International negotiators at a United Nations-sponsored climate conference ending today in Bangkok repeatedly underscored the goal of keeping the amount of global warming in this century to no more than 2˚C. But results from a Canadian government climate modeling study published last month suggest that “it is unlikely that warming can be limited to the 2˚C target,” the scientists who wrote the study say.
The paper finds that reaching that goal would require that greenhouse emissions “ramp down to zero immediately” and that scientists deploy means, starting in 2050, to actively remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. Previous modeling efforts have already highlighted the difficulty of reaching the 2˚C goal. But the new study is unique in several ways. Most important, it relies on the first published results from the latest generation of so-called Earth System climate models, complex programs that run on supercomputers and seek to simulate the planet’s oceans, land, ice, and atmosphere. The model in this study, Canadian Earth System Model 2, also incorporates updated data on volcanic eruptions, and it simulates in a more sophisticated way the biosphere’s ability to take in or emit carbon.....
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