Abstract
Trajectories of policy-driven transient temperatures are reported here for four different maximum temperature targets through 2100 and a “no-policy” baseline because it is they, and their associated manifestations in other impact and risk dimensions, that natural and human and natural systems see in real time as their common future unfolds. It follows that it is they that inform both the reactive and (for human systems) anticipatory responses that embedded decision-makers would contemplate in the future. Median pathways as well as 5th and 95th percentile alternatives for each set of scenarios are reported in decadal increments from 2010 through 2100. Two illustrations (agricultural yields and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change “reasons for concern”) are presented to provide provocative context within which to begin to see their potential value across a wide range of applications.
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Notes
Fawcett et al. (2015) examine a full range of emission scenarios reported in the Fifth Assessment of the IPCC for a variety of policy scenarios: a “no-policy case”, a low policy case (the Paris Accord and little else), a continuation of the pace of emission reductions consistent with the Paris commitments, and an increase in the stringency of Paris Accord commitments to increase the likelihood of achieving a 2 °C warming cap. The authors report distributions (likelihoods) of ranges of temperature increases ranging from 1 to 1.5 °C to more than 4 °C in 2100. This paper works from a “no policy” baseline that they report as the median of the first cohort of emission scenarios. See Section 2 of the SM to view their figure (Figure SM-1).
The implementation discount rates for the 1.5, 2.0, 2.5, and 3.0 °C targets are 15.4, 8.6, 6.9, and 5.7%, respectively.
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Yohe, G.W. Characterizing transient temperature trajectories for assessing the value of achieving alternative temperature targets. Climatic Change 145, 469–479 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-017-2100-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-017-2100-3