The ambition of the Paris Agreement – holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels – must be informed by solid scientific knowledge.
The Paris Agreement invited the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to prepare a special report in 2018 “on the impacts of global warming of 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels and related greenhouse gas emission pathways”.
The special report on 1.5 °C and 2 °C warming above pre-industrial levels will build on peer-reviewed literature, and targeted research is needed to finalize it in 2018. Several initiatives intend to strengthen the scientific basis for the report. One is the international project HAPPI – Half a degree Additional warming, Projections, Prognosis and Impacts.
The RCN-financed project “EVA – Earth system modelling of climate Variations in the Anthropocene” will – through an ad hoc additional project – contribute to HAPPI using the Norwegian Earth System Model (NorESM). This project is called “HappiEVA – Supporting HAPPI by harvesting from competence and tools in EVA”.
HappiEVA will quantify the risks associated with 1.5°C global warming, and will include analyses of multi-model results from HAPPI, and investigations of the importance of Arctic amplification. The analyses will emphasize differences in weather-related extremes between a 1.5 and 2 °C warming.
Significant contributions to scientific papers are aimed at in time for contributing to the scientific basis for the IPCC Special Report. The results of HAPPI are of high interest for society and will be communicated to a broad audience. HappiEVA plans to arrange a workshop where scientists, policymakers, and stakeholders will be updated on new knowledge on global warming at 1.5 and 2 °C.