Climate Stabilization Targets Emissions, Concentrations, and Impacts over Decades to Millennia (2011) / Chapter Skim
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Pages 49-58
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From page 49... ...
One way of evaluating these choices is to consider the climate changes and impacts that are projected if human actions were to cause greenhouse gases to increase to particular concentration levels and then stabilize. The focus of this study is on the alternatives for the planet's future represented by stabilization of greenhouse gases at a broad range of "target" levels, hereafter referred to as stabilization targets.
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From page 50... ...
For example, with global warming, fewer people may die in cold waves while more people die in heat waves; similarly, crops may be more productive in parts of Canada while less productive in the United States, raising issues of international food trade and transfer (see Section 5.1)
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From page 51... ...
It should be emphasized that these should not be considered negligible; indeed some of these could be very important, or even dominant, in evaluating future risks due to anthropogenic climate change. Many studies involve the use of "pattern scaling" whereby it is assumed that the spatial pattern of future climate change computed for one level of perturbation (i.e., radiative forcing)
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From page 52... ...
This implies that only a portion of the climate change is "realized" during a period of increasing greenhouse gas concen trations. If greenhouse gases are stabilized following a period of changing radiative forcing, the climate system response within a few centuries can be expected to reflect the equilibrium climate sensitivity (see Section 3.2)
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From page 53... ...
They present climate changes and impacts responses as a function of warming, that is, corresponding to stabilization targets of 350 to 2,000 ppmv CO2-equivalent, considering time frames up to 2100, as well as very long time frames several thousand years in the future. 1.2 ATTRIBUTION We offer here a brief summary of detection and attribution results as they provide part of the foundation of the discussion of future projected changes in the physical climate system and the impacts on natural and human systems that could ensue from them.
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From page 54... ...
When moving from temperature to other parameters and from global and continental scales to smaller regional scales, the confidence and robustness of the results diminish but are still high for many other measures of physical changes (e.g., sea level pressure, temperature extremes, zonally averaged precipitation, atmospheric moisture and surface specific humidity)
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From page 55... ...
Warming of the upper layer of the oceans Likely IPCC AR4 WG1 Ch9 (IPCC, 2007a) Sea level rise in latter half of 20th century Very Likely IPCC AR4 WG1 Ch9 (IPCC, 2007a)
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From page 56... ...
56 CLIMATE STABILIZATION TARGETS TABLE 1.1 Continued Higher temperatures/early snowmelt/early run-off in U.S. NA Maurer et al., 2007; Southwest Barnett et al., 2008; Bonfils et al., 2008, Hidalgo et al., 2009; Pierce et al., 2008 Arctic and Antarctic temperature increases; Arctic seaice NA Gillett et al., decrease; Arctic precipitation increase 2008a; Min et al., 2008.
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From page 57... ...
positive spatial correlation between said impacts and regionally differentiated warming. This reasoning is at the basis of the list of impacts attributed to global warming by IPCC AR4 WG2 in its Summary for Policy Makers, which we list, together with results from two studies that applied formal D&A methodology,2 in Table 1.2.
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