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Broad range of 2050 warming from an observationally constrained large climate model ensemble

Abstract

Incomplete understanding of three aspects of the climate system—equilibrium climate sensitivity, rate of ocean heat uptake and historical aerosol forcing—and the physical processes underlying them lead to uncertainties in our assessment of the global-mean temperature evolution in the twenty-first century1,2. Explorations of these uncertainties have so far relied on scaling approaches3,4, large ensembles of simplified climate models1,2, or small ensembles of complex coupled atmosphere–ocean general circulation models5,6 which under-represent uncertainties in key climate system properties derived from independent sources7,8,9. Here we present results from a multi-thousand-member perturbed-physics ensemble of transient coupled atmosphere–ocean general circulation model simulations. We find that model versions that reproduce observed surface temperature changes over the past 50 years show global-mean temperature increases of 1.4–3 K by 2050, relative to 1961–1990, under a mid-range forcing scenario. This range of warming is broadly consistent with the expert assessment provided by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report10, but extends towards larger warming than observed in ensembles-of-opportunity5 typically used for climate impact assessments. From our simulations, we conclude that warming by the middle of the twenty-first century that is stronger than earlier estimates is consistent with recent observed temperature changes and a mid-range ‘no mitigation’ scenario for greenhouse-gas emissions.

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Figure 1: Evolution of uncertainties in reconstructed global-mean temperature projections under SRES A1B in the HadCM3L ensemble.
Figure 2: Goodness-of-fit to recent temperature changes as a function of global-mean warming.
Figure 3: Surface temperature anomaly fields relative to 1961–1990 for 2001–2010 hindcast and 2041–2060 forecast for a low-response ensemble member, A (ΔT2050=1.4 K), and high-response ensemble member, B (ΔT2050=3 K) labelled in Fig. 2.

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Acknowledgements

We thank all participants in the climateprediction.net experiments, as well as the academic institutions and the individuals who have helped make the experiment possible, particularly D. Anderson for developing the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing. We also thank the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), the European Union FP6 WATCH and ENSEMBLES projects, the Oxford Martin School, the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment and Microsoft Research for support and J. Renouf and co-workers at the BBC for their documentaries explaining and promoting this experiment. D.J.R. was supported by a NERC PhD studentship with a CASE award from the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (CEH) Wallingford.

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All authors contributed to the design and implementation of the experiment. D.J.R. performed the analysis and wrote the paper, with significant contributions from D.J.F., M.R.A. and N.M. All authors commented on the paper.

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Correspondence to Daniel J. Rowlands.

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Rowlands, D., Frame, D., Ackerley, D. et al. Broad range of 2050 warming from an observationally constrained large climate model ensemble. Nature Geosci 5, 256–260 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo1430

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