Journal article
Higher CO2 concentrations increase extreme event risk in a 1.5 °c world
HS Baker, RJ Millar, DJ Karoly, U Beyerle, BP Guillod, D Mitchell, H Shiogama, S Sparrow, T Woollings, MR Allen
Nature Climate Change | NATURE PORTFOLIO | Published : 2018
Abstract
The Paris Agreement 1 aims to 'pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels.' However, it has been suggested that temperature targets alone are insufficient to limit the risks associated with anthropogenic emissions 2,3. Here, using an ensemble of model simulations, we show that atmospheric CO2 increase-an even more predictable consequence of emissions than global temperature increase-has a significant direct impact on Northern Hemisphere summer temperature, heat stress, and tropical precipitation extremes. Hence in an iterative climate mitigation regime aiming solely for a specific temperature goal, an unexpectedly low climate response may have corr..
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Awarded by Office of Science
Funding Acknowledgements
H.S.B. is supported by Natural Environment Research Council grant NE/L002612/1. R.J.M. was supported by Natural Environment Research Council grant NE/P014844/1. D.M. is supported by a NERC independent fellowship. H.S. was supported by the Integrated Research Program for Advancing Climate Models (TOUGOU program) from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Japan and ERTDF 2-1702 of Environmental Restoration and Conservation Agency, Japan. The authors thank the HAPPI project team and the modelling centres who contributed simulations. This research used science gateway resources of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, a DOE Office of Science User Facility supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231. The authors are grateful to F. Otto for making available results from event attribution experiments that provided the original motivation for this study. We would like to thank our colleagues at the Oxford eResearch Centre: A. Bowery, M. Rashid, P. Uhe and D. Wallom for their technical expertise. We would like to thank the Met Office Hadley Centre PRECIS team for their technical and scientific support for the development and application of weather@Home. Finally, we would like to thank all of the volunteers who have donated their computing time to climateprediction.net and weather@home.