In a letter in Nature Climate Change, NCICS’s Dr. Kenneth Kunkel and his coauthors emphasize the need for longer-term climate model projections.
Most climate model projections run only through the year 2099 or 2100. Several decades ago, when scientists first began using climate models to generate projections, 2100 was seen as the distant future. But from the perspective of 2024, the end of the century is now well within the horizon of long-term planning.
As the authors of a new article in the Correspondence section of Nature Climate Change put it, “the projections that were once considered outcomes our grandchildren might face now describe the potential futures of children born today.”
NCICS’s Kenneth Kunkel and his coathors on the article—David Easterling of NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information, Allison Crimmins of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and Michael Wehner of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory—argue that climate projections that end in 2100 are “insufficient to understand and plan for impacts on key sectors and industries” and that “the need for integrating long-term projections into capital improvement projects and climate resilience planning is growing.”
With climate change already having significant impacts and with even greater impacts expected as emissions of greenhouse gasses continue, Kunkel and his colleagues call for the next generation of climate model protocols “to be extended to at least 2150 to meet the continued demand for climate data relevant to policymakers and decision-makers.”
The full article is available at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-024-02085-0
Easterling, D.R., K.E. Kunkel, A.R. Crimmins, and M.F. Wehner, 2024: Long-term planning requires climate projections beyond 2100. Nature Climate Change, In Press. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-024-02085-0