Abstract
More than 100 countries have adopted a global warming limit of 2 °C or below (relative to pre-industrial levels) as a guiding principle for mitigation efforts to reduce climate change risks, impacts and damages1,2. However, the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions corresponding to a specified maximum warming are poorly known owing to uncertainties in the carbon cycle and the climate response. Here we provide a comprehensive probabilistic analysis aimed at quantifying GHG emission budgets for the 2000–50 period that would limit warming throughout the twenty-first century to below 2 °C, based on a combination of published distributions of climate system properties and observational constraints. We show that, for the chosen class of emission scenarios, both cumulative emissions up to 2050 and emission levels in 2050 are robust indicators of the probability that twenty-first century warming will not exceed 2 °C relative to pre-industrial temperatures. Limiting cumulative CO2 emissions over 2000–50 to 1,000 Gt CO2 yields a 25% probability of warming exceeding 2 °C—and a limit of 1,440 Gt CO2 yields a 50% probability—given a representative estimate of the distribution of climate system properties. As known 2000–06 CO2 emissions3 were ∼234 Gt CO2, less than half the proven economically recoverable oil, gas and coal reserves4,5,6 can still be emitted up to 2050 to achieve such a goal. Recent G8 Communiqués7 envisage halved global GHG emissions by 2050, for which we estimate a 12–45% probability of exceeding 2 °C—assuming 1990 as emission base year and a range of published climate sensitivity distributions. Emissions levels in 2020 are a less robust indicator, but for the scenarios considered, the probability of exceeding 2 °C rises to 53–87% if global GHG emissions are still more than 25% above 2000 levels in 2020.
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Acknowledgements
We thank T. Wigley, M. Schaeffer, K. Briffa, R. Schofield, T. S., von Deimling, J. Nabel, J. Rogelj, V. Huber and A. Fischlin for discussions and comments on earlier manuscripts and our code, J. Gregory for AOGCM diagnostics, D. Giebitz-Rheinbay and B. Kriemann for IT support and the EMF-21 modelling groups for providing their emission scenarios. M.M. thanks DAAD and the German Ministry of Environment for financial support. We acknowledge the modelling groups, the Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison (PCMDI) and the WCRP's Working Group on Coupled Modelling (WGCM) for their roles in making available the WCRP CMIP3 multi-model data set. Support of this data set is provided by the Office of Science, US Department of Energy.
Author Contributions M.M. and N.M. designed the research with input from W.H., R.K. and M.A. M.M. performed the climate modelling, N.M. the statistical analysis, W.H. the compilation of fossil fuel reserve estimates; all authors contributed to writing the paper.
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Accompanying datasets are available at http://www.primap.org.
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Supplementary Information
This file contains Supplementary Data, Supplementary Figures S1-S6 with Legends, Supplementary Tables S1-S4 and Supplementary References. (PDF 10562 kb)
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This file contains a 2C Check Tool Table for Emission Pathway Characteristics together with the background calculations. (XLS 4639 kb)
Supplementary Data
The attached source code files contain the statistical routines to constrain the parameter space of the carbon cycle climate model MAGICC6, as used within the study Meinshausen et al. (2009) "Greenhouse gas emission targets for limiting global warming to 2∞C." Nature. (ZIP 19 kb)
Please see http://www.primap.org for the complete set of EQW emission pathways that have been used in this study.
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Meinshausen, M., Meinshausen, N., Hare, W. et al. Greenhouse-gas emission targets for limiting global warming to 2 °C. Nature 458, 1158–1162 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature08017
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nature08017
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