Abstract
Most climatological studies characterize the future climate change as the evolution between a fixed current baseline and the future. However, as climate continues to change, ecosystems and societies will need to continuously adapt to a moving target. Here, we consider indicators of the pace of temperature change estimated from CMIP5 projections of an ensemble of climate models. We define the pace as a difference in relevant metrics between two successive 20-year periods, i.e. with a continually moving baseline. Under the strongest emission pathway (RCP8.5), the warming rate strongly increases, and peaks before 2080. All latitudes experience at least a doubling in the warming rate compared to the current period. Significant shifts in temperature distributions above twice the standard deviation between two successive 20-year periods expand from 9 % of continents on average currently to 41 % by 2060 onwards. In these regions, a warm year with a return period of about 50 years would become quite common 20 years later. The fraction of the world population exposed to such shifts will grow from 8 % to about 60 % on average, i.e. 6 billion people. Tropical areas are strongly affected, especially West Africa and South-East Asia. Low mitigation (RCP6.0) limits the warming rate to current values. Medium mitigation (RCP4.5) even reduces population exposure to significant shifts in temperature distributions to negligible values by the end of the century. Strong mitigation (RCP2.6) is the only option that generates a return to values similar to the historical period for all our indicators related to the pace of temperature change. This alternative way to analyze climate projections can yield new insights for the climate impacts and adaptation communities.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Collins M et al (2013) Long-term climate change: projections, commitments and irreversibility. In: Climate change 2013: the physical science basis. Contribution of working group I to the fifth assessment report of the intergovernmental panel on climate change. Cambridge University Press
Dawson TP, Jackson ST, House JI, Prentice IC, Mace GM (2011) Beyond predictions: biodiversity conservation in a changing climate. Science 332(6025):53–58
de Elía R, Biner S, Frigon A, Côté H (2014) Timescales associated with climate change and their relevance in adaptation strategies. Clim Change 126 (1–2):93–106
Drijfhout S, Bathiany S, Beaulieu C, Brovkin V, Claussen M, Huntingford C, Scheffer M, Sgubin G, Swingedouw D (2015) Catalogue of abrupt shifts in intergovernmental panel on climate change climate models. Proc Natl Acad Sci 112 (43):E5777–E5786
Estrada F, Perron P, Martinez-Lopez B (2013) Statistically derived contributions of diverse human influences to twentieth-century temperature changes. Nat Geosci 6:1050–1055
Flato G et al (2013) Evaluation of climate models. In: Climate Change 2013: the physical science basis. Contribution of working group I to the fifth assessment report of the intergovernmental panel on climate change. Cambridge University Press
Forster PM, Andrews T, Good P, Gregory JM, Jackson LS, Zelinka M (2013) Evaluating adjusted forcing and model spread for historical and future scenarios in the CMIP5 generation of climate models. J Geophys Res Atmos 118(3):1139–1150
Garnier E (2010) Les dérangements du temps, 500 ans de chaud et froids en Europe. Plon
Hallegatte S (2008) A note on including climate change adaptation in an international scheme. IDDRI - Idées pour le débat 18:1–15
Hansen J, Ruedy R, Sato M, Lo K (2010) Global surface temperature change. Rev Geophys 48(4):RG4004
Hansen J, Sato M, Ruedy R (2012) Perception of climate change. Proc Natl Acad Sci 109(37):2415–2423
Hartmann D L et al (2013) Observations: atmosphere and surface. In: Climate change 2013: the physical science basis. Contribution of working group I to the fifth assessment report of the intergovernmental panel on climate change. Cambridge University Press
Hawkins E, Sutton R (2009) The potential to narrow uncertainty in regional climate predictions. Bull Am Meteorol Soc 90:1095–1107
Hawkins E, Sutton R (2011) The potential to narrow uncertainty in projections of regional precipitation change. Clim Dyn 37(1–2):407–418
Hawkins E, Sutton R (2012) Time of emergence of climate signals. Geophys Res Lett 39(1):L01702
IPCC (2014) Summary for policymakers. In: Climate change 2014: impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability. Part A: global and sectoral aspects. Contribution of working group II to the fifth assessment report of the intergovernmental panel on climate change. Cambridge University Press, pp 1–32
Ji F, Zhaohua W, Jianping H, Chassignet EP (2014) Evolution of land surface air temperature trend. Nat Clim Chang 4(6):462–466
Jones RN et al (2014) Foundations for decision making. In: Climate change 2014: Impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability. Part A: global and sectoral aspects. Contribution of working group II to the fifth assessment report of the intergovernmental panel on climate change. Cambridge University Press, pp 195–228
Klein RJT et al (2014) Adaptation opportunities, constraints, and limits. In: Climate change 2014: impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability. Part A: global and sectoral aspects. Contribution of working group II to the fifth assessment report of the intergovernmental panel on climate change. Cambridge University Press, pp 899–943
Lammel A, Dugas E, Guillen Gutierrez E (2012) L’apport de la psychologie cognitive à l’étude de l’adaptation aux changements climatiques : la notion de vulnérabilité cognitive. VertigO 12(1)
Liebmann B, Dole RM, Jones C, Bladé I, Allured D (2010) Influence of choice of time period on global surface temperature trend estimates. Bull Am Meteorol Soc 91(11):1485–1491
Mahlstein I, Knutti R, Solomon S, Portmann RW (2011) Early onset of significant local warming in law latitude countries. Environ Res Lett 6:034009
Manabe S, Bryan K, Spelman MJ (1990) Transient response of a global ocean-atmosphere model to a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide. J Phys Oceanogr 20(5):722–749
Masson-Delmotte V et al (2013) Information from Paleoclimate Archives. In: Climate change 2013: The physical science basis. Contribution of working group I to the fifth assessment report of the intergovernmental panel on climate change. Cambridge University Press
McGregor HV et al (2015) Robust global ocean cooling trend for the pre-industrial Common Era. Nat Geosci
Meinshausen M, Smith S, Calvin K, Daniel J, Kainuma M, Lamarque JF, Matsumoto K, Montzka S, Raper S, Riahi K, Thomson A, Velders G, van Vuuren D (2011) The RCP greenhouse gas concentrations and their extensions from 1765 to 2300. Clim Change 109(1–2):213–241
Morice CP, Kennedy JJ, Rayner NA, Jones PD (2012) Quantifying uncertainties in global and regional temperature change using an ensemble of observational estimates: the HadCRUT4 data set. J Geophys Res Atmos 117(D8):D08101
O’Neill BC, Oppenheimer M (2004) Climate change impacts are sensitive to the concentration stabilization path. Proc Natl Acad Sci 101(47):16411–16416
Poli P, Hersbach H, Tan D, Dee D, Thépaut J N, Simmons A, Peubey C, Laloyaux P, Komori T, Berrisford P, Dragani R, Trémolet Y, Holm E, Bonavita M, Isaksen L, Fisher M (2013) The data assimilation system and initial performance evaluation of the ECMWF pilot reanalysis of the 20th-century assimilating surface observations only (ERA-20C). ERA Report Series (14)
Seneviratne SI et al (2012), Changes in climate extremes and their impacts on the natural physical environment. In: Managing the risks of extreme events and disasters to advance climate change adaptation. A special report of working groups I and II of the intergovernmental panel on climate change (IPCC). Cambridge University Press
Settele J et al (2014) Terrestrial and inland water systems. In: Climate change 2014: impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability. Part A: global and sectoral aspects. Contribution of Working Group II to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Cambridge University Press, pp 195–228
Smith SJ, Edmonds J, Hartin CA, Mundra A, Calvin K (2015) Near-term acceleration in the rate of temperature change. Nat Clim Chang 5:333–336
Spence A, Poortinga W, Pidgeon N (2012) The psychological distance of climate change. Risk Anal 32(6):957–972
Street R, Jacob D, Parry M, Runge T, Scott J (2015) A European research and innovation Roadmap for Climate Services. European Commission
Taylor KE, Stouffer RJ, Meehl GA (2011) An overview of CMIP5 and the experiment design. Bull Am Meteorol Soc 93(4):485–498
Van Vuuren DP et al (2011) The representative concentration pathways: an overview. Clim Change 109(1–2):5–31
Vose RS et al (2012) NOAA’s merged land-ocean surface temperature analysis. Bull Am Meteorol Soc 93:1677–1685
Acknowledgments
We acknowledge the World Climate Research Programme’s Working Group on Coupled Modeling, which is in charge of the fifth Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, and we thank the climate modeling groups for producing and making available their model output. To analyze the CMIP5 data, this study benefited from the IPSL Prodiguer-Ciclad facility which is supported by CNRS, UPMC, and Labex L-IPSL, which is funded by the ANR (Grant #ANR-10-LABX-0018) and by the European FP7 IS-ENES2 project (Grant #312979). We especially thank S. Denvil and J. Raciazek for supervising data fetching. We also warmly acknowledge R. Knutti at ETH Zürich, C. Nangini at LSCE-IPSL and L. Terray at CERFACS for their comments and useful advice on our work. This study was accomplished as part of a PhD thesis funded by the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) and the French Ministry of Defense (DGA). We thus acknowledge both organizations for making this work possible.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Electronic supplementary material
Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Chavaillaz, Y., Joussaume, S., Dehecq, A. et al. Investigating the pace of temperature change and its implications over the twenty-first century. Climatic Change 137, 187–200 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-016-1659-4
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-016-1659-4