampled for any emission pathway, which is not the case in CMIP6, where some of the most societally relevant strong mitigation scenarios have been run by only a small number of ESMs. (iii) Other lines of evidence to constrain future projections, including observational constraints, can be introduced, which helps to refine projected future ranges beyond the multi-ESM ensemble's estimates. In addition to presenting results from the coupled MAGICC-MESMER emulator chain, we carry out an extensive validation of MESMER, which is trained on and applied to multiple emission pathways for the first time in this study. The newly developed MAGICC-MESMER coupled emulator will allow unprecedented assessments of the implications of manifold emissions pathways at regional scale.

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A future perspective of historical contributions to climate change

Cited by 10 publications

References 36 publications

Methane and the Paris Agreement temperature goals

Methane and the Paris Agreement temperature goals

From emission scenarios to spatially resolved projections with a chain of computationally efficient emulators: coupling of MAGICC (v7.5.1) and MESMER (v0.8.3)

From emission scenarios to spatially resolved projections with a chain of computationally efficient emulators: MAGICC (v7.5.1) – MESMER (v0.8.1) coupling

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