Maximum warming occurs about one decade after a carbon dioxide emission

By K. Ricke, K. Caldeira. 2014

223 citations recorded by the source corpus.

It is known that carbon dioxide emissions cause the Earth to warm, but no previous study has focused on examining how long it takes to reach maximum warming following a particular CO2 emission. Using conjoined results of carbon-cycle and physical-climate model intercomparison projects (Taylor et al , Joos et al ), we find the median time between an emission and maximum warming is 10.1 years, with a 90% probability range of 6.6–30.7 years. We evaluate uncertainties in timing and amount of warming, partitioning them into three contributing factors: carbon cycle, climate sensitivity and ocean thermal inertia. If uncertainty in any one factor is reduced to zero without reducing uncertainty in the other factors, the majority of overall uncertainty remains. Thus, narrowing uncertainty in century-scale warming depends on narrowing uncertainty in all contributing factors. Our results indicate that benefit from avoided climate damage from avoided CO2 emissions will be manifested within the lifetimes of people who acted to avoid that emission. While such avoidance could be expected to benefit future generations, there is potential for emissions avoidance to provide substantial benefit to current generations.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/85385b66dad80eb935955fd8fb0452c94847f4e2

Citations in the corpus

• Zero emission targets as long-term global goals for climate protection (2015, unknown): “…limiting warming to any level requires annual net CO 2 emissions to be phased out to virtually zero ( Matthews and Caldeira 2008 ) , at the latest near the time when temperature stabilization is to be achieved ( Matthews and Caldeira 2008, Ricke and Caldeira 2014, Zickfeld and Herrington 2015 ) .”