Adjusting mitigation pathways to stabilize climate at 1.5 and 2.0 °C rise in global temperatures to year 2300

Goodwin, Philip, Brown, Sally, Haigh, Ivan, Nicholls, Robert ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9715-1109 and Matter, Juerg (2018) Adjusting mitigation pathways to stabilize climate at 1.5 and 2.0 °C rise in global temperatures to year 2300. Earth's Future, 6 (3). pp. 601-615. ISSN 2328-4277

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Abstract

To avoid the most dangerous consequences of anthropogenic climate change, the Paris Agreement provides a clear and agreed climate mitigation target of stabilizing global surface warming to under 2.0 °C above preindustrial, and preferably closer to 1.5 °C. However, policy makers do not currently know exactly what carbon emissions pathways to follow to stabilize warming below these agreed targets, because there is large uncertainty in future temperature rise for any given pathway. This large uncertainty makes it difficult for a cautious policy maker to avoid either: (1) allowing warming to exceed the agreed target; or (2) cutting global emissions more than is required to satisfy the agreed target, and their associated societal costs. This study presents a novel Adjusting Mitigation Pathway (AMP) approach to restrict future warming to policy-driven targets, in which future emissions reductions are not fully determined now but respond to future surface warming each decade in a self-adjusting manner. A large ensemble of Earth system model simulations, constrained by geological and historical observations of past climate change, demonstrates our self-adjusting mitigation approach for a range of climate stabilization targets ranging from 1.5 to 4.5 °C, and generates AMP scenarios up to year 2300 for surface warming, carbon emissions, atmospheric CO2, global mean sea level, and surface ocean acidification. We find that lower 21st century warming targets will significantly reduce ocean acidification this century, and will avoid up to 4m of sea-level rise by year 2300 relative to a high-end scenario.

Item Type: Article
Uncontrolled Keywords: sdg 13 - climate action,sdg 14 - life below water ,/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 > Collaborative Centre for Sustainable Use of the Seas
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Depositing User: LivePure Connector
Date Deposited: 07 Dec 2019 02:22
Last Modified: 22 Oct 2022 05:34
URI: https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/73308
DOI: 10.1002/2017EF000732

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