Poorest countries experience earlier anthropogenic emergence of daily temperature extremes

Harrington, Luke, Frame, D, Fischer, Erich, Hawkins, Ed, Joshi, Manoj ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2948-2811 and Jones, Chris (2016) Poorest countries experience earlier anthropogenic emergence of daily temperature extremes. Environmental Research Letters, 11 (5). ISSN 1748-9326

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Abstract

Understanding how the emergence of the anthropogenic warming signal from the noise of internal variability translates to changes in extreme event occurrence is of crucial societal importance. By utilising simulations of cumulative carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and temperature changes from eleven earth system models, we demonstrate that the inherently lower internal variability found at tropical latitudes results in large increases in the frequency of extreme daily temperatures (exceedances of the 99.9th percentile derived from pre-industrial climate simulations) occurring much earlier than for mid-to-high latitude regions. Most of the world’s poorest people live at low latitudes, when considering 2010 GDP-PPP per capita; conversely the wealthiest population quintile disproportionately inhabit more variable mid-latitude climates. Consequently, the fraction of the global population in the lowest socio-economic quintile is exposed to substantially more frequent daily temperature extremes after much lower increases in both mean global warming and cumulative CO2 emissions.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	sdg 13 - climate action ,/dk/atira/pure/sustainabledevelopmentgoals/climate_action
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Science > School of Environmental Sciences University of East Anglia Research Groups/Centres > Theme - ClimateUEA
UEA Research Groups:	University of East Anglia Schools > Faculty of Science > Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research Faculty of Science > Research Centres > Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research Faculty of Science > Research Groups > Centre for Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences Faculty of Science > Research Groups > Climatic Research Unit
Depositing User:	Pure Connector
Date Deposited:	18 May 2016 13:00
Last Modified:	20 Oct 2023 01:03
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/58864
DOI:	10.1088/1748-9326/11/5/055007

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