High sensitivity of future global warming to land carbon cycle processes
By B. Booth, Chris D. Jones, M. Collins, I. Totterdell, P. Cox, Stephen Sitch, C. Huntingford, R. Betts, G. Harris, J. Lloyd. 2012
310 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Unknowns in future global warming are usually assumed to arise from uncertainties either in the amount of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions or in the sensitivity of the climate to changes in greenhouse gas concentrations. Characterizing the additional uncertainty in relating CO2 emissions to atmospheric concentrations has relied on either a small number of complex models with diversity in process representations, or simple models. To date, these models indicate that the relevant carbon cycle uncertainties are smaller than the uncertainties in physical climate feedbacks and emissions. Here, for a single emissions scenario, we use a full coupled climate–carbon cycle model and a systematic method to explore uncertainties in the land carbon cycle feedback. We find a plausible range of climate–carbon cycle feedbacks significantly larger than previously estimated. Indeed the range of CO2 concentrations arising from our single emissions scenario is greater than that previously estimated across the full range of IPCC SRES emissions scenarios with carbon cycle uncertainties ignored. The sensitivity of photosynthetic metabolism to temperature emerges as the most important uncertainty. This highlights an aspect of current land carbon modelling where there are open questions about the potential role of plant acclimation to increasing temperatures. There is an urgent need for better understanding of plant photosynthetic responses to high temperature, as these responses are shown here to be key contributors to the magnitude of future change.
Subfields: Global and Planetary Change
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d5ceb141c709ab0d6d74e41fe93aa06099bbd9fe
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In Global and Planetary Change
Citations in the corpus
- Effects of model structural uncertainty on carbon cycle projections: biological nitrogen fixation as a case study (2015, background): “…perturbing key model parameter values and to show that a wide range of C cycle projections (of equal magnitude to multi-model ensembles) can be obtained from a single model given a plausible range in parameter values (Booth et al 2012, Booth et al 2013, Exbrayat et al 2013, Lambert et al 2013).”
- The BRIDGE HadCM3 family of climate models: HadCM3@Bristol v1.0 (2017, unknown): “…to rigorously calculate the probability density functions of either the mean or extreme climates (e.g. using HadCM3 variants, Murphy et al., 2007; Booth et al., 2012; Jackson and Vellinga, 2013; Schaller et al., 2016; Davies-Barnard et al., 2014; Armstrong et al., 2016; Stainforth et al., 2005).”