Negative emissions

‘The Economist’ has a cover story this week on Negative Emissions where WITCH is mentioned in relation to the R&D investments needed to stay below 2°C of Global Warming. Here are few links to the scientific publications the article refers to.

The issue of Negative Emissions is relatively new for the general public, but it is something modelers are struggling with since a decade or so, since the IPCC 4th Assessment Report have made clear that to avoid severe damages, humanity should try to limit global warming at 2°C, if not less.

‘The Economist’ article is essentially based on some scientific articles based on WITCH and other Integrated Assessment Models.

In the long term, ignoring the need for negative emissions is complacent at best. The eventual undertaking, after all, will be gargantuan.

The first set of papers is a 2014 special issue of an academic journal named Climatic Change, with 9 articles dedicated to the issue of negative emissions: five of the papers use Integrated Assessment Models to investigate Carbon Dioxyde Removal while the other four approach the issue through the lenses of ecology, carbon-cycle science, chemical engineering, and political science.

The second paper quoted in ‘The Economist’ is an article published on Climate Change Economics estimating the climate R&D investment needs, under the scenarios runs performed for the EU funded project LIMITS.

An overview of those studies is available in this Nature Climate Change review article, and as a pre-print here.