Climate change beyond the 1.5°C Paris limit

Signatories to the Paris Agreement are aiming to hold global warming below 2°C with a preferential limit of 1.5°C, but there are many unknowns about what will happen to the climate system at and beyond these global warming levels. In this talk, Dr King will present a body of work on building an understanding of the climate at different levels of global warming. Firstly, Andrew will present a methodology he developed for examining global warming at the Paris Agreement limits. He will then examine how linear local temperature changes are between the Paris Agreement limits (i.e. should we expect an acceleration or deceleration in local warming in some parts of the world?). Knowledge of the linearity of local warming is essential to how we plan for future climate changes and extreme events. For locations where non-linearities are identified Andrew seeks to explain their causes by examining projected changes in atmospheric processes in these areas. Finally, he applies his method for investigating and quantifying non-linear local climate changes to higher levels of global warming. Andrew examines how and why warming patterns are projected to change if we reach global warming of 3-4°C.

This work addresses fundamental questions about how the future climate will change and highlights regions where model uncertainties in non-linear warming must be constrained for accurate regional climate projections.