Analytically tractable climate&ndash;carbon cycle feedbacks under 21st century anthropogenic forcing

Lade, Steven J.; Donges, Jonathan F.; Fetzer, Ingo; Anderies, John M.; Beer, Christian; Cornell, Sarah E.; Gasser, Thomas; Norberg, Jon; Richardson, Katherine; Rockström, Johan; Steffen, Will

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-9-507-2018

Articles | Volume 9, issue 2

https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-9-507-2018

© Author(s) 2018. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Special issue:

Social dynamics and planetary boundaries in Earth system...

https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-9-507-2018

© Author(s) 2018. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 9, issue 2

Research article

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|

17 May 2018

Research article | Highlight paper |

| 17 May 2018

Analytically tractable climate–carbon cycle feedbacks under 21st century anthropogenic forcing

Steven J. Lade, Jonathan F. Donges, Ingo Fetzer, John M. Anderies, Christian Beer, Sarah E. Cornell, Thomas Gasser, Jon Norberg, Katherine Richardson, Johan Rockström, and Will Steffen

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Final revised paper (published on 17 May 2018)
Preprint (discussion started on 12 Sep 2017)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

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SC1: 'Small suggestion for improvement of model exposition', Jobst Heitzig, 12 Nov 2017
- AC2: 'Response to comment by Jobst Heitzig', Steven Lade, 12 Feb 2018
RC1: 'Review of “Analytically tractable climate-carbon cycle feedbacks under 21st century anthropogenic forcing”, by Lade et al.', Chris Jones, 21 Nov 2017
- AC1: 'Response to review by Chris Jones', Steven Lade, 12 Feb 2018
- AC4: 'Proposed revised manuscript', Steven Lade, 12 Feb 2018
RC2: 'A feedback analysis using new variant of a simple coupled global carbon cycle - climate model', Martin Heimann, 03 Jan 2018
- AC3: 'Response to review by Martin Heimann', Steven Lade, 12 Feb 2018
- AC4: 'Proposed revised manuscript', Steven Lade, 12 Feb 2018
AC5: 'Authors’ overall comment', Steven Lade, 12 Feb 2018

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

ED: Reconsider after major revisions (16 Feb 2018) by Axel Kleidon

AR by Steven Lade on behalf of the Authors (19 Feb 2018) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (21 Feb 2018) by Axel Kleidon

RR by Chris Jones (03 Apr 2018)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

The authors appear to have taken review comments on board and made suitable changes to the manuscript. I have a couple of remaining comments, but no substantive objections to publication

Chris Jones.

1. Multiple review comments asked - is there a need for a new simple model? OK, the authors make a good argument for this, and I accept it fits a niche - the ability to understand the simplicity of it is nice. I still feel that the aspect of "analytically" solving the behaviour of the model is a little over-sold given that further simplifying assumptions have to be made, but nonetheless the usefulness is clear.

2. I accept that the table of feedbacks is already full and so there is no need to add the Friedlingstein definitions of feedback metrics to it.

3. I would like to see some discussion of the implications of not tuning parameters to optimise the historical performance against observations. I certainly understand the argument that using best estimates of parameters keeps the model closer in a "process sense" to reality. But to some extent you cannot pick and choose when reality is a good test - for example in your response to Martin Heimann you say that you don't see "a discrepancy of a factor of 2 an invalidation of the simple model", but then your first sentence in the conclusions highlights that this model emulates the historical record - so either you see this as important or you don't! Perhaps a good way forward is to accept your parameter choice, but can you show that your main conclusions are not dependent on this - i.e. if you tuned the model to get closer to the historical record do you retain or lose your main conclusions? If you are correct then they should be robust... If they are dependent on tuning and that getting closer to historical global behaviour breaks your conclusions then to what extent can we really believe them?

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ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (16 Apr 2018) by Axel Kleidon

AR by Steven Lade on behalf of the Authors (23 Apr 2018) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (27 Apr 2018) by Axel Kleidon

Short summary

Around half of the carbon that humans emit into the atmosphere each year is taken up on land (by trees) and in the ocean (by absorption). We construct a simple model of carbon uptake that, unlike the complex models that are usually used, can be analysed mathematically. Our results include that changes in atmospheric carbon may affect future carbon uptake more than changes in climate. Our simple model could also study mechanisms that are currently too uncertain for complex models.