Climate mitigation benefits emerge within a decade

Assaf Shmuel, Niklas Schwind, Kai Kornhuber, Ron Milo, Carl-Friedrich Schleussner

Discernible differences in global climate responses under varying greenhouse gas emission scenarios are commonly assumed to emerge only after 20 to 30 years. Here we show that mitigation benefits are detectable within a decade (9±6 years) over the global land area when high-resolution gridded climate data are analysed with a machine learning approach. By retaining spatial information, we uncover regional warming signals that remain hidden when relying on global averages and identify the regions in which these signals first emerge using an explainability framework. Even when restricting our analysis to subregions, we find a detectable signal to emerge over the land area of the four highest emitting countries in 13 (±6) years. These results demonstrate that detectable climate benefits of greenhouse gas mitigation appear much earlier than previously recognised and suggest that high emitting countries would also experience near-term benefits from bending the emissions curve.