Responsibility of major emitters for country-level warming and extreme hot years

Beusch, Lea; Nauels, Alexander; Gudmundsson, Lukas; Gütschow, Johannes; Schleußner, Carl-Friedrich; Seneviratne, Sonia I.

doi:10.1038/s43247-021-00320-6

Cited by 36 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 40 publications

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“…These realities are highly detrimental to address the dangers of global public crisis such as climate change, pandemic, and global economic crisis. Ecological and environmental crisis is a global issue, which primarily relies on the close cooperation of major economies, especially like the US and China [4] . The international academic community has repeatedly voiced the opinion that there can be no real and effective solutions to major crisis concerning the future of mankind, such as climate change, if the West does not cooperate with China.…”

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confidence: 99%

Political Economy of Global Environmental Governance Institutions: Future Collaborations between China and USA

Zhang¹,

Guo²

2022

j. of econ. sci. res.

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confidence: 99%

Political Economy of Global Environmental Governance Institutions: Future Collaborations between China and USA

Zhang¹,

Guo²

2022

j. of econ. sci. res.

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“…Den Elzen & Schaeffer, 2002;Höhne et al, 2011;Matthews, 2016;Matthews et al, 2014;Skeie et al, 2017) or gridcell (Wei et al, 2012) scale, as opposed to the district or country scale used in empirical climate-economy studies (Burke et al, 2015;Burke & Tanutama, 2019;Dell et al, 2012;Kalkuhl & Wenz, 2020). Two recent studies connected individual emitters to regional (Lewis et al, 2019, p. 201) or country-level (Beusch et al, 2022) temperature changes, but both did so only for the top few emitters and focused on the next several decades instead of the historical period, making their analyses unsuited for quantifying national contributions to historical losses from warming and thus present liability claims.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

National attribution of historical climate damages

Callahan

Mankin

2022

Climatic Change

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Quantifying which nations are culpable for the economic impacts of anthropogenic warming is central to informing climate litigation and restitution claims for climate damages. However, for countries seeking legal redress, the magnitude of economic losses from warming attributable to individual emitters is not known, undermining their standing for climate liability claims. Uncertainties compound at each step from emissions to global greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations, GHG concentrations to global temperature changes, global temperature changes to country-level temperature changes, and country-level temperature changes to economic losses, providing emitters with plausible deniability for damage claims. Here we lift that veil of deniability, combining historical data with climate models of varying complexity in an integrated framework to quantify each nation’s culpability for historical temperature-driven income changes in every other country. We find that the top five emitters (the United States, China, Russia, Brazil, and India) have collectively caused US$6 trillion in income losses from warming since 1990, comparable to 14% of annual global gross domestic product; many other countries are responsible for billions in losses. Yet the distribution of warming impacts from emitters is highly unequal: high-income, high-emitting countries have benefited themselves while harming low-income, low-emitting countries, emphasizing the inequities embedded in the causes and consequences of historical warming. By linking individual emitters to country-level income losses from warming, our results provide critical insight into climate liability and national accountability for climate policy.

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“…Similar to MESMER (Beusch, Nauels, et al., 2022; Beusch, Nicholls, et al., 2022), MESMER‐X could be coupled to a simple climate model in future work to gain the ability to transform any emission scenario into local annual climate extremes in a fast and probabilistic way. Such an emulator chain could be used to provide detailed climate information into integrated assessment models, for instance, to assess how climate extremes affect different transformation pathways.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Showcasing MESMER‐X: Spatially Resolved Emulation of Annual Maximum Temperatures of Earth System Models

Quilcaille

Gudmundsson

Beusch

et al. 2022

Geophysical Research Letters

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The impacts of climate change impact the entire social and economic system (IPCC, 2014(IPCC, , 2021. In particular, changes in climate extremes count among the most impactful consequences of climate change. Climate extremes are substantially affected by human-induced climate change (Seneviratne et al., 2021). For example, the annual average losses to weather-related disasters in 2020 USD were 168 billion per year over 2001-2010 and have increased to 248 billion per year over 2011(AON, 2020. Climate extremes affect numerous economic sectors, for instance, the agriculture (Sivakumar et al., 2005;Vogel et al., 2019) or the energy sector (Perera et al., 2020;Schaeffer et al., 2012). Not only do climate extremes have direct consequences on food or energy security (Hasegawa et al., 2021), but they can also have indirect impacts on societies due to feedbacks with societal drivers (Raymond et al., 2020). Even if climate change were limited to 1.5°C, changes in climate extremes would remain a crucial issue (Seneviratne et al., 2018), and society will be impacted in many aspects (IPCC, 2018).Earth System Models (ESMs) are used to derive climate change projections and the associated climate extremes (Collins et al., 2013;Flato et al., 2013;Lee et al., 2021). These outputs are crucial to assess what consequences changes in climate extremes would have on society (Rosenzweig et al., 2017). However, simulating climate change with ESMs is computationally expensive, hindering their use in exploring new scenarios while characterizing internal climate variability.ESM emulators have been developed for a quicker assessment of climate change in response to given scenario pathways. A large class of emulators, termed "simple climate models" or "reduced complexity models" provide projections of key variables of the Earth system such as global mean temperature (Nicholls et al., 2020(Nicholls et al., , 2021; however, they do not provide local information, which is essential for studying climate impacts. A second class of emulators derives spatially resolved climate responses (spatially resolved emulators), such as the recently

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Responsibility of major emitters for country-level warming and extreme hot years

Cited by 36 publications

References 40 publications

Political Economy of Global Environmental Governance Institutions: Future Collaborations between China and USA

Political Economy of Global Environmental Governance Institutions: Future Collaborations between China and USA

National attribution of historical climate damages

Showcasing MESMER‐X: Spatially Resolved Emulation of Annual Maximum Temperatures of Earth System Models

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