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Allowable carbon emissions lowered by multiple climate targets

Nature volume 499, pages 197–201 (2013)Cite this article

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Abstract

Climate targets are designed to inform policies that would limit the magnitude and impacts of climate change caused by anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases and other substances. The target that is currently recognized by most world governments1 places a limit of two degrees Celsius on the global mean warming since preindustrial times. This would require large sustained reductions in carbon dioxide emissions during the twenty-first century and beyond2,3,4. Such a global temperature target, however, is not sufficient to control many other quantities, such as transient sea level rise5, ocean acidification6,7 and net primary production on land8,9. Here, using an Earth system model of intermediate complexity (EMIC) in an observation-informed Bayesian approach, we show that allowable carbon emissions are substantially reduced when multiple climate targets are set. We take into account uncertainties in physical and carbon cycle model parameters, radiative efficiencies10, climate sensitivity11 and carbon cycle feedbacks12,13 along with a large set of observational constraints. Within this framework, we explore a broad range of economically feasible greenhouse gas scenarios from the integrated assessment community14,15,16,17 to determine the likelihood of meeting a combination of specific global and regional targets under various assumptions. For any given likelihood of meeting a set of such targets, the allowable cumulative emissions are greatly reduced from those inferred from the temperature target alone. Therefore, temperature targets alone are unable to comprehensively limit the risks from anthropogenic emissions.

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Figure 1: Flowchart illustrating the applied methodology.
Figure 2: Probabilities of staying below the targets defined in set 3 up to year 2100.
Figure 3: Allowable cumulative fossil-fuel CO2 emissions for target set 3 selected for illustrative purposes.
Figure 4: Allowable cumulative twenty-first century fossil-fuel carbon emissions for multiple targets.

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Acknowledgements

We thank T. Kaminski for providing the Global Atmospheric Tracer Model (TM2) transport matrices, J. M. Lyman, H. Keith, and S. Gerber for providing observational data sets, R. Spahni, R. Roth, S. Ritz, B. Stocker and K. Strassmann for discussions and help with the model code, and K. Bieri for the IT support. We are grateful to the modelling teams participating in the EMF-21, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) GGI, and AME projects for providing scenario data, and to the EMIC AR5 and coupled model intercomparison (CMIP5) projects for providing model forcing data sets. This project was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and the European Project on Ocean Acidification (EPOCA 211384) and the European Project CARBOCHANGE (264879) which both received funding from the European Commission’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/20072013).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Climate and Environmental Physics, University of Bern, 3012 Bern, Switzerland ,

    Marco Steinacher, Fortunat Joos & Thomas F. Stocker

  2. Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research, University of Bern, 3012 Bern, Switzerland ,

    Marco Steinacher, Fortunat Joos & Thomas F. Stocker

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  1. Marco Steinacher
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Contributions

All authors contributed to designing the research and interpreting the results. M.S. ran the climate model, assembled the observational data sets, and performed the statistical analysis. M.S. wrote the paper with inputs from F.J. and T.F.S.

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Correspondence to Marco Steinacher.

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Steinacher, M., Joos, F. & Stocker, T. Allowable carbon emissions lowered by multiple climate targets. Nature 499, 197–201 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature12269

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