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Sea-level commitment as a gauge for climate policy

Nature Climate Change volume 8, pages 653–655 (2018)Cite this article

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A well-defined relationship between global mean sea-level rise and cumulative carbon emissions can be used to inform policy about emission limits to prevent dangerous and essentially permanent anthropogenic interference with the climate system.

It is now clear that cumulative emissions of CO2 control the magnitude of long-term warming1,2, while the rate of warming is modulated by the emissions pathway3, facilitating the identification of emissions quotas that would limit global warming to a temperature target mandated by climate policy4. This framework forms the cornerstone of the Paris Agreement adopted in 2015 under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which aims to hold “the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels and [to pursue] efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 °C” by providing the means to both quantify the allowable budget of remaining emissions required to achieve the treaty goals4 and assess the implications of emissions-reduction pledges made by countries5.

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Fig. 1: GMSL as a function of cumulative carbon emissions.

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Acknowledgements

M.E. was supported by NSERC (grant no. 2017-03775) and Compute Canada. A.C.M. was supported by NSF grant no. 1418053. A.L. was supported by the German Science Foundation DFG grant no. SPP 1158. J.R. was supported by the Oxford Martin School Visiting Fellowship Programme.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR, USA

    Peter U. Clark, Alan C. Mix & David J. Wrathall

  2. School of Earth and Ocean Sciences, University of Victoria, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada

    Michael Eby

  3. Department of Geography, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada

    Michael Eby

  4. Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Potsdam, Germany

    Anders Levermann

  5. Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA

    Anders Levermann

  6. Institute of Physics, Potsdam University, Potsdam, Germany

    Anders Levermann

  7. ENE Program, IIASA, Laxenburg, Austria

    Joeri Rogelj

  8. Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Joeri Rogelj

  9. Environmental Change Institute, School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Joeri Rogelj

  10. Grantham Institute, Imperial College London, London, UK

    Joeri Rogelj

  11. Australian-German Climate and Energy College, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

    Alexander Nauels

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  1. Peter U. Clark
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  3. Michael Eby
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  7. David J. Wrathall
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Peter U. Clark.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary methods, Supplementary figures 1-3, Supplementary tables 1-2 and Supplementary references

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Clark, P.U., Mix, A.C., Eby, M. et al. Sea-level commitment as a gauge for climate policy. Nature Clim Change 8, 653–655 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-018-0226-6

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