Journal article
Climate extremes in Europe at 1.5 and 2 degrees of global warming
AD King, DJ Karoly
Environmental Research Letters | IOP Publishing Ltd | Published : 2017
Abstract
There is an international effort to attempt to limit global warming to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels, however, there is a lack of quantitative analysis on the benefits of holding global warming to such a level. In this study, coupled climate model simulations are used to form large ensembles of simulated years at 1.5 °C and 2 °C of global warming. These ensembles are used to assess projected changes in the frequency and magnitude of European climate extremes at these warming levels. For example, we find that events similar to the European record hot summer of 2003, which caused tens of thousands of excess deaths, would be very likely at least 24% less frequent in a world at 1.5 °C globa..
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Funding Acknowledgements
We thank the anonymous reviewers for providing helpful and constructive feedback. We acknowdedge the support of the NCI facility in Australia and the World Climate Research Programme's Working Group on Coupled Modelling, which is responsible for CMIP, and we thank the climate modelling groups for producing and making available their model output. For CMIP the US Department of Energy's Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Inter-comparison provides coordinating support and led development of software infrastructure in partnership with the Global Organization for Earth System Science Portals. We acknowledge the E-OBS data set from the EU-FP6 project ENSEMBLES (http://ensembles-eu.metoffice.com) and the data providers in the ECA&D project (www.ecad.eu). Both authors are funded through the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science (CE110001028). David Karoly acknowledges support from the Oxford Martin School while he was a Visiting Fellow during January to July 2017.