Nicholas Leach
CL Climate: Past, Present & Future
The 2019 Outstanding Student Poster and PICO (OSPP) Award is awarded to Nicholas Leach for the poster/PICO entitled:
Current level and rate of warming determine emissions budgets under ambitious mitigation (Leach, N.; Millar, R.; Haustein, K.; Jenkins, S.; Allen, M.)
Click here to download the poster/PICO file.
Nicholas is a PhD student on the NERC Environmental Research Doctoral Training Partnership, in the Department of Physics at the University of Oxford, UK. His research concerns the representation of internal variability in models used for the attribution of climate change, with a focus on heatwaves.
The work presented at EGU 2019 is part of research regarding simple climate models and carbon budgets that he carried out during his undergraduate masters in physics – collaborating with the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford – and still spends a limited time on. The aim of the research was to help understand where the differences between the broad range of estimates of the remaining carbon budget to 1.5C arise. To do this, a simple geometrical formula was derived to relate the current rate and level of warming to the remaining time until a particular temperature target is exceeded. This could then be used to determine a carbon budget using estimates of the present day emission rate of carbon dioxide, which can be adapted to calculate either the CO2-only or all-forcings CO2-forcing-equivalent budget. This method can be used to constrain the budget using observations alone, is consistent with model-derived estimates, and explains where some discrepancies between previous estimates come from.