Search

The Paris Agreement has opened debate on whether limiting warming to 1.5 °C is compatible with current emission pledges and warming of about 0.9 °C from the mid-nineteenth century to the present decade. We show that limiting cumulative post-2015 CO2emissions to about 200 GtC would limit post-2015 warming to less than 0.6 °C in 66% of Earth system model members of the CMIP5 ensemble with no mitigation of other climate drivers, increasing to 240 GtC with ambitious non-CO2mitigation. We combine a simple climate–carbon-cycle model with estimated ranges for key climate system properties from the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report. Assuming emissions peak and decline to below current levels by 2030, and continue thereafter on a much steeper decline, which would be historically unprecedented but consistent with a standard ambitious mitigation scenario (RCP2.6), results in a likely range of peak warming of 1.2–2.0 °C above the mid-nineteenth century. If CO2emissions are continuously adjusted over time to limit 2100 warming to 1.5 °C, with ambitious non-CO2mitigation, net future cumulative CO2emissions are unlikely to prove less than 250 GtC and unlikely greater than 540 GtC. Hence, limiting warming to 1.5 °C is not yet a geophysical impossibility, but is likely to require delivery on strengthened pledges for 2030 followed by challengingly deep and rapid mitigation. Strengthening near-term emissions reductions would hedge against a high climate response or subsequent reduction rates proving economically, technically or politically unfeasible.

Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) have requested guidance on common greenhouse gas metrics in accounting for Nationally determined contributions (NDCs) to emission reductions. Metric choice can affect the relative emphasis placed on reductions of ‘cumulative climate pollutants’ such as carbon dioxide versus ‘short-lived climate pollutants’ (SLCPs), including methane and black carbon. Here we show that the widely used 100-year global warming potential (GWP100) effectively measures the relative impact of both cumulative pollutants and SLCPs on realized warming 20–40 years after the time of emission. If the overall goal of climate policy is to limit peak warming, GWP100therefore overstates the importance of current SLCP emissions unless stringent and immediate reductions of all climate pollutants result in temperatures nearing their peak soon after mid-century, which may be necessary to limit warming to “well below 2 °C” (ref. ). The GWP100can be used to approximately equate a one-off pulse emission of a cumulative pollutant and an indefinitely sustained change in the rate of emission of an SLCP. The climate implications of traditional CO2-equivalent targets are ambiguous unless contributions from cumulative pollutants and SLCPs are specified separately.

A large volcanic eruption might constitute a climate emergency, significantly altering global temperature and precipitation for several years. Major future eruptions will occur, but their size or timing cannot be predicted. We show, for the first time, that it may be possible to counteract these climate effects through deliberate emissions of short‐lived greenhouse gases, dampening the abrupt impact of an eruption. We estimate an emission pathway countering a hypothetical eruption 3 times the size of Mount Pinatubo in 1991. We use a global climate model to evaluate global and regional responses to the eruption, with and without counteremissions. We then raise practical, financial, and ethical questions related to such a strategy. Unlike the more commonly discussed geoengineering to mitigate warming from long‐lived greenhouse gases, designed emissions to counter temporary cooling would not have the disadvantage of needing to be sustained over long periods. Nevertheless, implementation would still face significant challenges. Deliberate emission of short‐lived GHG could counteract volcanic coolingClimate model shows feasibility of counteracting a 3X Pinatubo eruptionShorter time scales make counteracting different from other climate engineering

Current climate policies are based on the use of Global Warming Potentials (GWPs) to compare emissions of various greenhouse gases. Yet, from an economic point of view, more efficient methods exist. We compare the potential costs of implementing some long-term goal for stabilization of the climate in three cases: Reduce CO2 emissions only, reduce emissions of the four greenhouse gases CO2, CH4, N2O and SF6 using the standard IPCC GWPs and reduce emissions of the same four gases with efficient and flexible, time dependent metrics. A multi-gas approach with GWPs reduces the costs by 8 percent when compared with CO2 reductions only, whereas the costs may be reduced by an additional 2 percent if using flexible metrics. If compared with the use of GWPs, we find that efficient weights increase the cost savings of including non-CO2 gases in climate policy by 15-40%, depending on the stabilization goal.