Yangyang Xu

Yangyang Xu (born 1986 in Anqing , China) is a climate impact researcher who has been researching and teaching at Texas A&M University since September 2016 . He publishes regularly on the consequences of climate change , occasionally together with Veerabhadran Ramanathan .

life and work

Yangyang Xu studied atmospheric science at Beijing University and graduated in 2008 with a Bachelors Of Science . In the same year he went to the United States to continue his studies at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UCSD . There he obtained a Master of Science degree in oceanography in 2011 and his doctorate in geosciences in 2014 . His teachers included the famous oceanographer and climate researcher Veerabhadran Ramanathan , with whom he published scientific papers while he was still a student.

From February 2014 to August 2016, he held various positions at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado . Since September 2016 he has been researching and teaching as an Assistant Professor at Texas A&M University in College Station , Texas. In 2017, together with Veerabhadran Ramanathan, he proposed two additional categories ("Catastrophic" and "Unknown") to describe the consequences of climate change:

• "Dangerous" if the temperature rises above the target corridor of the Paris Climate Agreement ,
• "Catastrophic" when the temperature rises above three degrees, as well
• “Unknown” when the temperature is above five degrees.

The article appeared in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . Ramanathan and Xu reckoned with a 50 percent probability that global warming will exceed the "dangerous" threshold within three decades, provided that greenhouse gas emissions are not significantly reduced. They defined reaching the catastrophic level with a five percent probability. In an interview with the San Diego Union-Tribune, Ramanathan compared this value with another risk: "Would you get on a plane if it had a five percent chance of crashing?"

At the end of 2018, together with Veerabhadran Ramanathan and David G. Victor , he published an article on global warming in the journal Nature , in which, in the opinion of the three authors, it was proven that the warming is happening faster than previously feared. The authors put forward the thesis that the interaction of three factors - increasing emissions, reduced air pollution and natural climate cycles - could cause a warming of 1.5 C to occur as early as 2030, not 2040. Climate research and climate policy should focus on rapid change and what is realistically achievable.

Publications

• Xu, Y., S. Liu, F. Hu, N. Ma, Y. Wang, Y. Shi, and H. Jia (2009), Influence of Beijing urbanization on the characteristics of atmospheric boundary layer, Chinese Journal of Atmospheric Sciences , 33 (4), 859-867, doi: 10.3878 / j.issn.1006-9895.2009.04.18.
• Ramanathan, V., and Y. Xu (2010), The Copenhagen Accord for limiting global warming: criteria, constraints, and available avenues, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , 107 (18), 8055-8062, doi: 10.1073 / pnas.1002293107.
• Bahadur, R., PS Praveen, Y. Xu, and V. Ramanathan (2012), Solar absorption by elemental and brown carbon determined from spectral observations, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , 109 (43), 17366-17371, doi : 10.1073 / pnas.1205910109.
• Xu, Y., and V. Ramanathan (2012), Latitudinally asymmetric response of global surface temperature: Implications for regional climate change, Geophysical Research Letters , 39 (13), L13706, doi: 10.1029 / 2012GL052116.
• Xu, Y., R. Bahadur, C. Zhao, and LR Leung (2013), Estimating the radiative forcing of carbonaceous aerosols over California based on satellite and ground observations, Journal of Geophysical Research : Atmospheres, 118 (19), 11148– 11160, doi: 10.1002 / jgrd.50835.
• Xu, Y., D. Zaelke, GJM Velders, and V. Ramanathan (2013), The role of HFCs in mitigating 21st century climate change, Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics , 13 (12), 6083-6089, doi: 10.5194 / acp -13-6083-2013.
• Hu, A., Y. Xu, C. Tebaldi, WM Washington, and V. Ramanathan (2013), Mitigation of short-lived climate pollutants slows sea-level rise, Nature Climate Change , 3 (8), 730–734, doi: 10.1038 / nclimate1869.
• Xu, Y., J.-F. Lamarque, and BM Sanderson (2015), The importance of aerosol scenarios in projections of future heat extremes, Climatic Change , 1–14, doi: 10.1007 / s10584-015-1565-1.
• Pendergrass, AG, F. Lehner, BM Sanderson, and Y. Xu (2015), Does extreme precipitation intensity depend on the emissions scenario ?, Geophysical Research Letters , 42, 8767-8774, doi: 10.1002 / 2015GL065854.
• Xu, Y., and S.-P. Xie (2015), Ocean mediation of tropospheric response to reflecting and absorbing aerosols, Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics , 15 (10), 5827-5833, doi: 10.5194 / acp-15-5827-2015.
• Lin, L., Z. Wang, Y. Xu, and Q. Fu (2016), Sensitivity of precipitation extremes to radiative forcing of greenhouse gases and aerosols, Geophysical Research Letters , 43 (18), 9860-9868, doi: 10.1002 / 2016GL070869.
• Xu, Y., V. Ramanathan, and WM Washington (2016), Observed high-altitude warming and snow cover retreat over Tibet and the Himalayas enhanced by black carbon aerosols, Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics , 16 (3), 1303-1315, doi: 10.5194 / acp-16-1303-2016.
• Lin, L., A. Gettelman, Q. Fu, and Y. Xu (2016), Simulated differences in 21st century aridity due to different scenarios of greenhouse gases and aerosols, Climatic Change , 1–16, doi: 10.1007 / s10584- 016-1615-3
• Lin, L., A. Gettelman, Y. Xu, and Q. Fu (2016), Simulated responses of terrestrial aridity to black carbon and sulfate aerosols, Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, 121 (2), 785-794, doi : 10.1002 / 2015JD024100
• Wang, Z., L. Lin, M. Yang, and Y. Xu (2016), The effect of future reduction in aerosol emissions on climate extremes in China, Climate Dynamics , 1–15, doi: 10.1007 / s00382-016- 3003-0
• Xu, Y., and V. Ramanathan (2017), Well below 2 ° C: Mitigation strategies for avoiding dangerous to catastrophic climate changes. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. , doi: 10.1073 / pnas.1618481114
• O'Neill, BC, JM Done, A. Gettelman, P. Lawrence, F. Lehner, JF., Lamarque, L. Lin, AJ Monaghan, K. Oleson, X. Ren, BM Sanderson, C. Tebaldi, M. Weitzel, Y. Xu, B. Anderson, MJ Fix, and S. Levis (2017), The Benefits of Reduced Anthropogenic Climate change (BRACE): A synthesis,  Climatic Change , 1–15, doi: 10.1007 / s10584-017- 2009-x
• Wang, Z., Lin, L., Yang, M., Xu, Y., and J. Li, (2017), Disentangling fast and slow responses of the East Asian summer monsoon to reflecting and absorbing aerosol forcings , Atmos. Chem. Phys. , 17, 11075-11088
• Sanderson, BM, Xu, Y., Tebaldi, C., Wehner, M., O'Neill, B., Jahn, A., Pendergrass, AG, Lehner, F., Strand, WG, Lin, L., Knutti , R., and JF Lamarque (2017), Community climate simulations to assess avoided impacts in 1.5 and 2 ° C futures , Earth Syst. Dynam. , 8, 827-847
• Wang, Z., L. Lin, X. Zhang, H. Zhang, L. Liu, and Y. Xu (2017), Scenario dependence of future changes in climate extremes under 1.5 ° C and 2 ° C global warming, Scientific Report , 7, 46432
• Liu, J., KM Rühland, J. Chen, Y. Xu, S. Chen, Q. Chen, W. Huang. Q. Xu, F. Chen, and JP Smol (2017), Aerosol-weakened summer monsoons decrease lake fertilization in the Chinese Loess Plateau, Nature Climate Change , 7 (3), 190-194, doi: 10.1038 / nclimate3220
• Xu, Y., and L. Lin (2017), Pattern scaling based projections for precipitation and potential evapotranspiration: sensitivity to composition of GHGs and aerosols forcing, Climatic Change , 140 (3), 635–647, doi: 10.1007 / s10584- 016-1879-7

Web links

• Personal web presence , Texas A&M University

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ATM: CV , accessed January 6, 2020
2. ↑ ATM: Yangyang Xu , accessed January 6, 2020
3. ↑ Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists : Beyond “catastrophic” climate change , September 18, 2017
4. ↑ Yangyang Xu, Veerabhadran Ramanathan, David G. Victor : Global warming will happen faster than we think . In: Nature . 564, 2018, pp. 30-32. doi : 10.1038 / d41586-018-07586-5 .