Narrowing the Range of Future Climate Projections Using Historical Observations of Atmospheric CO 2

• Published in: Journal of climate 2017-04, Vol.30 (8), p.3039-3053
• Main Authors: Booth, Ben B. B., Harris, Glen R., Murphy, James M., House, Jo I., Jones, Chris D., Sexton, David, Sitch, Stephen
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 0894-8755; 1520-0442
• DOI: 10.1175/JCLI-D-16-0178.1

Uncertainty in the behavior of the carbon cycle is important in driving the range in future projected climate change. Previous comparisons of model responses with historical CO 2 observations have suggested a strong constraint on simulated projections that could narrow the range considered plausible. This study uses a new 57-member perturbed parameter ensemble of variants of an Earth system model for three future scenarios, which 1) explores a wider range of potential climate responses than before and 2) includes the impact of past uncertainty in carbon emissions on simulated trends. These two factors represent a more complete exploration of uncertainty, although they lead to a weaker constraint on the range of future CO 2 concentrations as compared to earlier studies. Nevertheless, CO 2 observations are shown to be effective at narrowing the distribution, excluding 30 of 57 simulations as inconsistent with historical CO 2 changes. The perturbed model variants excluded are mainly at the high end of the future projected CO 2 changes, with only 8 of the 26 variants projecting RCP8.5 2100 concentrations in excess of 1100 ppm retained. Interestingly, a minority of the high-end variants were able to capture historical CO 2 trends, with the large-magnitude response emerging later in the century (owing to high climate sensitivities, strong carbon feedbacks, or both). Comparison with observed CO 2 is effective at narrowing both the range and distribution of projections out to the mid-twenty-first century for all scenarios and to 2100 for a scenario with low emissions.