How much do greenhouse gas emissions warm your part of the world?

Climate science attempts to answer a lot of questions, but Earth’s population probably cares about just one of them: what is the amount of global warming we should expect from a given amount of greenhouse gas emissions?

There are a variety of metrics researchers use to describe that variable, differing mainly in how long you give the climate system to equilibrate. One handy metric is called the “transient climate response to cumulative carbon emissions”—TCRE for short. Given a total amount of CO₂ emitted up until a point in time, this relationship tells you about how much warming will have already occurred.

It’s a straightforward and (nearly) linear relationship that was highlighted in the last Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. Find your place on the graph by totaling up historical CO₂ emissions and you get an idea of how much of the “carbon budget” remains before you reach, say, 2°C warming.

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