The Lund–Potsdam–Jena Dynamic Global Vegetation Model (LPJ) combines process‐based, large‐scale representations of terrestrial vegetation dynamics and land‐atmosphere carbon and water exchanges in a modular framework. Features include feedback through canopy conductance between photosynthesis and transpiration and interactive coupling between these ‘fast’ processes and other ecosystem processes including resource competition, tissue turnover, population dynamics, soil organic matter and litter dynamics and fire disturbance. Ten plants functional types (PFTs) are differentiated by physiological, morphological, phenological, bioclimatic and fire‐response attributes. Resource competition and differential responses to fire between PFTs influence their relative fractional cover from year to year. Photosynthesis, evapotranspiration and soil water dynamics are modelled on a daily time step, while vegetation structure and PFT population densities are updated annually. Simulations have been made over the industrial period both for specific sites where field measurements were available for model evaluation, and globally on a 0.5°° × 0.5°° grid. Modelled vegetation patterns are consistent with observations, including remotely sensed vegetation structure and phenology. Seasonal cycles of net ecosystem exchange and soil moisture compare well with local measurements. Global carbon exchange fields used as input to an atmospheric tracer transport model (TM2) provided a good fit to observed seasonal cycles of CO2 concentration at all latitudes. Simulated inter‐annual variability of the global terrestrial carbon balance is in phase with and comparable in amplitude to observed variability in the growth rate of atmospheric CO2. Global terrestrial carbon and water cycle parameters (pool sizes and fluxes) lie within their accepted ranges. The model is being used to study past, present and future terrestrial ecosystem dynamics, biochemical and biophysical interactions between ecosystems and the atmosphere, and as a component of coupled Earth system models.

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Climate variations influenced the agricultural productivity, health risk, and conflict level of preindustrial societies. Discrimination between environmental and anthropogenic impacts on past civilizations, however, remains difficult because of the paucity of high-resolution paleoclimatic evidence. We present tree ring-based reconstructions of central European summer precipitation and temperature variability over the past 2500 years. Recent warming is unprecedented, but modern hydroclimatic variations may have at times been exceeded in magnitude and duration. Wet and warm summers occurred during periods of Roman and medieval prosperity. Increased climate variability from ~250 to 600 C.E. coincided with the demise of the western Roman Empire and the turmoil of the Migration Period. Such historical data may provide a basis for counteracting the recent political and fiscal reluctance to mitigate projected climate change.

Abstract. Accurate assessment of anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and their redistribution among the atmosphere, ocean, and terrestrial biosphere – the “global carbon budget” – is important to better understand the global carbon cycle, support the development of climate policies, and project future climate change. Here we describe data sets and methodology to quantify the five major components of the global carbon budget and their uncertainties. Fossil CO2 emissions (EFF) are based on energy statistics and cement production data, while emissions from land use change (ELUC), mainly deforestation, are based on land use and land use change data and bookkeeping models. Atmospheric CO2 concentration is measured directly and its growth rate (GATM) is computed from the annual changes in concentration. The ocean CO2 sink (SOCEAN) and terrestrial CO2 sink (SLAND) are estimated with global process models constrained by observations. The resulting carbon budget imbalance (BIM), the difference between the estimated total emissions and the estimated changes in the atmosphere, ocean, and terrestrial biosphere, is a measure of imperfect data and understanding of the contemporary carbon cycle. All uncertainties are reported as ±1σ. For the last decade available (2009–2018), EFF was 9.5±0.5 GtC yr−1, ELUC 1.5±0.7 GtC yr−1, GATM 4.9±0.02 GtC yr−1 (2.3±0.01 ppm yr−1), SOCEAN 2.5±0.6 GtC yr−1, and SLAND 3.2±0.6 GtC yr−1, with a budget imbalance BIM of 0.4 GtC yr−1 indicating overestimated emissions and/or underestimated sinks. For the year 2018 alone, the growth in EFF was about 2.1 % and fossil emissions increased to 10.0±0.5 GtC yr−1, reaching 10 GtC yr−1 for the first time in history, ELUC was 1.5±0.7 GtC yr−1, for total anthropogenic CO2 emissions of 11.5±0.9 GtC yr−1 (42.5±3.3 GtCO2). Also for 2018, GATM was 5.1±0.2 GtC yr−1 (2.4±0.1 ppm yr−1), SOCEAN was 2.6±0.6 GtC yr−1, and SLAND was 3.5±0.7 GtC yr−1, with a BIM of 0.3 GtC. The global atmospheric CO2 concentration reached 407.38±0.1 ppm averaged over 2018. For 2019, preliminary data for the first 6–10 months indicate a reduced growth in EFF of +0.6 % (range of −0.2 % to 1.5 %) based on national emissions projections for China, the USA, the EU, and India and projections of gross domestic product corrected for recent changes in the carbon intensity of the economy for the rest of the world. Overall, the mean and trend in the five components of the global carbon budget are consistently estimated over the period 1959–2018, but discrepancies of up to 1 GtC yr−1 persist for the representation of semi-decadal variability in CO2 fluxes. A detailed comparison among individual estimates and the introduction of a broad range of observations shows (1) no consensus in the mean and trend in land use change emissions over the last decade, (2) a persistent low agreement between the different methods on the magnitude of the land CO2 flux in the northern extra-tropics, and (3) an apparent underestimation of the CO2 variability by ocean models outside the tropics. This living data update documents changes in the methods and data sets used in this new global carbon budget and the progress in understanding of the global carbon cycle compared with previous publications of this data set (Le Quéré et al., 2018a, b, 2016, 2015a, b, 2014, 2013). The data generated by this work are available at https://doi.org/10.18160/gcp-2019 (Friedlingstein et al., 2019).