Abstract

The currently ongoing climate change and the debate about possible measures to be taken to limit the consequences of climate change, requires to know and understand the future response of the climate system to greenhouse gas emissions. Classical measures of climate change such as the Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity are inherently linear and unable to account for abrupt transitions due to (interacting) tipping elements.

In this presentation I will discuss more general notions of climate sensitivity defined on a climate attractor that can be useful in understanding the response of a climate state to changes in radiative forcing. For example, a climate state close to a tipping point will have a degenerate linear response to perturbations, which can be associated with extreme values of the climate sensitivity. While many identified tipping elements in the climate system are regional and may have no direct impact on the global mean temperature, cascades of tipping elements can potentially have an impact, initiated by the threshold of the leading tipping element in a cascade.

I will also showcase a few examples of large scale climate tipping elements and their interactions, in particular related to the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation and polar ice sheets.