Consequences of twenty-first-century policy for multi-millennial climate and sea-level change

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Clark, Peter U., Shakun, Jeremy D., Marcott, Shaun A., Mix, Alan C., Eby, Michael, Kulp, Scott, Levermann, Anders, Milne, Glenn A., Pfister, Patrik L., Santer, Benjamin D., Schrag, Daniel P., Solomon, Susan, Stocker, Thomas F., Strauss, Benjamin H., Weaver, Andrew J., Winkelmann, Ricarda, Archer, David, Bard, Edouard, Goldner, Aaron, Lambeck, Kurt, Pierrehumbert, Raymond T. and Plattner, Gian Kasper (2016) Consequences of twenty-first-century policy for multi-millennial climate and sea-level change. Nature Climate Change, 6 (4). pp. 360-369. ISSN 1758-678X

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Abstract

Most of the policy debate surrounding the actions needed to mitigate and adapt to anthropogenic climate change has been framed by observations of the past 150 years as well as climate and sea-level projections for the twenty-first century. The focus on this 250-year window, however, obscures some of the most profound problems associated with climate change. Here, we argue that the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, a period during which the overwhelming majority of human-caused carbon emissions are likely to occur, need to be placed into a long-term context that includes the past 20 millennia, when the last Ice Age ended and human civilization developed, and the next ten millennia, over which time the projected impacts of anthropogenic climate change will grow and persist. This long-term perspective illustrates that policy decisions made in the next few years to decades will have profound impacts on global climate, ecosystems and human societies-not just for this century, but for the next ten millennia and beyond.

Item Type: Article
Additional Information: Publisher Copyright: © 2016 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved.
Uncontrolled Keywords: environmental science (miscellaneous),social sciences (miscellaneous),sdg 13 - climate action ,/dk/atira/pure/subjectarea/asjc/2300/2301
Faculty \ School: Faculty of Science > School of Environmental Sciences
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Depositing User: LivePure Connector
Date Deposited: 18 Mar 2026 13:30
Last Modified: 23 Mar 2026 01:21
URI: https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/102419
DOI: 10.1038/nclimate2923

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