The relationship between peak warming and cumulative CO2 emissions, and its use to quantify vulnerabilities in the carbon-climate-human system

Abstract

Interactions between the carbon cycle, climate and human societies are subject to several major vulnerabilities, broadly defined as factors contributing to the risk of harm from human-induced climate change. We assess five vulnerabilities: (1) effects of increasing CO2 on the partition of anthropogenic carbon between atmospheric, land and ocean reservoirs; (2) effects of climate change (quantified by temperature) on CO2 fluxes; (3) uncertainty in climate sensitivity; (4) non-CO2 radiative forcing and (5) anthropogenic CO2 emissions. Our analysis uses a physically based expression for Tp(Qp), the peak warming Tp associated with a cumulative anthropogenic CO2 emission Qp to the time of peak wa..