Climate Change Model Scenarios - What are they, what are their underlying assumptions, how well do they perform, and how are they best applied? These are the topics I explore in this lecture.
In the spirit of Nullias in verba (take the word of nobody), this lecture was presented as an assignment for students to fact check my material. This topic has been a passion of mine since teaching an introductory course a few years ago, as I discuss in the introduction.
Incidentally, this is the last UBC lecture I’ll be posting, at least for awhile. I’ve decided to step away from teaching to spend the next few years travelling - there are so many pit lakes to visit!
Here are my references, in case you would like to do your own fact checking:
Burgess, M. G., Ritchie, J., Shapland, J., & Pielke, R. (2020). IPCC baseline scenarios have over-projected CO2 emissions and economic growth. Environmental Research Letters, 16(1), 014016.
Fyfe, J. C., Gillett, N. P., & Zwiers, F. W. (2013). Overestimated global warming over the past 20 years. Nature Climate Change, 3(9), 767-769.
Hausfather, Z., & Peters, G. P. (2020). Emissions - the ‘business as usual’ story is misleading. Nature, 577(7792), 618-620. doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-00177-3
IPCC. (2013). Evaluation of Climate Models (Section 9; Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fifth Assessment Report of the IPCC, p. 126). Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Working Group 1.
IPCC. (2014). Near Term Climate Change: Projections and Predictability. IPCC Assessment Report 5 Working Group1 Volume 11 (WG1 AR5 11; p. 76). United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Koonin, S. E. (2021). Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters. BenBella Books.
NSIDC. (2022). National Snow and Ice Data Center |. nsidc.org/
Palmer, T., & Stevens, B. (2019). The scientific challenge of understanding and estimating climate change. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(49), 24390-24395. doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1906691116
Papalexiou, S. M., Rajulapati, C. R., Clark, M. P., & Lehner, F. (2020). Robustness of CMIP6 Historical Global Mean Temperature Simulations: Trends, Long‐Term Persistence, Autocorrelation, and Distributional Shape. Earth’s Future, 8(10). doi.org/10.1029/2020EF001667
Pielke, R., & Ritchie, J. (2021). Distorting the view of our climate future: The misuse and abuse of climate pathways and scenarios. Energy Research & Social Science, 72, 101890. doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2020.101890
Pielke Jr R, Burgess MG, Ritchie J (2022) Plausible 2005-2050 emissions scenarios project between 2°C and 3°C of warming by 2100. Environ Res Lett 17:024027. doi.org/10.1088/1748 9326/ac4ebf
Ritchie, J., & Dowlatabadi, H. (2017). Why do climate change scenarios return to coal? Energy, 140, 1276-1291.