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- ItemThe IPCC Sixth Assessment Report WGIII climate assessment of mitigation pathways: from emissions to global temperatures(Katlenburg-Lindau : Copernicus, 2022) Kikstra, Jarmo S.; Nicholls, Zebedee R. J.; Smith, Christopher J.; Lewis, Jared; Lamboll, Robin D.; Byers, Edward; Sandstad, Marit; Meinshausen, Malte; Gidden, Matthew J.; Rogelj, Joeri; Kriegler, Elmar; Peters, Glen P.; Fuglestvedt, Jan S.; Skeie, Ragnhild B.; Samset, Bjørn H.; Wienpahl, Laura; van Vuuren, Detlef P.; van der Wijst, Kaj-Ivar; Al Khourdajie, Alaa; Forster, Piers M.; Reisinger, Andy; Schaeffer, Roberto; Riahi, KeywanWhile the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) physical science reports usually assess a handful of future scenarios, the Working Group III contribution on climate mitigation to the IPCC's Sixth Assessment Report (AR6 WGIII) assesses hundreds to thousands of future emissions scenarios. A key task in WGIII is to assess the global mean temperature outcomes of these scenarios in a consistent manner, given the challenge that the emissions scenarios from different integrated assessment models (IAMs) come with different sectoral and gas-to-gas coverage and cannot all be assessed consistently by complex Earth system models. In this work, we describe the "climate-assessment"workflow and its methods, including infilling of missing emissions and emissions harmonisation as applied to 1202 mitigation scenarios in AR6 WGIII. We evaluate the global mean temperature projections and effective radiative forcing (ERF) characteristics of climate emulators FaIRv1.6.2 and MAGICCv7.5.3 and use the CICERO simple climate model (CICERO-SCM) for sensitivity analysis. We discuss the implied overshoot severity of the mitigation pathways using overshoot degree years and look at emissions and temperature characteristics of scenarios compatible with one possible interpretation of the Paris Agreement. We find that the lowest class of emissions scenarios that limit global warming to "1.5 ° C (with a probability of greater than 50 %) with no or limited overshoot"includes 97 scenarios for MAGICCv7.5.3 and 203 for FaIRv1.6.2. For the MAGICCv7.5.3 results, "limited overshoot"typically implies exceedance of median temperature projections of up to about 0.1 ° C for up to a few decades before returning to below 1.5 ° C by or before the year 2100. For more than half of the scenarios in this category that comply with three criteria for being "Paris-compatible", including net-zero or net-negative greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, median temperatures decline by about 0.3-0.4 ° C after peaking at 1.5-1.6 ° C in 2035-2055. We compare the methods applied in AR6 with the methods used for SR1.5 and discuss their implications. This article also introduces a "climate-assessment"Python package which allows for fully reproducing the IPCC AR6 WGIII temperature assessment. This work provides a community tool for assessing the temperature outcomes of emissions pathways and provides a basis for further work such as extending the workflow to include downscaling of climate characteristics to a regional level and calculating impacts.
- ItemThe Zero Emissions Commitment Model Intercomparison Project (ZECMIP) contribution to C4MIP: Quantifying committed climate changes following zero carbon emissions(Katlenburg-Lindau : Copernicus, 2019) Jones, Chris D.; Frölicher, Thomas L.; Koven, Charles; MacDougall, Andrew H.; Matthews, H. Damon; Zickfeld, Kirsten; Rogelj, Joeri; Tokarska, Katarzyna B.; Gillett, Nathan P.; Ilyina, Tatiana; Meinshausen, Malte; Mengis, Nadine; Séférian, Roland; Eby, Michael; Burger, Friedrich A.The amount of additional future temperature change following a complete cessation of CO2 emissions is a measure of the unrealized warming to which we are committed due to CO2 already emitted to the atmosphere. This “zero emissions commitment” (ZEC) is also an important quantity when estimating the remaining carbon budget – a limit on the total amount of CO2 emissions consistent with limiting global mean temperature at a particular level. In the recent IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 ∘C, the carbon budget framework used to calculate the remaining carbon budget for 1.5 ∘C included the assumption that the ZEC due to CO2 emissions is negligible and close to zero. Previous research has shown significant uncertainty even in the sign of the ZEC. To close this knowledge gap, we propose the Zero Emissions Commitment Model Intercomparison Project (ZECMIP), which will quantify the amount of unrealized temperature change that occurs after CO2 emissions cease and investigate the geophysical drivers behind this climate response. Quantitative information on ZEC is a key gap in our knowledge, and one that will not be addressed by currently planned CMIP6 simulations, yet it is crucial for verifying whether carbon budgets need to be adjusted to account for any unrealized temperature change resulting from past CO2 emissions. We request only one top-priority simulation from comprehensive general circulation Earth system models (ESMs) and Earth system models of intermediate complexity (EMICs) – a branch from the 1 % CO2 run with CO2 emissions set to zero at the point of 1000 PgC of total CO2 emissions in the simulation – with the possibility for additional simulations, if resources allow. ZECMIP is part of CMIP6, under joint sponsorship by C4MIP and CDRMIP, with associated experiment names to enable data submissions to the Earth System Grid Federation. All data will be published and made freely available.