Climate Stabilization Targets Emissions, Concentrations, and Impacts over Decades to Millennia (2011) / Chapter Skim
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Therefore, emissions reductions choices made today matter in determining impacts experienced not just over the next few decades, but in the coming centuries and millennia. Policy choices can be informed by recent advances in climate science that quantify the relationships between increases in carbon dioxide and global warming, related climate changes, and resulting impacts, such as changes in streamflow, wildfires, crop productivity, extreme hot summers, and sea level rise.
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. IMPACTS CAN BE LINKED TO GLOBAL MEAN TEMPERATURES To date, climate stabilization goals have been most often discussed in terms of stabilizing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (e.g., 350
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. This report concludes that, for a variety of conceptual and practical reasons, it is more effective to assess climate stabilization goals by using global mean temperature change as the primary metric.
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of global warming (see Figure Syn.3) , including: • 5-10 percent changes in precipitation in a number of regions • 3-10 percent increases in heavy rainfall • 5-15 percent yield reductions of a number of crops • 5-10 percent changes in streamflow in many river basins worldwide
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of global warming. Many other important impacts of climate change are difficult to quantify for a given change in global average temperature, in part because temperature is not the only driver of change for some impacts; multiple environmental and other human factors come into play.
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The report quantifies -- per degree of warming -- several anticipated effects and impacts of global warming, including changes in streamflow, wildfires, crop produc R01705 Climate fig Brief.eps tivity, extreme hot summers, and sea level rise. The graphical part of the diagram shows how atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide correspond to temperatures -- transient, or near-term warming (in blue)
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Emissions reductions larger than about 80 percent, relative to whatever peak global emissions rate may be reached, are required to approximately stabilize carbon dioxide concentrations for a century or so at any chosen target level (see Figure Syn.3)
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. The lower graph shows how carbon dioxide concentrations would be expected to evolve depending upon emissions for one illustrative case, but this applies for any chosen target.
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