Climate change impacts and vulnerability in Europe 2016

Changes in the climate system
assessments can be more detailed than in regions
with a small number of stations or with short records.
Limited data availability is particularly detrimental for
the detection of long-term climate trends in extreme
events (see Section 3.1.5). Increased data sharing by
meteorological services would improve the accuracy
of regional climate change assessments, including
understanding of past and future climate and weather
extremes.
There is strong evidence that observed changes in
many climate variables, including extremes, can be
attributed to anthropogenic climate change (Hegerl
and Zwiers, 2011; Bindoff et al., 2013; Trenberth
et al., 2015; Stott et al., 2016; National Academies
of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2016). The
IPCC AR5 concluded that 'It is extremely likely that
human influence has been the dominant cause of
the observed warming since the mid-20th century'
(IPCC, 2013b). Furthermore, anthropogenic forcings
are very likely to be the main cause of the decline in
Arctic sea ice, and likely to be the cause of decreases
in the Greenland ice sheet and glaciers worldwide
in recent decades. Anthropogenic forcings have also
influenced the global water cycle in different ways,
including increases in record-breaking rainfall events
(Lehmann et al., 2015).
3.1.4 Future climate change
Even if anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse
gases were to fall to zero in the very near future, the
dynamics of the climate system and the atmospheric
residence time of greenhouse gases (typically decades
to centuries) mean that past human activities will
influence the climate for many decades to come. This
will affect other components of the climate system,
leading to hotter and more frequent heat extremes,
the melting of snow and ice, increasing sea levels and
changing precipitation patterns, including precipitation
extremes.
Projections of precipitation and temperature from
general circulation models (GCMs) are generally the
basis for the assessment of climate change, but they
do not provide detailed information on climate change
impacts at regional or local scales (see Box 3.1).
Map 3.2 depicts the spatial patterns of changes in
near-surface temperature and precipitation using the
multi-model mean of at least 30 GCMs for the period
2081–2100 relative to 1986–2005 under the RCP2.6
scenario (low emissions scenario) and RCP8.5 scenario
(high emissions scenario) (see Section 1.2 for details).
The two scenarios show warming and changes in
precipitation across the globe, both of which are much
Map 3.1
Location of stations with temperature and precipitation data
Temperature data
0° 10°
70°
Precipitation data
60°
70°
40°
Location of stations
Downloadable data
Non-downloadable data 0 500 1 000 1 500 km
Note:
This map shows stations available in the European Climate Assessment & Dataset (ECA&D) (with different lengths of records) for
daily mean temperature and daily precipitation amount. Green dots represent downloadable data and red dots represent additional
non‐downloadable data that have been used for producing gridded datasets.
Source: Adapted from van der Schrier et al., 2013.
64 Climate change, impacts and vulnerability in Europe 2016 | An indicator-based report