Extreme Sensitivity and Climate Tipping Points

Peter Ashwin; Anna S. von der Heydt

doi:10.1007/s10955-019-02425-x

Extreme Sensitivity and Climate Tipping Points

Peter Ashwin^*, Anna S. von der Heydt

^*Corresponding author for this work

University of Exeter

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › Academic › peer-review

Abstract

A climate state close to a tipping point will have a degenerate linear response to perturbations, which can be associated with extreme values of the equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS). In this paper we contrast linearized (‘instantaneous’) with fully nonlinear geometric (‘two-point’) notions of ECS, in both presence and absence of tipping points. For a stochastic energy balance model of the global mean surface temperature with two stable regimes, we confirm that tipping events cause the appearance of extremes in both notions of ECS. Moreover, multiple regimes with different mean sensitivities are visible in the two-point ECS. We confirm some of our findings in a physics-based multi-box model of the climate system.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	1531–1552
Journal	Journal of Statistical Physics
Volume	179
Early online date	13 Nov 2019
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1007/s10955-019-02425-x
Publication status	Published - 2020

Funding

We thank Peter Cox, Henk Dijsktra, Valerio Lucarini, Michael Ghil and Georg Gottwald for interesting comments and suggestions concerning this work. We thank the EU ITN network CRITICS and CliMathNet for opportunities to discuss and develop this research. PA thanks the EPSRC for support under grant number EP/M008495/1. AvdH thanks the program of the Netherlands Earth System Science Centre (NESSC), financially supported by the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science (OCW). This project is TiPES contribution #7: this project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 820970. MATLAB code for the Energy Balance Model is available from https://github.com/peterashwin/ashwin-heydt-2019 .

Keywords

Climate sensitivity
Energy balance model
Stochastic climate model
Tipping point

UN SDGs

This output contributes to the following UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

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Cite this

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Extreme Sensitivity and Climate Tipping Points

Abstract

Funding

Keywords

UN SDGs

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