On Monday 9 October, the Dutch National Meteorological Institute KNMI presented an update of their national climate scenarios.
The new national climate scenarios show what the Netherlands will face in terms of climate change in the coming decades. Even in the most optimistic scenarios, the climate will continue to change for quite some time, with major consequences for the Netherlands. It will get warmer in all seasons, with more tropical days and fewer frost days. Winter gets wetter, summer gets drier and heavier showers develop. Sea levels continue to rise.
In the new KNMI'23 climate scenarios, KNMI shows that the amount of greenhouse gases we will emit will make a big difference to further climate change. The higher the emissions, the stronger the warming and the more extreme the weather. Moreover, with every tonne of emissions, the likelihood of unpredictable consequences increases.
The KNMI'23 climate scenarios consist of four paths describing a possible future climate in the Netherlands around 2050, 2100 and 2150. The scenarios are based on the amount of greenhouse gas emissions (and thus global warming) and the degree of precipitation change in the Netherlands. The four scenarios provide, as it were, the vertices within which the Dutch climate is likely to change in the future. Thus, we know how climate change will change the Dutch weather.
In these KNMI'23 climate scenarios, all the new knowledge on climate change from the most recent IPCC report was translated to the Dutch situation. In total, the supercomputer spent around two years calculating 2,000 terabytes of climate models. A large group of KNMI staff contributed to the scenarios. New climate scenarios are expected around 2031.
More information: www.knmi.nl/klimaatscenarios
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