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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Levermann, Anders
Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Germany - University of Potsdam, Germany
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Bamber, Jonathan L.
University of Bristol, UK
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Drijfhout, Sybren
Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, De Bilt, The Netherlands
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Ganopolski, Andrey
Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Germany
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Haeberli, Winfried
University of Zurich, Switzerland
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Harris, Neil R. P.
European Ozone Research Coordinating Unit, Department of Chemistry, Cambridge University, UK
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Huss, Matthias
University of Fribourg, Switzerland
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Krüger, Kirstin
Leibniz Institute for Marine Sciences, Kiel, Germany
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Lenton, Timothy M.
College of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Exeter, UK
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Lindsay, Ronald W.
University o fWashington, Seattle, USA
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Notz, Dirk
Max-Planck-Institute for Meteorology, Hamburg, Germany
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Wadhams, Peter
Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, Cambridge University, UK
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Weber, Susanne
Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, De Bilt, The Netherlands
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Published in:
- Climatic Change. - 2011, vol. 110, no. 3-4, p. 845-878
English
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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Faculty
- Faculté des sciences et de médecine
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Department
- Département de Géosciences
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Language
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Classification
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Meteorology, climatology
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License
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License undefined
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Identifiers
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Persistent URL
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https://folia.unifr.ch/unifr/documents/302187
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