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What Surprises Lurk Within the Climate System? Home Search Collections Journals About Contact us My IOPscience What surprises lurk within the climate system? This content has been downloaded from IOPscience. Please scroll down to see the full text. 2016 Environ. Res. Lett. 11 120202 (http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/11/12/120202) View the table of contents for this issue, or go to the journal homepage for more Download details: This content was downloaded by: bobkopp IP Address: 68.192.122.146 This content was downloaded on 07/12/2016 at 13:21 Please note that terms and conditions apply. Environ. Res. Lett. 11 (2016) 120202 doi:10.1088/1748-9326/11/12/120202 EDITORIAL What surprises lurk within the climate system? OPEN ACCESS Katharine Hayhoe1 and Robert E Kopp2 PUBLISHED 1 Climate Science Center and Department of Political Science, Texas Tech University, Lubbock TX, USA 7 December 2016 2 Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences, Rutgers Energy Institute, and Institute of Earth, Ocean & Atmospheric Sciences, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 licence. Aristotle might argue that humans were not respon- of future scenarios, representing everything from con- Any further distribution of this work must maintain sible for the choices made at the beginning of the tinued reliance on fossil fuels to the sharp emission attribution to the Industrial Era, when collective scientific and societal cuts required to achieve global mean temperature tar- author(s) and the title of ‘ ° ’ the work, journal citation knowledge limited our capacity to choose wisely and gets such as the well below 2 C goal of the Paris and DOI. well [1]. Regardless of our original ignorance, how- Agreement [9]. These simulations provide invaluable ever, over the last few centuries we have been conduct- insights into the probability, severity, and magnitude ing an unprecedented experiment with the Earth’s of human-induced climate change and its associated climate system. impacts: yet they are still imperfect. Some known pro- Human society is built on the implicit assumption cesses likely to accelerate the rate of change and/or its that climate is largely stationary: that historical records impacts, such as methane release from thawing per- can be used with confidence to determine the energy mafrost and sea level rise from ice sheet melt, are not loads of our buildings, the hundred-year floodplains included in most standard simulations. Incomplete of our cities, and the growing zones for the crops that representation of interactions between components power our economy and feed our world. What hap- that are included may be just as important. For exam- pens when that assumption is no longer valid? ple, models that underestimate the rate of Arctic sea For generations, our civilization has been building ice melt will also underestimate the rate of Arctic a climate debt, borrowing from the stability of the warming; and models that inaccurately capture the future to power the economic growth of the present. response of ecosystems to climate change will also Through the combustion of fossil fuels, as well as agri- miss their effects on the carbon cycle and albedo. culture, deforestation, land use change, and waste, Looking back, paleoclimate records provide evi- human activities have disrupted the natural carbon dence that self-reinforcing cycles (technically but cycle, increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) by potentially confusingly referred to as positive feed- almost 50% and methane (CH4) by 250% relative to backs) can accelerate climate change and even shift the pre-industrial levels [2]. Even as this climate debt con- Earth’s climate system into new states very different tinues to grow, it is now coming due: the heat trapped from those experienced in the recent past [10–12]— by these and other greenhouse gases is raising global for example, states in which the Arctic Ocean is ice- temperature, affecting heat and cold extremes, heavy free in summer [13, 14], in which the Atlantic Mer- precipitation and drought, sea ice and ice sheet melt, idional Overturning Circulation is greatly weakened sea level rise and coastal flooding, and many other [15], or in which ice sheets are dramatically shrunken aspects of the climate system [3] that can harm human [16, 17]. Some of these potential state shifts can be cap- health, the economy, food supply, water availability, tured by climate models [18], but others arise from and even national security [4–6]. feedbacks or processes that are missing. As climate scientists, we look to both the future Paleoclimate analyses also reveal a broader limita- and the past to understand what’s happening in a tion of global models. Compared to geological recon- world in which global temperatures are changing structions of temperature and CO2 from the past approximately 10 times faster than between the last warm periods [19, 20], global climate models have a glacial maximum and the current Holocene epoch [7], tendency to underestimate—both in the global mean and are hurtling towards levels never before experi- and especially at the poles—the magnitude of warm- enced in the relatively brief history of human civiliza- ing in response to higher CO2 levels. This under- tion [8]. Looking forward, we force increasingly estimation hints at potential shifts in the state of the complex mathematical representations of the climate climate system that could increase climate sensitivity system—Earth System Models (ESMs)—with a range in a warmer world [21]. A bias towards under- © 2016 IOP Publishing Ltd Environ. Res. Lett. 11 (2016) 120202 K Hayhoe and R E Kopp estimation is evident in predicting more recent rates of [4] Crimmins A, Balbus J, Gamble J L, Beard C B, Bell J E, sea level rise, and other physical changes in the climate Dodgen D, Eisen R J, Fann N, Hawkins M D and Herring S C system [22, 23], while scientific assessments over the 2016 The Impacts of Climate Change on Human Health in the United States: a Scientific Assessment (US Global Change past few decades have demonstrated a systematic ten- Research Program)(doi:10.7930/J0VX0DFW) dency towards ‘erring on the side of least drama [24]’. [5] Houser T, Hsiang S, Kopp R and Larsen K 2015 Economic Risks Together, these limitations emphasize the need to of Climate Change: An American Prospectus (New York: ) stress-test ESMs against the paleoclimate record, and Columbia University Press [6] IPCC 2014 Summary for policymakers Climate Change 2014: to build models and conduct simulations that explore Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability Part A: Global and potential catastrophic events and states of the world Sectoral Aspects Contribution of Working Group II to the Fifth with low or unknown probability but profound Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate ( consequences. Change ed C B Field et al Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) pp 1–32 What other surprises might the climate system [7] Snyder C W 2016 Evolution of global temperature over the hold? Less dramatic but more imminent—and with past two million years Nature 538 226–8 the potential for serious physical and/or socio- [8] Collins M 2013 Long-term climate change: projections, economic harm—is the risk of the ‘perfect storm’ of commitments and irreversibility Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis Contribution of Working Group I to the multiple extreme events occurring in rapid sequence, Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on or in tandem. On its own, a prolonged drought, Climate Change ed T F Stocker et al (Cambridge: Cambridge record-breaking flood, or killer heat wave may be University Press) [ ] ( // / devastating but not surprising [25]. Together, how- 9 United Nations 2015 Paris Agreement https: treaties.un.org doc/Treaties/2016/02/20160215%2006-03%20PM/Ch_ ever, the impact of simultaneous droughts and heat XXVII-7-d.pdf) waves occurring in multiple breadbaskets around the [10] Lenton T M, Held H, Kriegler E, Hall J W, Lucht W, world, or a recurring pattern of droughts that together Rahmstorf S and Schellnhuber H J 2008 Tipping elements in ‘ ’ the earth’s climate system Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. 105 1786–93 add up to the type of mega-drought seen in paleocli- [ ] [ ] 11 Lenton T M 2013 Environmental tipping points Annu. Rev. mate records for the US Southwest 26 , can be far Environ. Resour. 38 1–29 greater than the sum of each individual part [27]. [12] Kopp R E, Shwom R, Wagner G and Yuan J 2016 Tipping Simultaneous stressors may increase the odds of cli- elements and climate-economic shocks: pathways toward integrated assessment Earth’s Future 4 346–72 mate-driven socio-economic tipping points, both [ ] fi ( ) 13 Polyak L et al 2010 History of sea ice in the Arctic Quat. Sci. bene cial such as more active climate policy and det- Rev. 29 1757–78 rimental (such as an increase in civil conflict) [12]. [14] Li C, Notz D, Tietsche S and Marotzke J 2013 The transient These risks and uncertainties emphasize the need for versus the equilibrium response of sea ice to global warming 26 – large initial condition ensembles from multiple ESMs, J. Clim. 5624 36 [15] Barker S and Knorr G 2016 A paleo-perspective on the AMOC analyses of extremes within those ensembles over mul- as a tipping element PAGES Mag. 24 14–5 tiple spatial and temporal scales, and integration of [16] Dutton A, Carlson A, Long A, Milne G, Clark P, DeConto R, projected changes in physical climate with drivers of Horton B, Rahmstorf S and Raymo M 2015 Sea-level rise due to polar ice-sheet mass loss during past warm periods socioeconomic impacts and policies. 349 fi Science Regardless of our ignorance when humans rst [17] DeConto R and Pollard D 2016 Contribution of Antarctica to began this planetary experiment centuries ago, we are past and future sea-level rise Nature 531 591–7 now cognizant of the climate debt that we have incur- [18] Drijfhout S, Bathiany S, Beaulieu C, Brovkin V, Claussen M, red and which we will be paying for centuries and even Huntingford C, Scheffer M, Sgubin G and Swingedouw D 2015 fi Catalogue of abrupt shifts in intergovernmental panel on millennia to come.
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