Global Warming White Papers

Climate Change and Its Impacts: Stabilisation of CO2 in the Atmosphere

• Tags:
• global warming,
• scenarios,
• climate,
• emissions

Overview In reports issued in 1997 and 1998, we have looked at the climate change due to a ‘business as usual’, or unmitigated, emissions scenario and the socio-economic impacts resulting from it. In this report, in order to contribute to the discussion on interpreting Annex 2 of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, we investigate two scenarios of reduced emissions, leading to a stabilization of the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, at 550 and 750 parts per million (ppm); about twice and three times pre-industrial levels respectively. In the first section the climate consequences are predicted, and these predictions are used as scenarios to make the first assessments of global impacts in five areas: natural vegetation, water resources, food supply, coastal flooding and human health. The impacts are compared in each case with those which would arise if emissions were not mitigated, concentrating on changes between the present day (defined as the period 1961–90) and 30-year periods centered on the 2020s, the 2050s and the 2080s. In addition, changes are illustrated over the longer term from the stabilization scenarios, up to the 2230s. All models and methods used in this report have been validated and peer-reviewed.

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