Basin stability and limit cycles in a conceptual model for climate tipping cascades

TL;DR

This study analyzes the stability and oscillatory behaviors of key climate tipping elements using a large-scale basin stability approach, revealing critical thresholds and potential internal climate variability modes.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive basin bifurcation analysis methodology to identify stability loss and limit cycles in a climate tipping cascade model.

Findings

Large ice sheets dominate Earth system resilience at high warming levels.

Limit cycles mainly involve Greenland Ice Sheet and AMOC interactions.

Rare parameter combinations induce oscillatory climate modes resembling paleoclimatic cycles.

Abstract

Tipping elements in the climate system are large-scale subregions of the Earth that might possess threshold behavior under global warming with large potential impacts on human societies. Here, we study a subset of five tipping elements and their interactions in a conceptual and easily extendable framework: the Greenland and West Antarctic Ice Sheets, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), the El-Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the Amazon rainforest. In this nonlinear and multistable system, we perform a basin stability analysis to detect its stable states and their associated Earth system resilience. Using this approach, we perform a system-wide and comprehensive robustness analysis with more than 3.5 billion ensemble members. Further, we investigate dynamic regimes where some of the states lose stability and oscillations appear using a newly developed basin bifurcation analysis methodology. Our results reveal that the state of four or five tipped elements has the largest basin volume for large levels of global warming beyond 4 {\deg}C above pre-industrial climate conditions. For lower levels of warming, states including disintegrated ice sheets on West Antarctica and Greenland have higher basin volume than other state configurations. Therefore in our model, we find that the large ice sheets are of particular importance for Earth system resilience. We also detect the emergence of limit cycles for 0.6% of all ensemble members at rare parameter combinations. Such limit cycle oscillations mainly occur between the Greenland Ice Sheet and AMOC (86%), due to their negative feedback coupling. These limit cycles point to possibly dangerous internal modes of variability in the climate system that could have played a role in paleoclimatic dynamics such as those unfolding during the Pleistocene ice age cycles.