David J Frame

Victoria University of Wellington · NZ Climate Change Research Institute

Plain Language Summary The stratospheric ozone layer is expected to recover from the damaging effects of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and other halogen‐containing source gases this century. Ozone recovery is traditionally but somewhat arbitrarily defined as the year when total column ozone (TCO) abundances return to 1980 levels. Here, we use a metric...

The Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) model ensemble projects climate change emerging soonest and most strongly at low latitudes, regardless of the emissions pathway taken. In terms of signal-to-noise (S/N) ratios of average annual temperatures, these models project earlier and stronger emergence under the Shared Socio-economic...

Wildfire is a highly variable natural phenomenon, yet despite this, climate change is already making wildfire conditions measurably worse around the world; however, detailed knowledge about Aotearoa New Zealand's wildfire climate is currently limited. This study blends weather observations with regional climate model projections to assess Aotearoa...

Citizens in many countries are now experiencing record-smashing heatwaves that were intensified due to anthropogenic climate change. Whether today’s most impactful heatwaves could have occurred in a pre-industrial climate, traditionally a central focus of attribution research, is fast becoming an obsolete question. The next frontier for attribution...

Plain Language Summary Global climate models must simulate Southern Hemisphere westerly winds accurately to simulate other key features of Southern Hemisphere midlatitude climate. During Southern Hemisphere summer, westerly winds are partly influenced by the Antarctic ozone hole. Global climate models simulate ozone in one of two ways: either they...

Investigations into the role of anthropogenic climate change in extreme weather events are now starting to extend into analysis of anthropogenic impacts on non-climate (e.g. socio-economic) systems. However, care needs to be taken when making this extension, because methodological choices regarding extreme weather attribution can become crucial whe...

Meeting the Paris Agreement temperature goal necessitates limiting methane (CH 4 )-induced warming, in addition to achieving net-zero or (net-negative) carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) emissions. In our model, for the median 1.5°C scenario between 2020 and 2050, CH 4 mitigation lowers temperatures by 0.1°C; CO 2 increases it by 0.2°C. CO 2 emissions continue...

Recent climate change is characterized by rapid global warming, but the goal of the Paris Agreement is to achieve a stable climate where global temperatures remain well below 2°C above pre‐industrial levels. Inferences about conditions at or below 2°C are usually made based on transient climate projections. To better understand climate change impac...

Dietary transitions, such as eliminating meat consumption, have been proposed as one way to reduce the climate impact of the global and regional food systems. However, it should be ensured that replacement diets are, indeed, nutritious and that climate benefits are accurately accounted for. This study uses New Zealand food consumption as a case stu...

Emissions from the transport sector are one of the major challenges toward achieving climate goals globally and in particular in New Zealand. In New Zealand, the road transport sector is the fastest growing major source of emissions despite the government’s various initiatives including the introduction of an Emissions Trading Scheme (NZ ETS), prop...

The problem of dynamically inconsistent preferences is common in domestic and international politics. A country’s—or indeed the world’s—future health (economic, social, environmental, etc.) often requires policy adjustments that are costly and unpopular. Governments face formidable pressures to underinvest today in policies whose consequences are o...

Weather and climate service providers around the world are looking to issue assessments of the human role in recent extreme weather events. For this attribution to be of value, it is important that vulnerability is acknowledged and questions are framed appropriately.

Agriculture is a significant contributor to anthropogenic global warming, and reducing agricultural emissions—largely methane and nitrous oxide—could play a significant role in climate change mitigation. However, there are important differences between carbon dioxide (CO 2 ), which is a stock pollutant, and methane (CH 4 ), which is predominantly a...

In New Zealand, the average age of a light vehicle in 2018 was 14.09 years. Despite having an old light vehicle fleet, no study has been conducted so far to calculate the per-kilometre cost of ownership (PCO) for old used cars. Therefore, this study attempts to identify the PCO of a new and a used light duty EV and light duty petrol-powered car ove...

An important and under-quantified facet of the risks associated with human-induced climate change emerges through extreme weather. In this paper, we present an initial attempt to quantify recent costs related to extreme weather due to human interference in the climate system, focusing on economic costs arising from droughts and floods in New Zealan...

Capsule Currently no systematic assessment of loss and damage due to climate change exists. Towards such an inventory we present a transparent way to ascertain the quality of evidence for such assessments. Current levels of global warming (Haustein et al. 2017) have already intensified heatwaves, droughts and floods, with many recent events exhibit...

Hurricane Harvey is one of the costliest tropical cyclones in history. In this paper, we use a probabilistic event attribution framework to estimate the costs associated with Hurricane Harvey that are attributable to anthropogenic influence on the climate system. Results indicate that the “fraction of attributable risk” for the rainfall from Harvey...

Carbon dioxide emissions from New Zealand’s transport sector have experienced rapid growth since 1990. In this paper, we investigate the scope for a targeted price signal to curb emissions growth and help deliver on the country’s Paris Agreement pledges. Cost burdens on various income groups are investigated, and experts’ opinions are elicited to e...

Changes in climate are usually considered in terms of trends or differences over time. However, for many impacts requiring adaptation, it is the amplitude of the change relative to the local amplitude of climate variability which is more relevant. Here, we develop the concept of “signal‐to‐noise” in observations of local temperature, highlighting t...

Multi-gas climate agreements rely on a methodology (widely referred to as ‘metrics’) to place emissions of different gases on a CO 2 -equivalent scale. There has been an ongoing debate on the extent to which existing metrics serve current climate policy. Endpoint metrics (such as global temperature change potential GTP) are the most closely related...

Effective climate policy necessitates being able to compare the impact of different greenhouse gases on warming. This is commonly accomplished by converting non-CO2 emissions to CO2 equivalent emissions using Global Warming Potentials (GWP). However, the conventional GWP approach masks the true behaviour of short-lived climate pollutants (SLCPs) an...

The transport sector is the fastest growing greenhouse gas-emitting sector in the world and it is also a major source of emissions in New Zealand. Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from road transport increased by 84.3% between 1990 and 2016. This increase in GHG emissions was the highest among the different energy sub-sectors of New Zealand. Increasi...

We develop a new index which maps relative climate change contributions to relative emergent impacts of climate change. The index compares cumulative emissions data with patterns of signal-to-noise ratios ( S / N ) in regional temperature (Frame et al 2017 Nat. Clim. Change 7 407–11). The latter act as a proxy for a range of local climate impacts,...

Climate mitigation: An improved emission metric A new approach allows the temperature forcing of CO2 and short-lived climate pollutants (SLCPs) to be examined under a common cumulative framework. While anthropogenic warming is largely determined by cumulative emissions of CO2, SLCPs—including soot, other aerosols and methane—also play a role. Quant...

In the version of this Article originally published, a coding error resulted in the erroneous inclusion of a subset of RCP4.5 and RCP8.5 simulations in the sets used for RCP2.6 and RCP6, respectively, leading to an incorrect depiction of the data of the latter two sets in Fig. 1b and RCP2.6 in Table 2. This coding error has now been corrected. The...

We propose a simple real-time index of global human-induced warming and assess its robustness to uncertainties in climate forcing and short-term climate fluctuations. This index provides improved scientific context for temperature stabilisation targets and has the potential to decrease the volatility of climate policy. We quantify uncertainties ari...

A common proxy for the adaptive capacity of a community to the impacts of future climate change is the range of climate variability which they have experienced in the recent past. This study presents an interpretation of such a framework for monthly temperatures. Our results demonstrate that emergence into genuinely 'unfamiliar' climates will occur...

The Paris Agreement has opened debate on whether limiting warming to 1.5 °C is compatible with current emission pledges and warming of about 0.9 °C from the mid-nineteenth century to the present decade. We show that limiting cumulative post-2015 CO2 emissions to about 200 GtC would limit post-2015 warming to less than 0.6 °C in 66% of Earth system...

Previous studies evaluating anthropogenic influences on the meteorological drivers of drought have found mixed results owing to (1) the complex physical mechanisms which lead to the onset of drought, (2) differences in the characteristics and timescales of drought for different regions of the world, and (3) different approaches to the question of a...

Understanding how the emergence of the anthropogenic warming signal from the noise of internal variability translates to changes in extreme event occurrence is of crucial societal importance. By utilising simulations of cumulative carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and temperature changes from eleven earth system models, we demonstrate that the inheren...

The 'pledge and review' approach to reducing greenhouse-gas emissions presents an opportunity to link mitigation goals explicitly to the evolving climate response. This seems desirable because the progression from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's fourth to fifth assessment reports has seen little reduction in uncertainty. A common re...

The emerging scientific focus on cumulative carbon emissions may make climate negotiations harder. But, it serves to clarify the scale and scope of climate mitigation needed to meet potential temperature targets.

Some recent high-profile publications have suggested that immediately reducing emissions of methane, black carbon and other short-lived climate pollutants (SLCPs) may contribute substantially towards the goal of limiting global warming to 2 °C above pre-industrial levels. Although this literature acknowledges that action on long-lived climate pollu...

The choice of an appropriate scientific target to guide global mitigation efforts is complicated by uncertainties in the temperature response to greenhouse gas emissions. Much climate policy discourse has been based on the equilibrium global mean temperature increase following a concentration stabilization scenario. This is determined by the equili...

In 1990, climate scientists from around the world wrote the First Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It contained a prediction of the global mean temperature trend over the 1990-2030 period that, halfway through that period, seems accurate. This is all the more remarkable in hindsight, considering that a number of i...

Incomplete understanding of three aspects of the climate system-equilibrium climate sensitivity, rate of ocean heat uptake and historical aerosol forcing-and the physical processes underlying them lead to uncertainties in our assessment of the global-mean temperature evolution in the twenty-first century 1,2. Explorations of these uncertainties hav...

Schelling (1995) stressed the importance of correctly disaggregating the impacts of climate change to understand how individual interests differ across space and time. This chapter considers equity implications at a level of disaggregation which we consider insightful, but which is non-standard in the literature. We consider a 'three-agent' model,...

In order to transpire the impact of paleoclimate proxy information on the future climate projection, we explore the combined uncertainty in paleoclimate proxy data and in paleoclimate modelling. First, as a pilot study, we use a parameter-perturbed ensemble of simple thermodynamic climate model that has been known as an energy balance model (EBM) a...

Climate change projections are usually presented as 'snapshots' of change at a particular time in the future. Instead, we consider the key question 'when will specific temperature thresholds be exceeded?' Framing the question as 'when might something happen (either permanently or temporarily)?' rather than 'what might happen?' demonstrates that low...

A full understanding of the causes of the severe drought seen in the Sahel in the latter part of the twentieth-century remains elusive some 25 yr after the height of the event. Previous studies have suggested that this drying trend may be explained by either decadal modes of natural variability or by human-driven emissions (primarily aerosols), but...

Market-based approaches to commons problems have attracted considerable interest and claim various successes in managing environmental issues. Yet in order to apply market-based approaches to environmental problems we need to have both a good understanding of the dynamics of the system which we are commodifying, and a good, or at least shared, unde...

In October 2010, a group of leading thinkers on environmental policy met at the Sustainable Consumption Institute at the University of Manchester for a conference in honour of Nobel Laureate Tom Schelling. This column presents a 10-point guideline for climate change policy co-authored by 26 attendees that focuses on designing policies that are cred...

A number of recent studies have found a strong link between peak human-induced global warming and cumulative carbon emissions from the start of the industrial revolution, while the link to emissions over shorter periods or in the years 2020 or 2050 is generally weaker. However, cumulative targets appear to conflict with the concept of a 'floor' in...

Climate change is likely to have serious and significant impacts on human population health. The mechanisms by which climate change may affect health are becoming better understood. Current quantitative methods of estimating future health impacts rely on disease-specific models that primarily describe relationships between mean values of weather va...

There is uncertainty about the response of the climate system to future trajectories of radiative forcing. To quantify this uncertainty we conducted face-to-face interviews with 14 leading climate scientists, using formal methods of expert elicitation. We structured the interviews around three scenarios of radiative forcing stabilizing at different...

Recent papers have argued that avoiding the potentially dangerous anthropogenic climate change resulting from more than 2° C of global average warming (since pre-industrial times) will require climate policies to limit cumulative emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2). In particular, such analyses demonstrate tight correlations between cumulative emissi...

The uncertainty in the climate response to carbon emissions implies a strong likelihood that a temperature target such as limiting global warming to 2° C or even 4° C may be exceeded almost irrespective of emission policies adopted today. Due to the thermal inertia in the climate system, however, a period of negative emissions might stabilise tempe...

The risk of dangerous long-term climate change due to anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions is predominantly determined by cumulative emissions over all time, not the rate of emission in any given year or commitment period. This has profound implications for climate mitigation policy: emission targets for specific years such as 2020 or 2050 provid...

The goals and objectives of ‘climate stabilization’ feature heavily in contemporary environmental policy and in this paper we trace the factors that have contributed to the rise of this concept and the scientific ideas behind it. In particular, we explore how the stabilization-based discourse has become dominant through developments in climate scie...

Climate change is increasingly seen to raise difficult normative issues. To date, cumulative emissions have been disproportionately from the developed world, while the consequences of climate change are anticipated to hit poorer countries hardest. For this reason, amongst others, it is suggested that more economically developed countries with high...

One of the chief goals of climate research is to produce meaningful probabilistic forecasts that can be used in the formation of future policy and adaptation strategies. The current range of methodologies presented in the scientific literature show that this is not an easy task, especially with the various philosophical interpretations of how to co...

The fact that cumulative carbon dioxide emissions are more important than annual emission rates calls for a fresh approach to climate change mitigation. One option would be a mandatory link between carbon sequestration and fossil fuel extraction.

A large ensemble of general circulation model (GCM) integrations coupled to a fully interactive sulfur cycle scheme were run on the climateprediction.net platform to investigate the uncertainty in the climate response to sulfate aerosol and carbon dioxide (CO2) forcing. The sulfate burden within the model (and the atmosphere) depends on the balance...

More than 100 countries have adopted a global warming limit of 2 degrees C or below (relative to pre-industrial levels) as a guiding principle for mitigation efforts to reduce climate change risks, impacts and damages. However, the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions corresponding to a specified maximum warming are poorly known owing to uncertainties in...

Global efforts to mitigate climate change are guided by projections of future temperatures. But the eventual equilibrium global mean temperature associated with a given stabilization level of atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations remains uncertain, complicating the setting of stabilization targets to avoid potentially dangerous levels of global...

We report a modelling analysis of a proxy-based climate reconstruction over the last millennium and its implication for future climate projections. A large number of simple energy balance models with different internal parameters were driven by a range of reconstructed climate forcings to produce a variety of climate change over the last millennium...