Accounting for Pacific climate variability increases projected global warming

Abstract

Observational constraint methods based on the relationship between the past global warming trend and projected warming across climate models were used to reduce uncertainties in projected warming by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Internal climate variability in the eastern tropical Pacific associated with the so-called pattern effect weakens this relationship and has reduced the observed warming trend over recent decades. Here we show that regressing out this variability before applying the observed global mean warming trend as a constraint results in higher and narrower twenty-first century warming ranges than other methods. Whereas the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessed that warming is unlikely to exceed 2 °C under a low-emissions scenario, our results indicate that warming is likely to exceed 2 °C under the same scenario, and hence, limiting global warming to well below 2 °C will be harder than previously anticipated. However, the reduced uncertainties in these projections could benefit adaptation planning.