What is a climate change scenario?
• “… a coherent, internally consistent and plausible description of a possible future state of the world…” (Parry, 2002), and • “… a plausible future climate that has been constructed for explicit use in investigating the potential consequences of anthropogenic climate change…” (IPCC TAR, 2001). Climate change scenarios are the first step along the path to creating plausible representations of the future climate based on assumptions concerning future atmospheric composition, and on our understanding of the effect of increased atmospheric concentrations of, for example, greenhouse gases, particulates and other pollutants, on global climate. A number of different methods exist to construct climate change scenarios, including techniques utilizing arbitrary, analogue and global climate model (GCM) information. Each method has its own advantages and disadvantages. GCM-derived scenarios of climate change are by far the most common scenario type encountered, since they conform to most of the
