Zeb Nicholls
Research Scholar
Energy, Climate, and Environment Program
Biography
Zebedee Nicholls is an expert in reduced complexity climate modeling currently associated with the Integrated Assessment and Climate Change Research Group of the IIASA Energy, Climate, and Environment Program. His research focuses on the development, evaluation, and application of reduced complexity models with a particular focus on the Model for the Assessment of Greenhouse Gas Induced Climate Change (MAGICC). Alongside Associate Professor Malte Meinshausen, he leads the Reduced Complexity Model Intercomparison Project (RCMIP). To facilitate this work and enhance reproducibility, he is committed to developing open-source scientific software and contributes to a number of projects (see github.com/znicholls and gitlab.com/znicholls).In the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report (AR6), he led the writing of Cross-Chapter Box 7.1 on reduced complexity models used for scenario classification in AR6, was a contributing author to Working Group 1 Chapters 1, 4, 5, 6, 7 and the Technical Summary, and Working Group 3's Summary for Policy Makers, Chapter 3, and Annex C.
Nicholls completed his PhD at the Climate and Energy College within the University of Melbourne's School of Geography, Earth, and Atmospheric Sciences in 2021. Prior to that, he completed his undergraduate Master's course in Physics at St. John's College, University of Oxford, where his thesis was supervised by Professor Myles Allen. He is currently working on the next phase of RCMIP, taking MAGICC open source and developing more regionally detailed emulators.
Last update: 14 SEP 2022
Publications
Dooley, K., Nicholls, Z. , & Meinshausen, M. (2022). Carbon removals from nature restoration are no substitute for steep emission reductions. One Earth 5 (7) 812-824. 10.1016/j.oneear.2022.06.002.
Kikstra, J.S. , Nicholls, Z.R.J. , Smith, C.J. , Lewis, J., Lamboll, R.D., Byers, E. , Sandstad, M., Meinshausen, M., Gidden, M.J. , Rogelj, J. , Kriegler, E., Peters, G.P., Fuglestvedt, J.S., Skeie, R.B., Samset, B.H., Wienpahl, L., van Vuuren, D.P., van der Wijst, K.-I., Al Khourdajie, A., Forster, P.M., Reisinger, A., Schaeffer, R., & Riahi, K. (2022). The IPCC Sixth Assessment Report WGIII climate assessment of mitigation pathways: from emissions to global temperatures. Preprint 10.5194/egusphere-2022-471.
Koven, C., Arora, V., Cadule, P., Fisher, R., Jones, C., Lawrence, D., Lewis, J., Lindsey, K., Mathesius, S., Meinshausen, M., Mills, M., Nicholls, Z. , Sanderson, B., Swart, N., Wieder, W., & Zickfeld, K. (2022). 23rd Century surprises: Long-term dynamics of the climate and carbon cycle under both high and net negative emissions scenarios. Earth System Dynamics 10.5194/esd-2021-23. (Submitted)
Meinshausen, M., Lewis, J., McGlade, C., Gütschow, J., Nicholls, Z. , Burdon, R., Cozzi, L., & Hackmann, B. (2022). Realization of Paris Agreement pledges may limit warming just below 2 °C. Nature 604 (7905) 304-309. 10.1038/s41586-022-04553-z.
Nicholls, Z. , Meinshausen, M., & Lewis, J. (2022). AR6 WG3 Plots and Processing. 10.5281/zenodo.6496232.