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Potential climatic transitions with profound impact on Europe

Review of the current state of six ‘tipping elements of the climate system’

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Abstract

We discuss potential transitions of six climatic subsystems with large-scale impact on Europe, sometimes denoted as tipping elements. These are the ice sheets on Greenland and West Antarctica, the Atlantic thermohaline circulation, Arctic sea ice, Alpine glaciers and northern hemisphere stratospheric ozone. Each system is represented by co-authors actively publishing in the corresponding field. For each subsystem we summarize the mechanism of a potential transition in a warmer climate along with its impact on Europe and assess the likelihood for such a transition based on published scientific literature. As a summary, the ‘tipping’ potential for each system is provided as a function of global mean temperature increase which required some subjective interpretation of scientific facts by the authors and should be considered as a snapshot of our current understanding.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Potsdam, Germany

    Anders Levermann & Andrey Ganopolski

  2. University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany

    Anders Levermann

  3. University of Bristol, Bristol, UK

    Jonathan L. Bamber

  4. Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, De Bilt, The Netherlands

    Sybren Drijfhout & Susanne Weber

  5. University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Winfried Haeberli

  6. European Ozone Research Coordinating Unit, Department of Chemistry, Cambridge University, Cambridge, UK

    Neil R. P. Harris

  7. University of Fribourg, Fribourg, Switzerland

    Matthias Huss

  8. Leibniz Institute for Marine Sciences, Kiel, Germany

    Kirstin Krüger

  9. College of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK

    Timothy M. Lenton

  10. University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

    Ronald W. Lindsay

  11. Max-Planck-Institute for Meteorology, Hamburg, Germany

    Dirk Notz

  12. Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, Cambridge University, Cambridge, UK

    Peter Wadhams

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  1. Anders Levermann
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Correspondence to Anders Levermann.

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Levermann, A., Bamber, J.L., Drijfhout, S. et al. Potential climatic transitions with profound impact on Europe. Climatic Change 110, 845–878 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-011-0126-5

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