Warming proportional to cumulative carbon emissions not explained by heat and carbon sharing mixing processes

Abstract

The constant ratio of global warming to cumulative CO2 emissions underpins the use of cumulative emissions budgets as policy tools, and the need to reach net zero CO2 emissions to stabilize global mean temperature. Several studies have argued that this property arises because heat and carbon are mixed into the ocean by similar physical processes, and this argument was echoed in the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. Here we show that, contrary to this hypothesis, atmosphere-ocean fluxes of heat and carbon evolve very differently to each other in abrupt CO2 increase experiments in five earth system models, and that changes in the atmosphere, ocean and land carbon pools all contribute to making warming proportional to cumulative emissions. Our results strongly suggest that this proportionality is not amenable to a simple physical explanation, but rather arises because of the complex interplay of multiple physical and biogeochemical processes.