Mean RCP4.5 annual temperature 2081-2100 minus 1986-2005 (AR5 CMIP5 subset)

Unit: degree celsius

The future climate depends on how much we change the composition of the atmosphere (CO2, other gases, aerosols) and land properties. This in turn depends on economical growth, technological progress, and choices that are made whether to limit emissions or not. Possible futures are described by scenarios, plausible ways that the world could develop that are constructed so that the consequences of climate change and choices to limit it can be investigated. The most recent scenarios used for the CMIP5 experiments run in support of the IPCC AR5 report are the Representative Concentration Pathways or RCPs. RCP4.5 assumes quicker action to limit greenhouse gas emissions with emissions peaking in 2040 and declining strongly until 2080. There are many ways to measure how much the climate has changed or may change. The most straightforward one, widely used, is to take the difference of two periods. This is easy to interpret but suffers from rather large uncertainties due to the natural variability of the climate, depending on the variable and the length of the periods. GCM: CMIP5 (IPCC AR5 Atlas subset) This is the dataset used in the IPCC WG1 AR5 Annex I "Atlas", fully described in Table 1. It uses only a single realisation of each model and weighs all models equally, where model realisations differing only in model parameter settings are treated as different models. The projection of future climate change involves the careful evaluation of models, taking into account uncertainties in observations and consideration of the physical basis of the findings, in order to characterise the credibility of the projections and assess their sensitivity to uncertainties.

Source: GCM: CMIP5 (IPCC AR5 Atlas subset)

Provider: KNMI Climate Change Atlas [https://climexp.knmi.nl/plot_atlas_form.py]