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Future volcanic eruptions shift the timing of net-zero emissions
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Authors
Moritz Adam 
,
Tom Schürmann ,
Kira Rehfeld
Abstract
Volcanic eruptions are inevitable, unpredictable, and impact climate globally. During outbreaks, volcanic aerosols enter the stratosphere, modifying the planetary energy balance. How eruptions affect biosphere carbon uptake is unclear, as including the possible forcing trajectories in climate model projections is computationally expensive. Here, we show realistic future volcanic forcing increases projected regional temperature variability for the overshoot scenario SSP5-3.5-OS and adds uncertainty to biosphere carbon sink capacity estimates. We use intermittent eruption trajectories to derive 300 estimates of future climate and biosphere productivity from a computationally efficient, regionally explicit simulator. Global mean temperature pathway uncertainty relative to the internal component is, on average, 0.32°C (+89%) larger with intermittent forcing. Propagating this uncertainty into net carbon uptake through shared variances between climatic drivers and the biosphere’s response increases regional uncertainty by up to 34% of internal variability. Regionally, uncertainty in annual temperature is increased by 50%+ for half of the world’s population. Effects aggregate globally, potentially delaying or advancing net-zero emissions and planetary temperature stabilization.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.31223/X5946V
Subjects
Environmental Sciences
Keywords
climate variability, volcanoes, volcanic forcing, stochastic forcing, earth system modeling, emulation, energy balance model, future projections, uncertainty, temperature variability, carbon cycle, carbon uptake, net-zero emissions, emissions scenario, temperature overshoot, radiative forcing, insolation, simulation ensemble
Dates
Published: 2026-02-16 16:28
Last Updated: 2026-02-16 16:28
License
CC BY Attribution 4.0 International
Additional Metadata
Conflict of interest statement:
The authors have no competing interests to declare.
Data Availability (Reason not available):
MPI-ESM is licensed under the MPI-ESM Software License Agreement, a free, non-commercial, and personalized license and can be obtained at https://code.mpimet.mpg.de/projects/mpi-esm-license. The Max-Planck-Institute Grand Ensemble (Olonscheck et al. 2023) is publicly available through the ESGF server at DKRZ: https://esgf-metagrid.cloud.dkrz.de/search/cmip6-dkrz/. WorldPop population data (Tatem et al. 2017, Bondarenko et al. 2025) is publicly available at: https://www.worldpop.org/datacatalog/. The PalVolv1 dataset (Toohey et al. 2023, Schindlbeck-Belo et al. 2023) is publicly available at: https://doi.org/10.26050/WDCC/PalVolv1. The ClimBayes package (Schillinger et al. 2022) and supporting code are publicly available on Github: https://github.com/paleovar/ClimBayes and https://github.com/paleovar/EmulatingVariability. Code and data for reproducing the results of this manuscript will be openly available on Zenodo upon publication: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18404078. Further gridded output of our simulations is available upon request.
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