Overview
- Researchers report in Nature that some individual climate models at 2C project impacts as severe as, or worse than, average outcomes at 3C or 4C.
- The team ranked 42 CMIP6 climate models for three risks: heavy rain in crowded areas, drought across key crop belts, and fire weather in forests.
- For global breadbaskets, 10 of 42 models show drought at 2C that exceeds the multimodel average at 4C, a threat to maize, wheat, soy and rice.
- The spread differs by hazard, with no 2C rainfall case topping the 4C average and only four models showing worse fire weather at 2C than the 3C average.
- The authors call for risk-focused assessments and warn that relying on multimodel averages and narrow model sets like ISIMIP can hide the worst plausible outcomes.