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Permafrost currently stores more than a fourth of global soil carbon. A warming climate makes this carbon increasingly vulnerable to decomposition and release into the atmosphere in the form of greenhouse gases. The resulting climate feedback can be estimated using land surface models, but the high complexity and computational cost of these models make it challenging to use them for estimating uncertainty, exploring novel scenarios, and coupling with other models. We have added a representation of permafrost to the simple, open-source global carbon–climate model Hector, calibrated to be consistent with both historical data and 21st century Earth system model projections of permafrost thaw. We include permafrost as a separate land carbon pool that becomes available for decomposition into both methane (CH 4) and carbon dioxide (CO 2) once thawed; the thaw rate is controlled by region-specific air temperature increases from a preindustrial baseline. We found that by 2100 thawed permafrost carbon emissions increased Hector's atmospheric CO 2 concentration by 5 %–7 % and the atmospheric CH 4 concentration by 7 %–12 %, depending on the future scenario, resulting in 0.2–0.25 ∘ C of additional warming over the 21st century. The fraction of thawed permafrost carbon available for decomposition was the most significant parameter controlling the end-of-century temperature change in the model, explaining around 70 % of the temperature variance, and was distantly followed by the initial stock of permafrost carbon, which contributed to about 10 % of the temperature variance. The addition of permafrost in Hector provides a basis for the exploration of a suite of science questions, as Hector can be cheaply run over a wide range of parameter values to explore uncertainty and can be easily coupled with integrated assessment and other human system models to explore the economic consequences of warming from this feedback. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Permafrost, soil that remains below 0 °C for two or more years, currently stores more than a fourth of global soil carbon. A warming climate makes this carbon increasingly vulnerable to decomposition and release into the atmosphere in the form of greenhouse gases. The resulting climate feedback can be estimated using Earth system models (ESMs), but the high complexity and computational cost of these models make it challenging to use them for estimating uncertainty, exploring novel scenarios, and coupling with other models. We have added a representation of permafrost to the simple, open-source global carbon-climate model Hector, calibrated to be consistent with both historical data and twenty-first century ESM projections of permafrost thaw. We include permafrost as a separate land carbon pool that becomes available for decomposition into both methane and carbon dioxide once thawed; the thaw rate is controlled by region-specific air temperature increases from a pre-industrial baseline. We found that by 2100 thawed permafrost carbon emissions increased Hector's atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration by 10-15 % and the atmospheric methane concentration by 10-20 %, depending on the future scenario. This resulted in around 0.5 °C of additional warming over the next century. The fraction of thawed permafrost carbon available for decomposition was the most significant parameter controlling the end-of-century temperature change and atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration in the model and became increasingly significant over even longer timescales. The addition of permafrost in Hector provides a basis for the exploration of a suite of science questions, as Hector can be cheaply run over a wide range of parameter values to explore uncertainty and easily coupled with integrated assessment models to explore the economic consequences of warming from this feedback. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Here we present results from the first phase of the Reduced Complexity Model Intercomparison Project (RCMIP). RCMIP is a systematic examination of reduced complexity climate models (RCMs), which are used to complement and extend the insights from more complex Earth System Models (ESMs), in particular those participating in the Sixth Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6). In Phase 1 of RCMIP, with 14 participating models namely ACC2, AR5IR (2 and 3 box versions), CICERO-SCM, ESCIMO, FaIR, GIR, GREB, Hector, Held et al. two layer model, MAGICC, MCE, OSCAR and WASP, we highlight the structural differences across various RCMs and show that RCMs are capable of reproducing global-mean surface air temperature (GSAT) changes of ESMs and historical observations. We find that some RCMs are capable of emulating the GSAT response of CMIP6 models to within a root-mean square error of 0.2°C (of the same order of magnitude as ESM internal variability) over a range of scenarios. Running the same model configurations for both RCP and SSP scenarios, we see that the SSPs exhibit higher effective radiative forcing throughout the second half of the 21st Century. Comparing our results to the difference between CMIP5 and CMIP6 output, we find that the change in scenario explains approximately 46% of the increase in higher end projected warming between CMIP5 and CMIP6. This suggests that changes in ESMs from CMIP5 to CMIP6 explain the rest of the increase, hence the higher climate sensitivities of available CMIP6 models may not be having as large an impact on GSAT projections as first anticipated. A second phase of RCMIP will complement RCMIP Phase 1 by exploring probabilistic results and emulation in more depth to provide results available for the IPCC's Sixth Assessment Report author teams. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]