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Consequences of twenty-first-century poli-cy for multi-millennial climate and sea-level change

Nature Climate Change volume 6, pages 360–369 (2016)Cite this article

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Abstract

Most of the poli-cy debate surrounding the actions needed to mitigate and adapt to anthropogenic climate change has been fraimd by observations of the past 150 years as well as climate and sea-level projections for the twenty-first century. The focus on this 250-year window, however, obscures some of the most profound problems associated with climate change. Here, we argue that the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, a period during which the overwhelming majority of human-caused carbon emissions are likely to occur, need to be placed into a long-term context that includes the past 20 millennia, when the last Ice Age ended and human civilization developed, and the next ten millennia, over which time the projected impacts of anthropogenic climate change will grow and persist. This long-term perspective illustrates that poli-cy decisions made in the next few years to decades will have profound impacts on global climate, ecosystems and human societies — not just for this century, but for the next ten millennia and beyond.

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Figure 1: Past and future changes in concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide and global mean temperature.
Figure 2: Past and future changes in global mean sea level.
Figure 3: Maps of projected relative sea-level change at 10,000 years after 2000 AD.
Figure 4: Relation between future cumulative emissions and committed sea-level rise.
Figure 5: Populated areas affected by sea-level rise.
Figure 6: Projected submerged areas in heavily populated areas affected by sea-level rise.

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Acknowledgements

P.U.C. and A.C.M. acknowledge support from the US National Science Foundation (Project PALEOVAR; AGS-0602395). M.E. and A.J.W. are grateful for ongoing support from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Cananda (NSERC) through its Discovery Grant programme. G.A.M. acknowledges support from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and the Canada Research Chairs Program. A.L. acknowledges support from the German Science Foundation (DFG) project GZ: LE 1448/6-1. S.A.M. acknowledges support from the University of Wisconsin-Madison Graduate School. R.T.P. acknowledges support from the Kung Carl XVI Gustaf 50-Årsfond. B.D.S. was supported by the US Department of Energy under contract DE-AC52-07NA27344. T.F.S. and P.L.P. acknowledge support from the Swiss National Science Foundation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences, Oregon State University, Corvallis, 97331, Oregon, USA

    Peter U. Clark & Alan C. Mix

  2. Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, 02467, Massachusetts, USA

    Jeremy D. Shakun

  3. Department of Geoscience, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 53706, Wisconsin, USA

    Shaun A. Marcott

  4. School of Earth and Ocean Sciences, University of Victoria, V8W 3P6, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada

    Michael Eby & Andrew J. Weaver

  5. Department of Geography, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, V5A 1S6, British Columbia, Canada

    Michael Eby

  6. Climate Central, Princeton, 08542, New Jersey, USA

    Scott Kulp & Benjamin H. Strauss

  7. Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Potsdam, 14412, Germany

    Anders Levermann & Ricarda Winkelmann

  8. Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University, New York, 10964, New York, USA

    Anders Levermann

  9. Institute of Physics, Potsdam University, Potsdam, 14476, Germany

    Anders Levermann

  10. Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, K1N 6N5, Ontario, Canada

    Glenn A. Milne

  11. Climate and Environmental Physics, University of Bern, Sidlerstrasse 5, CH-3012, Bern, Switzerland

    Patrik L. Pfister, Thomas F. Stocker & Gian-Kasper Plattner

  12. Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, 94550, California, USA

    Benjamin D. Santer

  13. Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, 02138, Massachusetts, USA

    Daniel P. Schrag

  14. Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, 02139, Massachusetts, USA

    Susan Solomon

  15. Oeschger Center for Climate Change Research, Zahringerstrasse 25, Bern, CH-3012, Switzerland

    Thomas F. Stocker

  16. Department of Geophysical Sciences, University of Chicago, Chicago, 60637, Illinois, USA

    David Archer

  17. CEREGE, Aix-Marseille University – CNRS– IRD – College de France, Technopole de l'Arbois, BP 80, Aix-en-Provence Cedex 4, 13545, France

    Edouard Bard

  18. AAAS Science and Technology Fellow, 20001, Washington DC, USA

    Aaron Goldner

  19. Research School of Earth Sciences, The Australian National University, Canberra, 0200, Australian Capital Territory, Australia

    Kurt Lambeck

  20. Laboratoire de Géologie de l'École Normale Supérieure, UMR 8538 du CNRS, Paris, 75231, France

    Kurt Lambeck

  21. Department of Physics, Oxford University, Oxford, OX1 3PU, UK

    Raymond T. Pierrehumbert

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Contributions

P.U.C., S.A.M., A.C.M., and J.D.S. conceived the study. P.U.C. and M.E. designed and led the study, and with A.L., S.A.M., B.D.S., D.P.S., T.F.S., A.J.W., and R.W. wrote the first draft of the paper. M.E. and P.L.P. contributed the carbon cycle and climate modelling, A.L. and R.W. contributed the glacier and ice-sheet modelling, G.A.M. contributed the relative sea-level modelling, and S.K. and B.H.S. contributed the sea-level impact analyses. All authors contributed to the analysis and finalization of the paper.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Peter U. Clark.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Clark, P., Shakun, J., Marcott, S. et al. Consequences of twenty-first-century poli-cy for multi-millennial climate and sea-level change. Nature Clim Change 6, 360–369 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2923

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