Many models show a mean El Niño-like response in the tropical Pacific, with the central and eastern equatorial Pacific sea surface temperatures projected to warm more than the western equatorial Pacific and with a corresponding mean eastward shift of precipitation. Although many models show an El Niño-like change of the mean state of tropical Pacific sea surface temperatures, the cause is uncertain. It has been related to changes in the cloud radiative forcing and/or evaporative damping of the east-west sea surface temperature gradient in some models. Confidence in projections of changes in future frequency, amplitude, and spatial pattern of El Niño events in the tropical Pacific is tempered by some shortcomings in how well El Niño is simulated in complex models. Current projections show little change or a small increase in amplitude for El Niño events over the next 100 years. However, even with little or no change in El Niño amplitude, global warming is likely to lead to greater extremes of drying and heavy rainfall and increase the risk of droughts and floods that occur with El Niño events in many regions. It also is likely that warming associated with increasing greenhouse gas concentrations will cause an increase of Asian summer monsoon precipitation variability. Changes in monsoon mean duration and strength depend on the details of the emission scenario. The confidence in such projections is limited by how well the climate models simulate the detailed seasonal evolution of the monsoons. There is no clear agreement on changes in frequency or structure of naturally occurring modes of variability, such as the North Atlantic Oscillation, i.e., the magnitude and character of the changes vary across the models.
The Antarctic ice sheet is likely to gain mass because of greater precipitation, while the Greenland ice sheet is likely to lose mass because the increase in runoff will exceed the precipitation increase. The West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) has attracted special attention because it contains enough ice to raise sea level by 6 m and because of suggestions that instabilities associated with its being grounded below sea level may result in rapid ice discharge when the surrounding ice shelves are weakened. However, loss of grounded ice leading to substantial sea level rise from this source is now widely agreed to be very unlikely during the 21st century, although its dynamics are still inadequately understood, especially for projections on longer time-scales.
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