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An assessment of land-based climate and carbon reversibility in the Australian Community Climate and Earth System Simulator

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Abstract

Future levels of climate change depend not only on carbon emissions but also on carbon uptake by the land and the ocean. Here we are using the Earth system model (ESM1) version of the Australian Community Climate and Earth System Simulator (ACCESS) to explore the potential and impact of removing carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere through the climate and carbon cycle reversibility experiment. This experiment builds on the standard Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) experiment, increasing CO2 at 1% per year until 4xCO2 is reached. The atmospheric CO2 levels are then decreased at the same rate which brings the CO2 back to pre-industrial levels. We then continue to run the model with constant CO2 for another 350 years. Our analysis focuses on the response of the land carbon cycle. We find that carbon stores are largely reversible at the global scale over the timescale of changing CO2. However, carbon stores continue to decrease after CO2 returns to its initial value, and the land loses another 40 Pg of carbon (PgC) with the largest change in the tropics. It takes about 300 years beyond the period of changing CO2 for the carbon stores to recover. Interestingly, we saw strong regional variations in the strength of the land response to changing CO2. Australia showed the largest increase/decrease in biomass carbon (about 40%) and the largest variability in productivity, which was strongly correlated with rainfall. This highlights the importance of assessing the regional response to understanding the processes underlying the response and the sensitivity of these processes within each model. This understanding will benefit future multi-model analyses of this reversibility experiment. It also illustrates more generally the potential to use Earth system model experiments as part of the evaluation of proposed applications of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies. As such, we recommend that these types of modelling experiments be included when mitigation policies are developed.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. CSIRO Oceans and Atmosphere, PMB 1, Aspendale, VIC, Australia

    Tilo Ziehn & Rachel Law

  2. CSIRO Oceans and Atmosphere, GPO Box 1538, Hobart, TAS, Australia

    Andrew Lenton

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  1. Tilo Ziehn
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Correspondence to Tilo Ziehn.

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Ziehn, T., Lenton, A. & Law, R. An assessment of land-based climate and carbon reversibility in the Australian Community Climate and Earth System Simulator. Mitig Adapt Strateg Glob Change 25, 713–731 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11027-019-09905-1

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