Poorest countries experience earlier anthropogenic emergence of daily temperature extremes
By L. Harrington, D. Frame, Erich Fischer, Ed Hawkins, M. Joshi, Chris D. Jones. 2016
164 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Understanding how the emergence of the anthropogenic warming signal from the noise of internal variability translates to changes in extreme event occurrence is of crucial societal importance. By utilising simulations of cumulative carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and temperature changes from eleven earth system models, we demonstrate that the inherently lower internal variability found at tropical latitudes results in large increases in the frequency of extreme daily temperatures (exceedances of the 99.9th percentile derived from pre-industrial climate simulations) occurring much earlier than for mid-to-high latitude regions. Most of the world’s poorest people live at low latitudes, when considering 2010 GDP-PPP per capita; conversely the wealthiest population quintile disproportionately inhabit more variable mid-latitude climates. Consequently, the fraction of the global population in the lowest socio-economic quintile is exposed to substantially more frequent daily temperature extremes after much lower increases in both mean global warming and cumulative CO2 emissions.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Global and Planetary Change, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a1685799c0199b5e1b689bb0823cb8096c008bf8
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Citations in the corpus
- The Inequality of Climate Change From 1.5 to 2°C of Global Warming (2018, background): “While the link between climate change and inequality has been drawn before (e.g., Harrington et al., 2016; Mahlstein et al., 2011; Schleussner et al., 2016), this is the first quantitative analysis for the policy-relevant Paris climate targets.”
- Extreme heat waves under 1.5 °C and 2 °C global warming (2018, background): “In tropical regions, where the present-day variability and the seasonal cycle is small, even a moderate temperature increase will result in longer heat waves (e.g. West Africa, supporting information figure S5, Fischer et al 2012a, King et al 2015, Harrington et al 2016, Dosio 2017).”