Emergent constraints on future climate extremes (4961)

The general circulation models (GCMs) used to make projections of future climate change are vitally important to inform climate mitigation and adaptation strategies but are also invaluable tools for testing hypotheses about the functioning of the Earth System.

Climate modelling centres around the world have devoted increasing effort to improving GCMs since the first IPCC report in 1990.

As a result, they now provide a more complete representation of the myriad of interactions and feedbacks that determine how the climate will change in response to human and natural forcing factors. Unfortunately, the range of possible futures they project has not significantly reduced despite this.

It is critically important to reduce projection uncertainty so as to provide better information to impact national and global climate policy action (Cox et al., 2018, Nijsse et al., 2020).