In a paper released today in the journal Nature, a study conducted by H. Damon Matthews - a professor at Montreal's Concordia University's Department of Geography, Planning and the Environment - attempts to correlate global warming to carbon emissions.
Matthews, along with fellow researchers Nathan P. Gillett, Peter A. Stott and Kirsten Zickfield, used a combination of global climate models and historical climate data to demonstrate what appears to be a simple linear relationship between total CO2 emissions and global temperature change.
What's important about this? If Matthews and his team are correct in their calculations, the rate of global warming can be based on simple carbon emission's figures, rather than the complex and arcane models currently in use to calculate how close the earth is to irreversible warming.
Matthews and his team have chosen to re-evaluate climate change in terms of what they call "carbon-climate response" or CCR, which they define as a formula for calculating the ratio of temperature change to cumulative carbon emissions. Matthews et al further speculate that CCR is relatively independent of both concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere and its rate of change over time. According to Matthews, this new CCR climate model does away with climate sensitivity (or "Charney sensitivity") models in favor of a straightforward approach that correlates tons of CO2 emissions to degrees of warming.
By their estimates, one trillion tonnes of CO2 will result in a 1-degree to 2.1-degree rise in temperature on the Celsius scale, which is consistent with global warming models. The caveat being that uncertainty over agricultural and other land-use CO2 emissions (and aerosol forcing) may contribute to even higher values.
Still, Matthews' model eliminates some of the more distressing uncertainties between emissions and warming, which revolve around such issues as carbon sink capacities, atmospheric concentrations of CO2, and anthropogenic emissions, and shows that individual emissions of CO2 result in proportional increases in the global mean temperature, regardless of the time span of emissions, at least under the CCR model.
In other words, the CCR model allows climate scientists to say that one tonne of CO2 will result in a hypothetical 0.0000000000015 degrees of warming. This also implies that if we want to keep warming below 2 degrees Celsius, then we must restrict carbon emissions to about half a trillion tonnes, or about as much as has been emitted since the Industrial Revolution began.
As Matthews observes, most people understand the correlation between point A (CO2 emissions) and point Z (global warming), but few have an inkling of the complexities that effect climate change between. The new CCR model will allow even novice climate investigators to make a "best guess" about how much individual emissions will drive climate change, which will prove highly useful in industrial, manufacturing and power-generation facilities.
The CCR model also incorporates climate feedbacks and carbon cycle feedbacks, and will be valuable in planning climate change mitigation and policy.
Based on this, Matthew and colleagues have written a letter to participants planning to attend the December Conference of the Parties (COP) to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, asking them to publicly recognize the need to limit CO2 emissions to prevent catastrophic climate change.
You can view the abstract and correlative data on this page. Viewing the entire article requires a subscription or a one-time fee.
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