Analyzing Temperature Anomaly Projections for the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways Using an Empirical Model of Global Climate

The Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSP) were developed by the Integrated Assessment Modeling Community as a new framework for the climate researchers using socio-economic conditions to combine the analysis of climate impacts, vulnerability, adaptation, and mitigation. The Representative Concentration Pathways (RCP), which had been used to designate four radiative forcing (RF) outcomes for year 2100, are combined with the new SSP scenarios to realize dozens of RF outcomes for year 2100. The forecasted abundances of greenhouse gases, aerosols, and land use change for selected SSPs will be used in the Empirical Model of Global Climate (EM-GC) (Salawitch et al., Springer Climate, 2017) developed by our research group to project future temperature anomalies out to 2100. Our temperature anomaly projections based on the SSPs will be compared to the Paris Climate Agreement target of 1.5 °C and upper limit of 2.0 °C warming, to determine the probability that the world might achieve either the target or upper limit of the agreement.