Uncertainties in climate responses to past land cover change: First results from the LUCID intercomparison study

Pitman, A. J.; Noblet‐Ducoudré, Nathalie de; Cruz, Faye; Davin, Edouard L.; Bonan, Gordon B.; Brovkin, Victor; Claußen, Martin; Delire, Christine; Ganzeveld, L.; Gayler, Veronika; Hurk, Bart van den; Lawrence, P.; Molen, M. K. van der; Müller, Christoph; Reick, Christian H.; Seneviratne, Sonia I.; Strengers, Bart J.; Voldoire, Aurore

doi:10.1029/2009gl039076

Cited by 478 publications

(597 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…We do not include many biogeophysical effects of LULCC, such as changes to surface latent and sensible heat fluxes and to the hydrological cycle, that impact climate (Defries et al, 2002;Feddema et al, 2005;Brovkin et al, 2006;Pitman et al, 2009;Lawrence and Chase, 2010). In general, while important for local or regional climate especially in the tropics (Strengers et al, 2010), these effects are considered minor on a global scale (Lawrence and Chase, 2010) and are difficult to quantify using the RF concept (Pielke et al, 2002).…”

Section: Uncertaintymentioning

confidence: 99%

Potential climate forcing of land use and land cover change

2014

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Abstract. Pressure on land resources is expected to increase as global population continues to climb and the world becomes more affluent, swelling the demand for food. Changing climate may exert additional pressures on natural lands as present-day productive regions may shift, or soil quality may degrade, and the recent rise in demand for biofuels increases competition with edible crops for arable land. Given these projected trends there is a need to understand the global climate impacts of land use and land cover change (LULCC). Here we quantify the climate impacts of global LULCC in terms of modifications to the balance between incoming and outgoing radiation at the top of the atmosphere (radiative forcing, RF) that are caused by changes in long-lived and short-lived greenhouse gas concentrations, aerosol effects, and land surface albedo. We attribute historical changes in terrestrial carbon storage, global fire emissions, secondary organic aerosol emissions, and surface albedo to LULCC using simulations with the Community Land Model version 3.5. These LULCC emissions are combined with estimates of agricultural emissions of important trace gases and mineral dust in two sets of Community Atmosphere Model simulations to calculate the RF of changes in atmospheric chemistry and aerosol concentrations attributed to LULCC. With all forcing agents considered together, we show that 40 % (±16 %) of the present-day anthropogenic RF can be attributed to LULCC. Changes in the emission of non-CO 2 greenhouse gases and aerosols from LULCC enhance the total LULCC RF by a factor of 2 to 3 with respect to the LULCC RF from CO 2 alone. This enhancement factor also applies to projected LULCC RF, which we compute for four future scenarios associated with the Representative Concentration Pathways. We attribute total RFs between 0.9 and 1.9 W m −2 to LULCC for the year 2100 (relative to a preindustrial state). To place an upper bound on the potential of LULCC to alter the global radiation budget, we include a fifth scenario in which all arable land is cultivated by 2100. This theoretical extreme case leads to a LULCC RF of 3.9 W m −2 (±0.9 W m −2 ), suggesting that not only energy policy but also land policy is necessary to minimize future increases in RF and associated climate changes.

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Section: Uncertaintymentioning

confidence: 99%

Potential climate forcing of land use and land cover change

2014

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“…Krinner et al, 2005) the phenology of crops was treated the same way as natural vegetation, but with different maximum leaf area index values and modified parameters for critical temperature and humidity in the phenology scheme. Slingo (2004a, 2004b) noted a large and regionally significant impact on simulated climate resulting from how phenology was included and Pitman et al (2009) attributed a part of the range of responses to land cover change to how crop phenology was represented.…”

Section: Crops and Phenologymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This is also shown in Figure 5 which demonstrates changes remote from the LCC are below the levels expected by chance. However, the experiments by Pitman et al (2009) used observed LCC and this did not include a large perturbation over tropical regions. It is possible that future LCC over the tropics could perturb the fluxes of energy and water sufficiently to trigger larger-scale responses.…”

Section: Land Cover-climate Interactionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The solid bar is the percent of grid points with statistically significant changes where land cover is not changed. The horizontal line is the 5% significance level, expected by chance (from Pitman et al, 2009). nitrogen compounds enough to trigger responses that teleconnect globally (ref. Section 3.2).…”

Section: Land Cover-climate Interactionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Most recent demonstrations include Findell et al (2009) who note that over areas of large-scale land cover change (US east coast, Europe, India, China) the impact on the regional scale hydrometeorology can be on par with sea surface temperature anomalies including ENSO or the observed warming trend. Pitman et al (2009) performed a LCC experiment with seven different climate models and concluded that a direct and significant impact on the regions exposed to land cover changes occurred. Figure 5 shows a strong signal from LCC co-located with the perturbation on the latent heat flux, temperature, and precipitation.…”

Section: Land Cover-climate Interactionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Regionalizing global climate models

Pitman

Arneth

Ganzeveld

2011

Intl Journal of Climatology

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Global climate models simulate the Earth's climate impressively at scales of continents and greater. At these scales, large-scale dynamics and physics largely define the climate. At spatial scales relevant to policy makers, and to impacts and adaptation, many other processes may affect regional and local climate and perhaps trigger teleconnections that provide significant feedbacks on the global climate. These processes include fire, irrigation, land cover change (including crops and urban landscapes), and the emissions of biogenic volatile organic compounds by vegetation. Many of these interact within the atmosphere via dynamical, physical, and chemical mechanisms that lead to boundary-layer feedbacks. It is unlikely that any of these processes have a significant global-scale impact on the Earth's climate in the sense that the amount of warming due to a doubling of well mixed greenhouse gases would change if these processes were explicitly represented in climate models. These phenomena are usually local in space (e.g. urban) or in time (e.g. fire) and probably do not provide the on-going and sustained forcing to affect the global climate. However, for most impacts and adaptation research it is the regional and local climate that defines climate risk. At these scales, processes missing in climate models can have a substantially larger local-scale impact than the additional radiative forcing due to increasing greenhouse gases. Thus, while climate models are well designed for global and continental scales they exclude a suite of important processes that are locally and/or regionally important. We review these missing processes and highlight the research required to resolve the representation of these regional-scale processes in climate models. We also discuss the experimental methodology required to rigorously determine whether these processes are restricted to a local or regional-scale role or whether they do trigger robust teleconnections that would demonstrate global-scale significance.

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Simulating global and local surface temperature changes due to Holocene anthropogenic land cover change

Vavrus

Kutzbach

et al. 2014

Geophysical Research Letters

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Surface albedo changes from anthropogenic land cover change (ALCC) represent the second largest negative radiative forcing behind aerosol during the industrial era. Using a new reconstruction of ALCC during the Holocene era by Kaplan et al. (2011), we quantify the local and global temperature response induced by Holocene ALCC in the Community Climate System Model, version 4. We find that Holocene ALCC causes a global cooling of 0.17°C due to the biogeophysical effects of land-atmosphere exchange of momentum, moisture, and radiative and heat fluxes. On the global scale, the biogeochemical effects of Holocene ALCC from carbon emissions dominate the biogeophysical effects by causing 0.9°C global warming. The net effects of Holocene ALCC amount to a global warming of 0.73°C during the preindustrial era, which is comparable to the~0.8°C warming during industrial times. On local to regional scales, such as parts of Europe, North America, and Asia, the biogeophysical effects of Holocene ALCC are significant and comparable to the biogeochemical effect.

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Uncertainties in climate responses to past land cover change: First results from the LUCID intercomparison study

Cited by 478 publications

References 19 publications

Potential climate forcing of land use and land cover change

Potential climate forcing of land use and land cover change

Regionalizing global climate models

Simulating global and local surface temperature changes due to Holocene anthropogenic land cover change

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