Transient Climate Response to Cumulative CO₂ Emissions (TCRE)#

Overview#

The idea that global temperature rise is directly proportional to the total amount of carbon dioxide (CO₂) released into the atmosphere is fundamental to climate policy. The concept stems from research showing a clear linear relationship between cumulative CO₂ emissions and global temperature change in climate models (Allen et al. 2009; Matthews et al. 2009; Zickfeld et al. 2009). This relationship is called the Transient Climate Response to Cumulative CO₂ Emissions (TCRE), which represents the amount of global warming caused by each trillion tonnes of carbon emitted. This simple yet powerful tool allows policymakers to directly link emission budgets to specific temperature targets and compare the long-term effects of different emissions scenarios.

For CMIP7, TCRE should be calculated from the esm-flat10 experiment, following the experimental protocol of Sanderson et al (2024).

Available recipes and diagnostics#

Recipes are stored in recipes/

recipe_tcre.yml
ref/recipe_tcre.yml

Diagnostics are stored in diag_scripts/

Variables#

tas (atmos, monthly, longitude, latitude, time)
fco2antt (atmos, monthly, longitude, latitude, time)

Observations and reformat scripts#

None

References#

Sanderson, B. M., Brovkin, V., Fisher, R., Hohn, D., Ilyina, T., Jones, C., Koenigk, T., Koven, C., Li, H., Lawrence, D., Lawrence, P., Liddicoat, S., Macdougall, A., Mengis, N., Nicholls, Z., O’Rourke, E., Romanou, A., Sandstad, M., Schwinger, J., Seferian, R., Sentman, L., Simpson, I., Smith, C., Steinert, N., Swann, A., Tjiputra, J., and Ziehn, T.: flat10MIP: An emissions-driven experiment to diagnose the climate response to positive, zero, and negative CO₂ emissions, EGUsphere [preprint], https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2024-3356, 2024.
Allen, M., Frame, D., Huntingford, C. et al.: Warming caused by cumulative carbon emissions towards the trillionth tonne, Nature 458, 1163–1166, https://doi.org/10.1038/nature08019, 2009.
Matthews, H., Gillett, N., Stott, P. et al.: The proportionality of global warming to cumulative carbon emissions, Nature 459, 829–832, https://doi.org/10.1038/nature08047, 2009.
K. Zickfeld, M. Eby, H. D. Matthews, & A. J. Weaver: Setting cumulative emissions targets to reduce the risk of dangerous climate change, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A., 106 (38), 16129-16134, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0805800106, 2009.

Example plots#

../_images/tcre.jpg — Fig. 167 Global mean surface air temperature anomaly versus cumulative CO₂ emissions for MPI-ESM1-2-LR using the emission-driven 1% CO₂ increase per year experiment.#

Transient Climate Response to Cumulative CO2 Emissions (TCRE)#