Population-based emergence of unfamiliar climates

Nature Climate Change (2017)

https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate3297

A useful metric for understanding future climate change in the context of past experience may be the ratio of climate signal to noise (S/N)—a measure of the amplitude of change expressed in terms of units of existing variability.

Here, we present S/N projections in the context of emergent climates. We show how for large sections of the world’s population, and for several geopolitical international groupings, mitigation can delay the onset of ‘unknown’ climates by decades.

The benefits of mitigation are shown to accumulate over several decades, thus timely mitigation will provide the greatest benefits to those facing the earliest impacts.