DOI: 10.5194/tc-15-1889-2021
论文题名: On the attribution of industrial-era glacier mass loss to anthropogenic climate change
作者: Roe G.H. ; Christian J.E. ; Marzeion B.
刊名: Cryosphere
ISSN: 19940416
出版年: 2021
卷: 15, 期: 4 起始页码: 1889
结束页码: 1905
语种: 英语
英文关键词: anthropogenic effect
; climate change
; glacier mass balance
英文摘要: Around the world, small ice caps and glaciers have been losing mass and retreating since the start of the industrial era. Estimates are that this has contributed approximately 30 % of the observed sea-level rise over the same period. It is important to understand the relative importance of natural and anthropogenic components of this mass loss. One recent study concluded that the best estimate of the magnitude of the anthropogenic mass loss over the industrial era was only 25 % of the total, implying a predominantly natural cause. Here we show that the anthropogenic fraction of the total mass loss of a given glacier depends only on the magnitudes and rates of the natural and anthropogenic components of climate change and on the glacier's response time. We consider climate change over the past millennium using synthetic scenarios, palaeoclimate reconstructions, numerical climate simulations, and instrumental observations. We use these climate histories to drive a glacier model that can represent a wide range of glacier response times, and we evaluate the magnitude of the anthropogenic mass loss relative to the observed mass loss. The slow cooling over the preceding millennium followed by the rapid anthropogenic warming of the industrial era means that, over the full range of response times for small ice caps and glaciers, the central estimate of the magnitude of the anthropogenic mass loss is essentially 100 % of the observed mass loss. The anthropogenic magnitude may exceed 100 % in the event that, without anthropogenic climate forcing, glaciers would otherwise have been gaining mass. Our results bring assessments of the attribution of glacier mass loss into alignment with assessments of others aspects of climate change, such as global-mean temperature. Furthermore, these results reinforce the scientific and public understanding of centennial-scale glacier retreat as an unambiguous consequence of human activity. © Author(s) 2021. Citation statistics:
资源类型: 期刊论文
标识符: http://119.78.100.158/handle/2HF3EXSE/164791
Appears in Collections: 气候变化与战略
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作者单位: Department of Earth and Space Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, United States; Institute of Geography, Center for Marine Environmental Sciences, University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany
Recommended Citation:
Roe G.H.,Christian J.E.,Marzeion B.. On the attribution of industrial-era glacier mass loss to anthropogenic climate change[J]. Cryosphere,2021-01-01,15(4)