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In the observational record half a degree matters

Nature Climate Change volume 7, pages 460–462 (2017)Cite this article

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An Author Correction to this article was published on 29 January 2018

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Discriminating the climate impacts of half-degree warming increments is high on the post-Paris science agenda. Here we argue that evidence from the observational record provides useful guidance for such assessments.

A key challenge for the upcoming IPCC special report on 1.5 °C is to discriminate between climate impacts at half-degree warming increments. The differences between present-day warming of about 1 °C, and warming levels of 1.5 °C and 2 °C global mean temperature (GMT) increase above pre-industrial levels are of special interest.

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Figure 1: Differences in extreme weather event indices for 0.5 °C warming over the observational record.
Figure 2: Historical 0.5 °C warming is representative for 1.5 °C versus 2 °C differences.

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  • 29 January 2018

    In the version of this Commentary originally published, in Figs 1 and 2 in the main Commentary, as well as Figs 3, 9 and 11 in the Supplementary Information, the colours for HadEX2 and GHCNDEX were incorrectly switched: HadEX2 should have been blue and GHCNDEX should have been red. This has now been corrected in the online versions of the Commentary.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the modelling groups, the Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison, and the WCRP's Working Group on Coupled Modelling for their roles in making available the CMIP multi-model datasets. Support for this dataset is provided by the Office of Science, US Department of Energy. We thank the CLIMDEX team for making available the gridded observational data sets at http://www.climdex.org through the WMO ETCCDI, Linkage Project LP100200690. C.F.S. and P.P. acknowledge support by the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety (16_II_148_Global_A_IMPACT).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Climate Analytics, Ritterstraße 3, Berlin, Germany

    Carl-Friedrich Schleussner & Peter Pfleiderer

  2. Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Telegrafenberg A62, 14473, Potsdam, Germany

    Carl-Friedrich Schleussner & Peter Pfleiderer

  3. Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science, Universitätstrasse 16, ETH Zürich, 8092, Zurich, Zürich, Switzerland

    Erich M. Fischer

Authors
  1. Carl-Friedrich Schleussner
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  2. Peter Pfleiderer
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  3. Erich M. Fischer
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Correspondence to Carl-Friedrich Schleussner.

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Schleussner, CF., Pfleiderer, P. & Fischer, E. In the observational record half a degree matters. Nature Clim Change 7, 460–462 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate3320

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