Warming ends when carbon pollution stops

The Zero Emissions Commitment and climate stabilization Key points• Improved Earth system models now consider the complex interplay between the oceans and terrestrial biosphere and their key role of actively drawing down carbon from the atmosphere, showing the direct and immediate impact of our efforts to reduce carbon emissions.• Long-term warming will largely be determined by carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) emissions but aerosols and short-lived, human-generated greenhouse gases such as methane must also be considered.• Caveats to the Zero Emissions Commitment (ZEC) and climate stabilization involve the precise magnitude of the carbon budgets that remain for avoiding critical warming thresholds, as well as processes such as the warming of the deep ocean and its consequences, including rising sea levels.• At this point, the obstacles to climate action are neither physical nor technological but political, which means they can be overcome with the right sense of urgency.What is most urgently required is a rapid phaseout of human-induced activities that produce carbon pollution.A recent article in The Hill insisted that "scientists failed for decades to communicate" (1) the threat of climate change.The scientific paper on which the article was reporting did not really say that-it was instead providing a more nuanced discussion of sea level rise "tail risk".But the irony here is that the opposite of what was asserted by the news article is arguably true.If anything, we scientists have failed to communicate the prospects for averting catastrophic warming.In the days when I was working on my PhD, in the early 1990s, we were taught that the warming of the planet would persist for decades even if we suddenly stopped burning fossil fuels and emitting carbon into the atmosphere.This is due to what is known as "thermal inertia"-the slow, sluggish response of the oceans.Climate models showed that surface warming would continue for 30 years or more, as the oceans slowly continue to warm, even after carbon pollution ceases.This so-called "committed warming" would seem to render Frontiers in Science frontiersin.

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