Assessing the implications of human land-use change for the transient climate response to cumulative carbon emissions

Abstract

Recent research has shown evidence of a linear climate response to cumulative CO2 emissions, which implies that the source, timing, and amount of emissions does not significantly influence the climate response per unit emission. Furthermore, these analyses have generally assumed that the climate response to land-use CO2 emissions is equivalent to that of fossil fuels under the assumption that, once in the atmosphere, the radiative forcing induced by CO2 is not sensitive to the emissions source. However, land-cover change also affects surface albedo and the strength of terrestrial carbon sinks, both of which have an additional climate effect. In this study, we use a coupled climate-carbon cycle model to assess the climate response to historical and future cumulative land-use CO2 emissions, in order to compare it to the response to fossil fuel CO2. We find that when we isolate the CO2-induced (biogeochemical) temperature changes associated with land-use change, then the climate response to cumulative land-use emissions is equivalent to that of fossil fuel CO2. We show further that the globally-averaged albedo-induced biophysical cooling from land-use change is non-negligible and may be of comparable magnitude to the biogeochemical warming, with the result that the net climate response to land-use change is substantially different from a linear response to cumulative emissions. However, our new simulations suggest that the biophysical cooling from land-use change follows its own independent (negative) linear response to cumulative net land-use CO2 emissions, which may provide a useful scaling factor for certain applications when evaluating the full transient climate response to emissions.