Ice-free Arctic projections under the Paris Agreement

Michael Sigmond (), John C. Fyfe and Neil C. Swart
Additional contact information
Michael Sigmond: Environment and Climate Change Canada
John C. Fyfe: Environment and Climate Change Canada
Neil C. Swart: Environment and Climate Change Canada

Nature Climate Change, 2018, vol. 8, issue 5, 404-408

Abstract: Abstract Under the Paris Agreement, emissions scenarios are pursued that would stabilize the global mean temperature at 1.5–2.0 °C above pre-industrial levels, but current emission reduction policies are expected to limit warming by 2100 to approximately 3.0 °C. Whether such emissions scenarios would prevent a summer sea-ice-free Arctic is unknown. Here we employ stabilized warming simulations with an Earth System Model to obtain sea-ice projections under stabilized global warming, and correct biases in mean sea-ice coverage by constraining with observations. Although there is some sensitivity to details in the constraining method, the observationally constrained projections suggest that the benefits of going from 2.0 °C to 1.5 °C stabilized warming are substantial; an eightfold decrease in the frequency of ice-free conditions is expected, from once in every five to once in every forty years. Under 3.0 °C global mean warming, however, permanent summer ice-free conditions are likely, which emphasizes the need for nations to increase their commitments to the Paris Agreement.

Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-018-0124-y Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcli:v:8:y:2018:i:5:d:10.1038_s41558-018-0124-y

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/nclimate/

DOI: 10.1038/s41558-018-0124-y

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Climate Change is currently edited by Bronwyn Wake

More articles in Nature Climate Change from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().