Irreversible Does Not Mean Unavoidable
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Solomon_Irreversible does.pdf
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281.36 KB
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Author(s)
Matthews, H. D.
Solomon, Susan
Date Issued
March 2013
Journal
Science
Publisher
American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
Citation
Matthews, H. D., and S. Solomon. “Irreversible Does Not Mean Unavoidable.” Science 340, no. 6131 (April 26, 2013): 438–439.
Version
Original manuscript
Abstract
Understanding how decreases in CO[subscript 2] emissions would affect global temperatures has been hampered in recent years by confusion regarding issues of committed warming and irreversibility. The notion that there will be additional future warming or “warming in the pipeline” if the atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide were to remain fixed at current levels (1) has been misinterpreted to mean that the rate of increase in Earth's global temperature is inevitable, regardless of how much or how quickly emissions decrease (2–4). Further misunderstanding may stem from recent studies showing that the warming that has already occurred as a result of past anthropogenic carbon dioxide increases is irreversible on a time scale of at least 1000 years (5, 6). But irreversibility of past changes does not mean that further warming is unavoidable.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences
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Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1236372
