Is the climate response to CO<sub>2</sub> emissions path dependent?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recent studies with coupled climate‐carbon cycle models suggest that global mean temperature change is proportional to cumulative CO 2 emissions, independent of the timing of those emissions. This finding has prompted the suggestion that climate stabilization targets, such as the 2°C target adopted by the Copenhagen Accord, can be expressed in terms of cumulative CO 2 emissions. Here we examine the simulated response of a range of global and regional climate variables to the same cumulative CO 2 emissions (2500 PgC) released along different pathways using a complex Earth system model. We find that the response of most surface climate variables is largely independent of the emissions pathway once emissions cease, with the exception of variables with response timescales of centuries, such as ocean heat content and thermosteric sea level rise. Peak responses of many climate variables, such as global mean temperature, precipitation and sea ice, are also largely independent of the emissions pathway, except for scenarios with cumulative emissions overshoot which require net removal of CO 2 from the atmosphere. By contrast, peak responses of atmospheric CO 2 and surface ocean pH are found to be dependent on the emissions pathway. We conclude that a CO 2 mitigation framework based on cumulative emissions is well suited for limiting changes in many impact‐relevant climate variables, but is less effective in avoiding impacts directly associated with atmospheric CO 2 , whose peak response is dependent on the rate of emissions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.010 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".