Imprint of the Atlantic multi-decadal oscillation and Pacific decadal oscillation on southwestern US climate: past,present, and future

The surface air temperature increase in the southwestern United States was much larger during the last few decades than the increase in the global mean. While the global temperature increased by about 0.5 °C from 1975 to 2000, the southwestern US temperature increased by about 2 °C. If such an enhanced warming persisted for the next few decades, the southwestern US would suffer devastating consequences. To identify major drivers of southwestern climate change we perform a multiple-linear regression of the past 100 years of the southwestern US temperature and precipitation. We find that in the early twentieth century the warming was dominated by a positive phase of the Atlantic multi-decadal oscillation (AMO) with minor contributions from increasing solar irradiance and concentration of greenhouse gases. The late twentieth century warming was about equally influenced by increasing concentration of atmospheric greenhouse gases (GHGs) and a positive phase of the AMO. The current southwestern US drought is associated with a near maximum AMO index occurring nearly simultaneously with a minimum in the Pacific decadal oscillation (PDO) index. A similar situation occurred in mid-1950s when precipitation reached its minimum within the instrumental records. If future atmospheric concentrations of GHGs increase according to the IPCC scenarios (Solomon et al. in Climate change 2007: working group I. The Physical Science Basis, Cambridge, 996 pp, 2007), climate models project a fast rate of southwestern warming accompanied by devastating droughts (Seager et al. in Science 316:1181–1184, 2007; Williams et al. in Nat Clim Chang, 2012). However, the current climate models have not been able to predict the behavior of the AMO and PDO indices. The regression model does support the climate models (CMIP3 and CMIP5 AOGCMs) projections of a much warmer and drier southwestern US only if the AMO changes its 1,000 years cyclic behavior and instead continues to rise close to its 1975–2000 rate. If the AMO continues its quasi-cyclic behavior the US SW temperature should remain stable and the precipitation should significantly increase during the next few decades.     

Scientific uncertainty and climate change: Part II. Uncertainty and mitigation

In public debate surrounding climate change, scientific uncertainty is often cited in connection with arguments against mitigative action. This article examines the role of uncertainty about future climate change in determining the likely success or failure of mitigative action. We show by Monte Carlo simulation that greater uncertainty translates into a greater likelihood that mitigation efforts will fail to limit global warming to a target (e.g., 2 °C). The effect of uncertainty can be reduced by limiting greenhouse gas emissions. Taken together with the fact that greater uncertainty also increases the potential damages arising from unabated emissions (Lewandowsky et al. 2014), any appeal to uncertainty implies a stronger, rather than weaker, need to cut greenhouse gas emissions than in the absence of uncertainty.     

Can developed economies combat dangerous anthropogenic climate change without near-term reductions from developing economies?

Developing economy greenhouse gas emissions are growing rapidly relative to developed economy emissions (Boden et al. 2010) and developing economies as a group have greater emissions than developed economies. These developments are expected to continue (U.S. Energy Information Administration 2010), which has led some to question the effectiveness of emissions mitigation in developed economies without a commitment to extensive mitigation action from developing economies. One often heard argument against proposed U.S. legislation to limit carbon emissions to mitigate climate change is that, without participation from large developing economies like China and India, stabilizing temperature at 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial (United Nations 2009), or even reducing global emissions levels, would be impossible (Driessen 2009; RPC Energy Facts 2009) or prohibitively expensive (Clarke et al. 2009). Here we show that significantly delayed action by rapidly developing countries is not a reason to forgo mitigation efforts in developed economies. This letter examines the effect of a scenario with no explicit international climate policy and two policy scenarios, full global action and a developing economy delay, on the probability of exceeding various global average temperature changes by 2100. This letter demonstrates that even when developing economies delay any mitigation efforts until 2050 the effect of action by developed economies will appreciably reduce the probability of more extreme levels of temperature change. This paper concludes that early carbon mitigation efforts by developed economies will considerably affect the distribution over future climate change, whether or not developing countries begin mitigation efforts in the near term.     

Climate change and violent conflict in Europe over the last millennium

We investigate the relationship between a thousand-year history of violent conflict in Europe and various reconstructions of temperature and precipitation. We find that conflict was more intense during colder period, just like Zhang et al. (Clim Change 76:459–477, 2006) found for China. This relationship weakens in the industrialized era, and is not robust to the details of the climate reconstruction or to the sample period. As the correlation is negative and weakening, it appears that global warming would not lead to an increase in violent conflict in temperature climates.     

Correction to “the vertical distribution of climate forcings and feedbacks from the surface to top of atmosphere”

We discuss here a mistake in the analysis of Previdi and Liepert (Clim Dyn, 2011). In that article, the surface albedo radiative kernels were calculated incorrectly. We present in this brief comment the corrected albedo kernels. We then use these kernels to compute the surface albedo radiative feedback in climate model simulations driven by increasing carbon dioxide, as in Previdi and Liepert (Clim Dyn, 2011). We find that the use of the corrected albedo kernels does not change the conclusions of our earlier work.     

Breaks and unit roots in global and hemispheric temperatures: an updated analysis

The unit root testing within a breaking trend framework for global and hemispheric temperatures of Gay-Garcia, Estrada and Sánchez Clim Chang 94:333–349, 2009 is extended in two directions: first, the extended HadCRUT3 temperature series from Brohan et al. J Geophys Res 111:D12106, 2006 are used and, second, new breaking trend estimators and unit root tests are employed, along with direct modelling of breaking trend and unit root processes for the series. Some differences to the results of Gay-Garcia et al. are found: break dates are shifted to 1976 for global and northern hemisphere temperatures and to 1964 for the southern hemisphere. Although the results are somewhat ambiguous, global and northern hemisphere temperatures are probably best modelled by unit root processes with a break in drift, while southern hemisphere temperatures follow a breaking trend process with stationary fluctuations about this trend. Irrespective of the models selected, there is little evidence of trend warming before the breaks, i.e., until the third quarter of the 20th century, and after the breaks northern hemisphere and global trend temperatures warm quicker than in the southern hemisphere, the range being between 0.01 and 0.02 °C per annum.     

Do probabilistic expert elicitations capture scientists’ uncertainty about climate change?

Expert elicitation studies have become important barometers of scientific knowledge about future climate change (Morgan and Keith, Environ Sci Technol 29(10), 1995; Reilly et al., Science 293(5529):430–433, 2001; Morgan et al., Climate Change 75(1–2):195–214, 2006; Zickfeld et al., Climatic Change 82(3–4):235–265, 2007, Proc Natl Acad Sci 2010; Kriegler et al., Proc Natl Acad Sci 106(13):5041–5046, 2009). Elicitations incorporate experts’ understanding of known flaws in climate models, thus potentially providing a more comprehensive picture of uncertainty than model-driven methods. The goal of standard elicitation procedures is to determine experts’ subjective probabilities for the values of key climate variables. These methods assume that experts’ knowledge can be captured by subjective probabilities—however, foundational work in decision theory has demonstrated this need not be the case when their information is ambiguous (Ellsberg, Q J Econ 75(4):643–669, 1961). We show that existing elicitation studies may qualitatively understate the extent of experts’ uncertainty about climate change. We designed a choice experiment that allows us to empirically determine whether experts’ knowledge about climate sensitivity (the equilibrium surface warming that results from a doubling of atmospheric CO₂ concentration) can be captured by subjective probabilities. Our results show that, even for this much studied and well understood quantity, a non-negligible proportion of climate scientists violate the choice axioms that must be satisfied for subjective probabilities to adequately describe their beliefs. Moreover, the cause of their violation of the axioms is the ambiguity in their knowledge. We expect these results to hold to a greater extent for less understood climate variables, calling into question the veracity of previous elicitations for these quantities. Our experimental design provides an instrument for detecting ambiguity, a valuable new source of information when linking climate science and climate policy which can help policy makers select decision tools appropriate to our true state of knowledge.     

Reconciling approaches to climate change adaptation for Colombian agriculture

The projected impact of climate change on agro-ecological systems is considered widespread and significant, particularly across the global tropics. As in many other countries, adaptation to climate change is likely to be an important challenge for Colombian agricultural systems. In a recent study, a national-level assessment of the likely future impacts of climate change on agriculture was performed (Ramirez-Villegas et al. Clim Chang 115:611–628, 2012, RV2012). The study diagnosed key challenges directly affecting major crops and regions within the Colombian agricultural system and suggested a number of actions thought to facilitate adaptation, while refraining from proposing specific strategies at local scales. Further insights on the study were published by Feola (2013) (F2013), who stressed the need for transformative adaptation processes to reduce vulnerability particularly of resource-limited farmers, and the benefits of a predominantly stakeholder-led approach to adaptation. We clarify that the recommendations outlined in RV2012 were not intended as a recipe for multi-scale adaptation, but rather a set of actions that are required to diagnose and develop adaptation actions particularly at governmental levels in coordination with national and international adaptation initiatives. Such adaptation actions ought to be, ideally, a product of inclusive sub-sectorial assessments, which can take different forms. We argue that Colombian agriculture as a whole would benefit from a better outlining of adaptation needs across temporal scales in sub-sectorial assessments that take into account both RV2012 and F2013 orientations to adaptation. We conclude with two case studies of research on climate change impacts and adaptation developed in Colombia that serve as examples of realistic, productive sectorial and sub-national assessments.     

Is public awareness and perceived threat of climate change associated with governmental mitigation targets?

Social scientists and science communicators are concerned about the apparent discrepancy between the scientific consensus on climate change (Anderegg et al. Proc Natl Acad Sci 107:12107–12109, 2010; Doran and Zimmerman EOS Trans Am Geophys Union 90:22–3, 2009) and the general public’s views (Knight Environ Sociol 2:101–113, 2016; Lee et al. Nat Clim Chang 5:1014–1020, 2015). It is reasoned that increased public awareness and perceived threat of climate change may pressure governments to enact policy to counteract climate change (e.g. setting stringent carbon emissions targets). Despite a logical link between public awareness and government-set emissions targets, this relationship remains untested. We examined the relationship between public awareness about and perceived threat of climate change and governmental emissions targets across 71 countries and 1 region. We found a positive association between the proportions of a country’s population that are aware of climate change and the unconditional emissions reduction targets set by that country in the Paris Agreement (Rogelj et al. Nature 534:631–639, 2016). However, the proportion of people in a country who perceive climate change as a personal threat was not associated with higher emissions reduction targets. Our results suggest that public awareness may be an important part of garnering the public support required for policies designed to mitigate climate change to succeed.     

How does framing affect policy support for emissions mitigation? Testing the effects of ocean acidification and other carbon emissions frames

Public support for carbon emissions mitigation is crucial to motivate action to address global issues like climate change and ocean acidification (OA). Yet in the public sphere, carbon emissions mitigation policies are typically discussed in the context of climate change and rarely in the context of OA or other global change outcomes. In this paper, we advance research on OA and climate change perceptions and communication, by (i) examining causal beliefs about ocean acidification, and (ii) measuring support for mitigation policies from individuals presented with one of five different policy frames (climate change, global warming, carbon pollution, air pollution, and ocean acidification). Knowledge about OA causes and consequences is more widespread than we anticipated, though still generally low. Somewhat surprisingly, an “air pollution” mitigation frame elicits the highest degree of policy support overall, while “carbon pollution” performs no better than “climate change” or “global warming.” Framing effects are in part contingent on prior knowledge and attitudes, and mediated by concern. Perhaps due to a lack of OA awareness, the OA frame generates the least support overall, although it seems to close the gap in support associated with political orientation: the OA frame increases support among those (few) conservatives who report having heard of OA before the survey. These findings complement previous work on climate change communication and suggest the need for further research into OA as an effective way to engage conservatives in carbon emissions mitigation policy. Potentially even more promising is the air pollution framing.     

Who remembers a hot summer or a cold winter? The asymmetric effect of beliefs about global warming on perceptions of local climate conditions in the U.S.

This paper explores the phenomenon of local climate perception and the extent to which public perceptions match climate conditions as recorded in instrumental climate data. We further examine whether perceptions of changes in local climates are influenced by prior beliefs about global warming, through the process of motivated reasoning. Using national survey data collected in the United States in 2011, we find that subjective experiences of seasonal average temperature and precipitation during the previous winter and summer were related to recorded conditions during each season. Beliefs about global warming also had significant effects on subjective experiences with above-normal temperatures, particularly among those who believed that global warming is not happening. When asked about the summer of 2010, those who believed that global warming is not happening were significantly less likely to report that they had experienced a warmer-than-normal summer, even when controlling for demographics and local climate conditions. These results suggest that the subjective experience of local climate change is dependent not only on external climate conditions, but also on individual beliefs, with perceptions apparently biased by prior beliefs about global warming.     

Public concern over global warming correlates negatively with national wealth

It has been shown previously that the awareness and concern of the general public about global warming is not only a function of scientific information. Both psychological and sociological factors affect the willingness of laypeople to acknowledge the reality of global warming, and to support climate policies of their home countries. In this paper, I analyse a cross-national dataset of public concern about global warming, utilising data from 46 countries. Based on earlier results at the national and regional level, I expect concern to be negatively correlated to national measures of wealth and carbon dioxide emissions. I find that gross domestic product is indeed negatively correlated to the proportion of a population that regards global warming as a serious problem. There is also a marginally significant tendency that nations’ per capita carbon dioxide emissions are negatively correlated to public concern. These findings suggest that the willingness of a nation to contribute to reductions in greenhouse gas emissions decreases with its share of these emissions. This is in accordance with psychological findings, but poses a problem for political decision-makers. When communicating with the public, scientists ought to be aware of their responsibility to use a language that is understood by laypeople.     

Climate model simulation of anthropogenic influence on greenhouse-induced climate change (early agriculture to modern): the role of ocean feedbacks

We present further steps in our analysis of the early anthropogenic hypothesis (Ruddiman, Clim Change 61:261–293, 2003) that increased levels of greenhouse gases in the current interglacial, compared to lower levels in previous interglacials, were initiated by early agricultural activities, and that these increases caused a warming of climate long before the industrial era (～1750). These steps include updating observations of greenhouse gas and climate trends from earlier interglacials, reviewing recent estimates of greenhouse gas emissions from early agriculture, and describing a simulation by a climate model with a dynamic ocean forced by the low levels of greenhouse gases typical of previous interglacials in order to gauge the magnitude of the climate change for an inferred (natural) low greenhouse gas level relative to a high present day level. We conduct two time slice (equilibrium) simulations using present day orbital forcing and two levels of greenhouse gas forcing: the estimated low (natural) levels of previous interglacials, and the high levels of the present (control). By comparing the former to the latter, we estimate how much colder the climate would be without the combined greenhouse gas forcing of the early agriculture era (inferred from differences between this interglacial and previous interglacials) and the industrial era (the period since ～1750). With the low greenhouse gas levels, the global average surface temperature is 2.7 K lower than present day—ranging from ～2 K lower in the tropics to 4–8 K lower in polar regions. These changes are large, and larger than those reported in a pre-industrial (～1750) simulation with this model, because the imposed low greenhouse gas levels (CH₄ = 450 ppb, CO₂ = 240 ppm) are lower than both pre-industrial (CH₄ = 760 ppb, CO₂ = 280 ppm) and modern control (CH₄ = 1,714 ppb, CO₂ = 355 ppm) values. The area of year-round snowcover is larger, as found in our previous simulations and some other modeling studies, indicating that a state of incipient glaciation would exist given the current configuration of earth’s orbit (reduced insolation in northern hemisphere summer) and the imposed low levels of greenhouse gases. We include comparisons of these snowcover maps with known locations of earlier glacial inception and with locations of twentieth century glaciers and ice caps. In two earlier studies, we used climate models consisting of atmosphere, land surface, and a shallow mixed-layer ocean (Ruddiman et al., Quat Sci Rev 25:1–10, 2005; Vavrus et al., Quat Sci Rev 27:1410–1425, 2008). Here, we replaced the mixed-layer ocean with a complete dynamic ocean. While the simulated climate of the atmosphere and the surface with this improved model configuration is similar to our earlier results (Vavrus et al., Quat Sci Rev 27:1410–1425, 2008), the added information from the full dynamical ocean is of particular interest. The global and vertically-averaged ocean temperature is 1.25 K lower, the area of sea ice is larger, and there is less upwelling in the Southern Ocean. From these results, we infer that natural ocean feedbacks could have amplified the greenhouse gas changes initiated by early agriculture and possibly account for an additional increment of CO₂ increase beyond that attributed directly to early agricultural, as proposed by Ruddiman (Rev Geophys 45:RG4001, 2007). However, a full test of the early anthropogenic hypothesis will require additional observations and simulations with models that include ocean and land carbon cycles and other refinements elaborated herein.     

Are there basic physical constraints on future anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide?

Global Circulation Models (GCMs) provide projections for future climate warming using a wide variety of highly sophisticated anthropogenic CO₂ emissions scenarios as input, each based on the evolution of four emissions ??drivers??: population p, standard of living g, energy productivity (or efficiency) f and energy carbonization c (IPCC WG III 2007). The range of scenarios considered is extremely broad, however, and this is a primary source of forecast uncertainty (Stott and Kettleborough, Nature 416:723?C725, 2002). Here, it is shown both theoretically and observationally how the evolution of the human system can be considered from a surprisingly simple thermodynamic perspective in which it is unnecessary to explicitly model two of the emissions drivers: population and standard of living. Specifically, the human system grows through a self-perpetuating feedback loop in which the consumption rate of primary energy resources stays tied to the historical accumulation of global economic production??or p×g??through a time-independent factor of 9.7±0.3 mW per inflation-adjusted 1990 US dollar. This important constraint, and the fact that f and c have historically varied rather slowly, points towards substantially narrowed visions of future emissions scenarios for implementation in GCMs.     

美国公众对全球变暖的认知和对气候政策的支持

利用民意调查数据,以相关研究作为补充,分析美国公众对全球变暖的认知、减缓行为和气候政策的支持等。分析表明,大部分美国民众认为全球在变暖,但很多人不了解全球变暖与温室气体的关系,把全球变暖混为大气污染和臭氧层耗竭等;不到一半的公众认为全球变暖对个人和美国是现实威胁,更多的公众认为全球变暖对后代和发展中国家是严重威胁;大部分公众认为减缓全球变暖需要改变现有的生活方式和行为,他们愿意选择较容易从事和成本低的行为减少碳排放,但不愿意从根本上改变生活方式,改变自驾车、乘飞机长途旅游这些碳排放量更大的行为;公众普遍支持政府采取措施限制温室气体排放,但不希望所采取的措施对就业和经济带来不利影响;支持通过技术进步和减免税收等措施提高能效,减少碳排放,但大部分反对为节能而提高能源税收。     

How do people update? The effects of local weather fluctuations on beliefs about global warming

Global warming has become a controversial public policy issue in spite of broad scientific consensus that it is real and that human activity is a contributing factor. It is likely that public consensus is also needed to support policies that might counteract it. It is therefore important to understand how people form and update their beliefs about climate change. Using unique survey data on beliefs about the occurrence of the effects of global warming, I estimate how local temperature fluctuations influence what individuals believe about these effects. I find that some features of the updating process are consistent with rational updating. I also test explicitly for the presence of several heuristics known to affect belief formation and find strong evidence for representativeness, some evidence for availability, and no evidence for spreading activation. I find that very short-run temperature fluctuations (1 day–2 weeks) have no effect on beliefs about the occurrence of global warming, but that longer-run fluctuations (1 month–1 year) are significant predictors of beliefs. Only respondents with a conservative political ideology are affected by temperature abnormalities.     

Does temperature contain a stochastic trend? Evaluating conflicting statistical results

We evaluate the claim by Gay et al. (Clim Change 94:333–349, 2009) that “surface temperature can be better described as a trend stationary process with a one-time permanent shock” than efforts by Kaufmann et al. (Clim Change 77:249–278, 2006) to model surface temperature as a time series that contains a stochastic trend that is imparted by the time series for radiative forcing. We test this claim by comparing the in-sample forecast generated by the trend stationary model with a one-time permanent shock to the in-sample forecast generated by a cointegration/error correction model that is assumed to be stable over the 1870–2000 sample period. Results indicate that the in-sample forecast generated by the cointegration/error correction model is more accurate than the in-sample forecast generated by the trend stationary model with a one-time permanent shock. Furthermore, Monte Carlo simulations of the cointegration/error correction model generate time series for temperature that are consistent with the trend-stationary-with-a-break result generated by Gay et al. (Clim Change 94:333–349, 2009), while the time series for radiative forcing cannot be modeled as trend stationary with a one-time shock. Based on these results, we argue that modeling surface temperature as a time series that shares a stochastic trend with radiative forcing offers the possibility of greater insights regarding the potential causes of climate change and efforts to slow its progression.     

A new scenario framework for climate change research: background,process, and future directions

The scientific community is developing new global, regional, and sectoral scenarios to facilitate interdisciplinary research and assessment to explore the range of possible future climates and related physical changes that could pose risks to human and natural systems; how these changes could interact with social, economic, and environmental development pathways; the degree to which mitigation and adaptation policies can avoid and reduce risks; the costs and benefits of various policy mixes; and the relationship of future climate change adaptation and mitigation policy responses with sustainable development. This paper provides the background to and process of developing the conceptual framework for these scenarios, as described in the three subsequent papers in this Special Issue (Van Vuuren et al., 2013; O’Neill et al., 2013; Kriegler et al., Submitted for publication in this special issue). The paper also discusses research needs to further develop, apply, and revise this framework in an iterative and open-ended process. A key goal of the framework design and its future development is to facilitate the collaboration of climate change researchers from a broad range of perspectives and disciplines to develop policy- and decision-relevant scenarios and explore the challenges and opportunities human and natural systems could face with additional climate change.     

SST and ice sheet impacts on the MIS–13 climate

As a first qualitative assessment tool, LOVECLIM has been used to investigate the interactions between insolation, ice sheets and the East Asian Monsoon at the Marine Isotopic Stage 13 (MIS–13) in work by Yin et?al. (Clim Past 4:79–90, 2008, Clim Past 5:229–243, 2009). The results are in need of validation with a more sophisticated model, which is done in this work with the ARPEGE atmospheric general circulation model. As in the Earth system Model of Intermediate Complexity, LOVECLIM, ARPEGE shows that the northern hemispheric high insolation in summer leads to strong MIS–13 monsoon precipitation. Data from the Chinese Loess Plateau indicate that MIS–13 was locally a warm and humid period (Guo et?al. in Clim Past 5:21–31, 2009; Yin and Guo in Chin Sci Bull 51(2):213–220, 2006). This is confirmed by these General Circulation Model (GCM) results, where the MIS–13 climate is found to be hotter and more humid both in the presence and absence of any added ice sheets. LOVECLIM found that the combined effects of the ice sheets and their accompanying SSTs contribute to more precipitation in eastern China, whilst in ARPEGE the impact is significant in northeastern China. Nonetheless the results of ARPEGE confirm the counter-intuitive results of LOVECLIM where ice sheets contribute to enhance monsoon precipitation. This happens through a topography induced wave propagating through Eurasia with an ascending branch over northeastern China. A feature which is also seen in LOVECLIM. The SST forcing in ARPEGE results in a strong zonal temperature gradient between the North Atlantic and east Eurasia, which in turn triggers an atmospheric gravity wave. This wave induces a blocking Okhotskian high, preventing the northwards penetration of the Meiyu monsoon front. The synergism between the ice sheets and SST is found through the factor separation method, yielding an increase in the Meiyu precipitation, though a reduction of the Changma precipitation. The synergism between the ice sheets and SST play a non-negligible role and should be taken into consideration in GCM studies. Preliminary fully coupled AOGCM results presented here further substantiate the finding of stronger MIS–13 monsoons and a reinforcement from ice sheets. This work increases our understanding of the signals found in the paleo-observations and the dynamics of the complex East Asian Summer Monsoon.