Emit now, mitigate later? Earth system reversibility  under overshoots of different magnitudes and durations

Schwinger, Jörg; Asaadi, Ali; Steinert, Norman Julius; Lee, Hanna

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-13-1641-2022

Articles | Volume 13, issue 4

https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-13-1641-2022

© Author(s) 2022. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-13-1641-2022

© Author(s) 2022. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 13, issue 4

Research article

|

23 Nov 2022

Research article |

| 23 Nov 2022

Emit now, mitigate later? Earth system reversibility under overshoots of different magnitudes and durations

Jörg Schwinger, Ali Asaadi, Norman Julius Steinert, and Hanna Lee

Data sets

Idealized overshoot experiments simulated with NorESM2-LM J. Schwinger and A. Asaadi https://doi.org/10.11582/2022.00012

Model code and software

NorESM2 source code as used for CMIP6 simulations (includes additional experimental setups, extended model documentation, automated inputdata download, restructuring of BLOM/iHAMOCC input data) Ø. Seland, M. Bentsen, D. Olivié, T. Toniazzo, A. Gjermundsen, L. S. Graff, J. B. Debernard, A. K. Gupta, Y. He, A. Kirkevåg, J. Schwinger, J. Tjiputra, K. S. Aas, I. Bethke, Y. Fan, S. Gao, J. Griesfeller, A. Grini, C. Guo, M. Ilicak, I. H. H. Karset, O. Landgren, J. Liakka, A. Moree, K. O. Moseid, A. Nummelin, C. Spensberger, H. Tang, Z. Zhang, C. Heinze, T. Iversen, and M. Schulz https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3905091

Short summary

We test whether climate change can be partially reversed if CO₂ is removed from the atmosphere to compensate for too large past and near-term emissions by using idealized model simulations of overshoot pathways. On a timescale of 100 years, we find a high degree of reversibility if the overshoot size remains small, and we do not find tipping points even for intense overshoots. We caution that current Earth system models are most likely not able to skilfully model tipping points in ecosystems.