Journal article

Implications of non-linearities between cumulative CO(2)emissions and CO2-induced warming for assessing the remaining carbon budget

ZRJ Nicholls, R Gieseke, J Lewis, A Nauels, M Meinshausen

ENVIRONMENTAL RESEARCH LETTERS | IOP PUBLISHING LTD | Published : 2020

Abstract

To determine the remaining carbon budget, a new framework was introduced in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 °C (SR1.5). We refer to this as a 'segmented' framework because it considers the various components of the carbon budget derivation independently from one another. Whilst implementing this segmented framework, in SR1.5 the assumption was that there is a strictly linear relationship between cumulative CO2 emissions and CO2-induced warming i.e. the TCRE is constant and can be applied to a range of emissions scenarios. Here we test whether such an approach is able to replicate results from model simulations that take the climate syst..

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