Scenarios, carbon budgets and temperature projections in the new IPCC WG1 AR6 report
Abstract: The Physical Science (Working Group 1) contribution to the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report will be released on the 10th August 2021. This first of two seminars will provide an overview of some key results in the IPCC report, presented by two authors that have been closely involved in this IPCC cycle. The seminar will cover the new scenarios that underpin future projections, historical warming updates, the question around how these scenarios compare to 1.5C warming, a comparison of when peak warming levels could be reached under the low mitigation scenarios, the impact of COVID, techniques to provide assessed future temperature projections based on multiple lines of evidence, the usefulness of providing projections against warming levels, remaining carbon budgets in comparison to the SR.5 report, as well as the importance of CO2 versus other gases, both in terms of past and future warming as well as in terms of so-called metrics that compare unit emissions of different GHGs. The second seminar (24th August) will provide more technical detail on two key aspects, i.e. assessed future warming levels and remaining carbon budgets.
This event has been organised with the financial support of the European Union’s Partnership Instrument. The opinions expressed are the sole responsibility of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views of the European Union.
Seminar slides
Malte’s research interests comprise probabilistic climate projections, carbon budgets and emulations of multiple climate system uncertainties. He is one of the Lead Authors for the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report on the physical climate science (WG1), and part of the Core Writing Team of the IPCC Synthesis Report. Malte has been the scientific advisor to the German Environmental Ministry, being part of the German negotiation team at international climate change negotiations for more than 10 years. In his scientific career, he received an Australian Research Council’s Future Fellowship Award to investigate Australia’s fair contribution towards a global mitigation effort. Malte is Associate Professor in Climate Science at the School of Geography, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Melbourne.
Zebedee is an expert in reduced complexity climate model development. Alongside A/Prof Malte Meinshausen, he leads the Reduced Complexity Model Intercomparison Project (RCMIP), which performs standardised evaluation of reduced complexity climate models. He also led the development of a common resource for reduced complexity model calibration data based on ESM output (cmip6.science.unimelb.edu.au) and helped create the input greenhouse gas datasets for CMIP6’s future scenario experiments. Zebedee submitted his PhD at the Climate & Energy College within the University of Melbourne’s School of Geography, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences in May, and before that completed his undergraduate Masters course in Physics at St. John’s College, University of Oxford. Beyond his PhD, Zebedee contributed to Working Group 1 of the forthcoming IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, leading Cross-Chapter Box 7.1 and acting as a Contributing Author to Chapters 1, 4, 5, 6 and 7.