Index of documentation
Integrated assessment models (IAMs) produce emissions pathways as part of larger pathway output coming from the modelling of scenarios. These emissions pathways imply a certain temperature development. Some integrated assessment modelling teams can provide their own climate assessment based on these emissions outcomes, others just work on the level of emissions. Not all IAMs model all societal processes that cause emissions, meaning that they also generally do not report all emissions species required to run a climate model.
For the Working Group III (WGIII) contribution to the IPCC Sixth Assessment (AR6) report, a large set of scenarios with emissions pathways had to be assessed and classified based on their temperature implications. To do so, emission pathways need to be harmonized to the same historical emissions, need to report the same set of greenhouse gases, and need to be run with the same (simple) climate model(s).
This repository package allows for reproducing the AR6 results, as well as assessing your own full-century emissions pathways, given certain minimum requirements as described in the Description of the workflow.
More information on how this package was used in AR6 can be found in the report itself, as well as the manuscript accompanying the release of this package.
Getting started
While this package aims to make it easier to run a climate model for a specific long-term scenario with emissions pathways, it is not quite “click and run”. Using this package requires some domain knowledge, understanding of certain research methods, and scientific computing skills.
Prerequisite knowledge & skills gives an (incomplete, but hopefully helpful) list of these items for formal and self-guided learning.
After you have read the section above, you can get started with reading a more detailed description of the workflow (Description of the workflow), read about what ways there are to install this software (Installation), and go through a few examples for new users that demonstrate the basic features of the workflow (How to use).
Code description
To better understand what is going on, or to use more advanced options of this workflow, we provide more detailed documentation on specific parts of the workflow, as well as describe the functionality of the functions in the code base.
The page Core configuration provides detailed description of the command line interface (CLI), that can be used from e.g. an Anaconda prompt, and descriptions of specific functions for infilling, harmonization, climate emulator runs, and post-processing.
The page Climate emulators provdies more detail and instructions on how the climate emulators FaIR, CICERO-SCM, and MAGICC are coupled to this workflow, where to download additional files, and how to set up emulators for running.
The page Utility functions lists a couple of utility functions that serve some specific functions including calculating a GHG basket to estimate CO2eq Kyoto Gases.
Lastly, if you would like to contribute to the code of this package, please check out the Notes for developers.
License
This package is licensed under an MIT License. You may obtain a copy of the License at https://github.com/iiasa/climate-assessment/blob/main/LICENSE.
Acknowledgements
Per good scientific practice, you must cite the following publication when you use this package in scientific work.
Jarmo S. Kikstra, Zebedee R. J. Nicholls, Christopher J. Smith, Jared Lewis, Robin D. Lamboll, Edward Byers, Marit Sandstad, Malte Meinshausen, Matthew J. Gidden, Joeri Rogelj, Elmar Kriegler, Glen P. Peters, Jan S. Fuglestvedt, Ragnhild B. Skeie, Bjørn H. Samset, Laura Wienpahl, Detlef P. van Vuuren, Kaj-Ivar van der Wijst, Alaa Al Khourdajie, Piers M. Forster, Andy Reisinger, Roberto Schaeffer, and Keywan Riahi“The IPCC Sixth Assessment Report WGIII climate assessment of mitigation pathways: from emissions to global temperatures”.Geosci. Model Dev., 15, 9075–91092022
You may additionally also cite the package itself:
Kikstra, J. S., Nicholls, Z. R. J., Lewis, J., Smith, C. J., Lamboll, R. D., Byers, E., Sandstad, M., Wienpahl, L., and Hackstock, P.:Climate assessment of long-term emissions pathways: IPCC AR6 WGIII version,Zenodo, 10.5281/zenodo.6624519, 2022.
For more detail, see How to cite.