Disentangling the relative importance of climate change abatement policies from the human-Earth system (HES) uncertainties that determine their performance is challenging because the two are inexorably linked, and the nature of this linkage is dynamic, interactive and metric specific(1). Here, we demonstrate an approach to quantify the individual and joint roles that diverse HES uncertainties and our choices in abatement policy play in determining future climate and economic conditions, as simulated by an improved version of the Dynamic Integrated model of Climate and the Economy(2,3). Despite wide-ranging HES uncertainties, the growth rate of global abatement (a societal choice) is the primary driver of long-term warming. It is not a question of whether we can limit warming but whether we choose to do so. Our results elucidate important long-term HES dynamics that are often masked by common time-aggregated metrics. Aggressive near-term abatement will be very costly and do little to impact near-term warming. Conversely, the warming that will be experienced by future generations will mostly be driven by earlier abatement actions. We quantify probabilistic abatement pathways to tolerable climate/economic outcomes(4,5), conditional on the climate sensitivity to the atmospheric CO2 concentration. Even under optimistic assumptions about the climate sensitivity, pathways to a tolerable climate/economic future are rapidly narrowing.
1.Tufts Univ, Dept Civil & Environm Engn, Medford, MA 02155 USA 2.Cornell Univ, Sch Civil & Environm Engn, Ithaca, NY 14853 USA 3.Penn State Univ, Earth & Environm Syst Inst, University Pk, PA 16802 USA 4.Penn State Univ, Dept Geosci, University Pk, PA 16802 USA 5.Rutgers State Univ, Dept Earth & Planetary Sci, Piscataway, NJ USA 6.Politecn Milan, Dept Management Econ & Ind Engn, Milan, Italy
Recommended Citation:
Lamontagne, J. R.,Reed, P. M.,Marangoni, G.,et al. Robust abatement pathways to tolerable climate futures require immediate global action[J]. NATURE CLIMATE CHANGE,2019-01-01,9(4):290-+