EGU22-9739
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu22-9739
EGU General Assembly 2022
© Author(s) 2022. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Assessing the consistency of institutional pathways with the Paris Agreement 

Gaurav Ganti1,2, Robert J. Brecha1,3,4, Robin D. Lamboll5, Zebedee Nicholls6,7, Bill Hare1, Jared Lewis7,8,9, Malte Meinshausen6,7,8, Michiel Schaeffer1,10, Christopher J. Smith9,11, and Matthew J. Gidden1,9
Gaurav Ganti et al.
  • 1Climate Analytics, Berlin, Germany
  • 2Geography Faculty, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany
  • 3Hanley Sustainability Institute, University of Dayton, Dayton, OH, USA
  • 4Renewable and Clean Energy Program, University of Dayton, Dayton, OH, USA
  • 5Center for Environmental Policy, Imperial College London, UK
  • 6Australian-German Climate and Energy College, The University of Melbourne, Australia
  • 7School of Geography, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, The University of Melbourne, Australia
  • 8Climate Resource, Melbourne, Australia
  • 9International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Laxenburg, Austria
  • 10The Global Center on Adaptation, Rotterdam, The Netherlands
  • 11Priestley International Centre for Climate, University of Leeds, UK

Scientifically rigorous guidance to policy makers on mitigation options for meeting the Paris Agreement long-term temperature goal requires an evaluation of long-term global-warming implications of greenhouse gas emissions pathways. Here, we present a uniform and transparent methodology to evaluate the climate outcome, and hence the Paris Agreement consistency of influential institutional emission scenarios from the grey literature, including those from the International Energy Agency1,2, BP3, and Shell4. We first identify challenges to performing such an assessment and then proceed to outline a sequence of steps to address these challenges by harmonizing5 all emissions to a consistent base-year (2010), extending all pathways to 2100, and filling in missing emission species6. We employ two simple climate models, MAGICC7 and FaIR8,9 to assess peak and end-of-century temperatures, and find that few published scenarios that claim to be compatible with the Paris Agreement are so.

 

References

 1. International Energy Agency. World Energy Outlook 2020. (2020).

2. International Energy Agency. Net Zero by 2050 - A Roadmap for the Global Energy Sector. (2021).

3. BP. Global Energy Outlook 2020. (2020).

4. Shell. The Energy Transformation Scenarios. (2021) 

5. Gidden, M. J. et al. A methodology and implementation of automated emissions harmonization for use in Integrated Assessment Models. Environ. Model. Softw. 105, 187–200 (2018)

6. Lamboll, R. D., Nicholls, Z. R. J., Kikstra, J. S., Meinshausen, M. & Rogelj, J. Silicone v1.0.0 : an open-source Python package for inferring missing emissions data for climate change research. Geosci. Model Dev 13, 5259–5275 (2020)

7. Meinshausen, M., Raper, S. C. B. & Wigley, T. M. L. Emulating coupled atmosphere-ocean and carbon cycle models with a simpler model, MAGICC6 - Part 1: Model description and calibration. Atmos. Chem. Phys. 11, 1417–1456 (2011).

8. Smith, C. J. et al. FAIR v1.3: A simple emissions-based impulse response and carbon cycle model. Geosci. Model Dev. 11, 2273–2297 (2018)

9. Millar, J. R., Nicholls, Z. R., Friedlingstein, P. & Allen, M. R. A modified impulse-response representation of the global near-surface air temperature and atmospheric concentration response to carbon dioxide emissions. Atmos. Chem. Phys. 17, 7213–7228 (2017).

How to cite: Ganti, G., J. Brecha, R., D. Lamboll, R., Nicholls, Z., Hare, B., Lewis, J., Meinshausen, M., Schaeffer, M., J. Smith, C., and J. Gidden, M.: Assessing the consistency of institutional pathways with the Paris Agreement , EGU General Assembly 2022, Vienna, Austria, 23–27 May 2022, EGU22-9739, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu22-9739, 2022.