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SYCE: Symposium Climate and energy: Challenges and options from a physics perspective

SYCE 1: Climate and energy: Challenges and options from a physics perspective

SYCE 1.3: Hauptvortrag

Donnerstag, 30. September 2021, 14:30–15:00, Audimax 1

A tale of stability, volatility, and uncertainty: What robust climate diagnostics can contribute to the design of climate mitigation approaches — •Kira Rehfeld — Department of Geoscience, Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen — Institute of Environmental Physics, Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg

On average, our planet is warming due to human activities and particularly anthropogenic trace gas emissions. This is evident from observations and climate model simulations, as is a rise in the number of extreme heatwaves and precipitation. Yet the impact of warming on higher-order moments of climate variable distributions is not well constrained beyond the instrumental era, and the decadal timescale. This leads to uncertainties that are difficult to incorporate in risk assessment, and to overcome these we need new model systems taking into account weather, climate, ice, as well as geological feedbacks.

By combining geobiochemical archives, observational evidence and simulations with climate models of different complexity we show that temperature variability decreases on many but not all timescales with warming [1]. Furthermore, we find that models show some skill in representing this variability. Therefore, the impact of surface climate variability can be taken into account in the design of climate mitigation approaches, such as for artificial photosynthesis [2].

[1] Rehfeld, K., Münch, T., Ho, S. et al. Global patterns of declining temperature variability from the Last Glacial Maximum to the Holocene. Nature 554, 356--359. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature25454, 2018.

[2] May, M. M. and Rehfeld, K.: ESD Ideas: Photoelectrochemical carbon removal as negative emission technology, Earth Syst. Dynam., 10, 1--7, https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-10-1-2019, 2019.