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Allowable CO2 emissions based on regional and impact-related climate targets
journal contribution
posted on 2016-03-08, 11:36 authored by Sonia I. Seneviratne, Markus G. Donat, Andy J. Pitman, Reto Knutti, Robert WilbyRobert Wilby© 2016 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved. Global temperature targets, such as the widely accepted limit of an increase above pre-industrial temperatures of two degrees Celsius, may fail to communicate the urgency of reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. The translation of CO2 emissions into regional- and impact-related climate targets could be more powerful because such targets are more directly aligned with individual national interests. We illustrate this approach using regional changes in extreme temperatures and precipitation. These scale robustly with global temperature across scenarios, and thus with cumulative CO2 emissions. This is particularly relevant for changes in regional extreme temperatures on land, which are much greater than changes in the associated global mean.
Funding
S.I.S. acknowledges the European Research Council (ERC) ‘DROUGHT-HEAT’ project funded by the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme (grant agreement FP7-IDEAS-ERC-617518). A.J.P. and M.G.D. were supported by the Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science (grant number CE110001028). M.G.D. was also supported by the ARC (grant number DE1501004).
History
Department
- Geography and Environment
Published in
NatureVolume
529Issue
7587Pages
477 - 483Citation
SENEVIRATNE, S.I. ...et al., 2016. Allowable CO2 emissions based on regional and impact-related climate targets. Nature, 529(7587), pp. 477-483.Publisher
© Nature Publishing GroupVersion
- AM (Accepted Manuscript)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Acceptance date
2015-12-16Publication date
2016-01-20Copyright date
2016Notes
This paper was accepted for publication in the journal Nature and the definitive published version is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature16542ISSN
0028-0836eISSN
1476-4687Publisher version
Language
- en