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Studying climate stabilization at Paris Agreement levels

Nature Climate Change volume 11, pages 1010–1013 (2021)Cite this article

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Since the Paris Agreement, the impacts of 1.5 and 2 °C global warming have been emphasized, but the rate of warming also has regional effects. A new framework of model experiments is needed to increase our understanding of climate stabilization and its impacts.

Following the Paris Agreement, there have been hundreds of studies researching the impacts of 1.5 °C and 2 °C of global warming above pre-industrial levels. Multiple methods have been developed to address the question of how regional climate change and impacts differ between global warming levels (GWLs), including pattern scaling1,2, time-slicing of existing climate projections3, single coupled-model experiments4 and multi-model atmosphere-only experiments5. The problem is that, while the Paris Agreement is not explicit, the intention is that global temperatures will be stabilized well below the 2 °C or, preferably, the 1.5 °C, GWL and will not continue to increase6, but the methods described above are based on transient projections in one form or another (Table 1) that do not reflect stabilized climates. This issue has come to the fore with the use of a time-sampling approach in transient simulations generating GWL-based climate projections in the Sixth Assessment Report of Working Group 1 (AR6 WG1) of the IPCC.

Table 1 Existing tools and techniques for analysing climates at the Paris Agreement global warming levels using publicly available data
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Fig. 1: A framework for delivering climate projections consistent with the Paris Agreement.

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Acknowledgements

A.D.K. was funded by the Australian Research Council (DE180100638). J.M.K.S. was funded by Australian Research Council grant FL160100028 to J. Woodhead. A.J.D. and E.H. were funded by the UK NERC REAL project (NE/N018591/1).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Geography, Earth, and Atmospheric Sciences, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

    Andrew D. King, J. M. Kale Sniderman & Josephine R. Brown

  2. ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

    Andrew D. King & Josephine R. Brown

  3. National Centre for Atmospheric Science and Department of Meteorology, University of Reading, Reading, UK

    Andrea J. Dittus & Ed Hawkins

  4. CSIRO Oceans and Atmosphere, Aspendale, Victoria, Australia

    Tilo Ziehn

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  1. Andrew D. King
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A.D.K. conceived the Comment and led the writing. All authors contributed to the writing and revision of the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Andrew D. King.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Peer review information Nature Climate Change thanks Tabea Lissner and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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King, A.D., Sniderman, J.M.K., Dittus, A.J. et al. Studying climate stabilization at Paris Agreement levels. Nat. Clim. Chang. 11, 1010–1013 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-021-01225-0

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