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Climate Sensitivity Controls Uncertainty in Future Terrestrial Carbon Sink

2018; American Geophysical Union; Volume: 45; Issue: 9 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1029/2018gl077528

1944-8007

Guy Schurgers, Anders Ahlström, Almut Arneth, Thomas A. M. Pugh, Benjamin Smith,

Meteorological Phenomena and Simulations

Abstract For the 21st century, carbon cycle models typically project an increase of terrestrial carbon with increasing atmospheric CO 2 and a decrease with the accompanying climate change. However, these estimates are poorly constrained, primarily because they typically rely on a limited number of emission and climate scenarios. Here we explore a wide range of combinations of CO 2 rise and climate change and assess their likelihood with the climate change responses obtained from climate models. Our results demonstrate that the terrestrial carbon uptake depends critically on the climate sensitivity of individual climate models, representing a large uncertainty of model estimates. In our simulations, the terrestrial biosphere is unlikely to become a strong source of carbon with any likely combination of CO 2 and climate change in the absence of land use change, but the fraction of the emissions taken up by the terrestrial biosphere will decrease drastically with higher emissions.