were on average 1.1C hotter than at the beginning of the 20th century already<\/a>.<\/p>\nIf emissions plunged fast, New Zealand would still be 0.8C hotter by the end of the century, on top of the heating it has already experienced to date.<\/p>\n
NIWA climate modellers used a supercomputer to run several of the most up-to-date global climate models from the latest global report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). They increased the resolution to enable them to zoom down to 5km x 5km squares of New Zealand, and added local topography to the mix.<\/p>\n
The result was more heat under all emissions scenarios, and a generally dryer country than scientists previously expected from climate change.<\/p>\n
“The new projections we’ve just released today are all a little bit warmer than we’ve had in the past,” Tait said.<\/p>\n
“The overall pattern that New Zealand is getting warmer everywhere is still consistent with what we had [published] before, but the rate of warming is increased.”<\/p>\n
Tait said scientists were still exploring what was behind the added heating.<\/p>\n
“Generally speaking, the global climate models used for the latest IPCC assessment are also showing a bit more warming than their predecessors.”<\/p>\n
For a middle-of-the road scenario for carbon emissions, the latest information added “quite a bit” of heat compared with past efforts.<\/p>\n
“By mid century, New Zealand on average is around about 0.2C warmer than what we thought before, and by end of century that’s up to about 0.9C warmer, so that’s quite a bit and it does matter – particularly when you start looking at the number of hot days or the number of frost days.”<\/p>\n
In a middle-of-the-road scenario, emitters globally would reign in pollution enough to keep the planet to about 2.7C total heating since preindustrial times, by the end of the century. The world would miss the 1.5C-2C target countries have signed up to. Even the middle path of around 2.7C would require carbon emissions to be sucked from the air and stored somewhere, after 2050, to bring CO2 in the atmosphere back down.<\/p>\n
Tait said it was hugely important for communities to use the latest projections, incorporating the added heat.<\/p>\n
“That’s important to our understanding for extreme events like heatwaves, which can have an impact on human and animal health and things like crop growing, as well as the risk of extreme events like wildfire.<\/p>\n
“The warming we’ve seen already going back to the beginning of the industrial revolution, this is in addition to that, so it’s a bit scary when you think about how it relates to targets like keeping global temperatures to 1.5 or 2C above preindustrial\u2026 when we’ve already had 1.1C above that.”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
rnz<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
New, more detailed climate projections show New Zealand is set to get hotter, faster than previously thought. The country was already expected to keep heating, but NIWA chief scientist for climate, atmosphere and hazards Andrew Tait said updated and more refined projections showed warming accelerating even faster. He said it was “very important” communities used […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":11479,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[222,174],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11478","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-latest-news","category-nz-news"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11478","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11478"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11478\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11480,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11478\/revisions\/11480"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/11479"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11478"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11478"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11478"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}