National Aeronautics and Space Administration

The role of carbon cycle feedback uncertainty in future concentration and warming outcomes

Recording >> Slides [PDF]

About the Talk Carbon cycle feedbacks are an important but under-appreciated contributor to end-of-century warming outcomes. However, the IPCC projections most commonly used are based on fixed concentration scenarios that include a best-estimate of carbon cycle feedbacks but do not take the large uncertainties in this estimate into account. Here I will present initial results from an ongoing project with Richard Betts, Pierre Friedlingstein, and Ben Booth to use both C4MIP results and the HadCM3 perturbed physics ensemble estimates of carbon cycle feedbacks to simulate both the range of possible end-of-century CO2 concentrations and warming response across all CMIP5 models for the four RCPs featured in the IPCC 5th Assessment Report. This builds off work done in an article recently published at Carbon Brief: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-carbon-cycle-feedbacks-could-make-global-warming-worse.

About the Speaker Zeke Hausfather is a climate scientist and energy systems analyst whose research focuses on observational temperature records, climate models, and mitigation technologies. He spent 10 years working as a data scientist and entrepreneur in the cleantech sector, where he was the lead data scientist at Essess, the chief scientist at C3.ai, and the cofounder and chief scientist of Efficiency 2.0. He also worked as a research scientist with Berkeley Earth, was the senior climate analyst at Project Drawdown, and the US analyst for Carbon Brief. He has master’s degrees in environmental science from Yale University and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and a PhD in climate science from the University of California, Berkeley.

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