Quantifying the climate response to cumulative greenhouse gas emissions

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Global warming is one of the most important environmental challenges currently facing our generation. It has been clear for several decades that human emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are driving a change in global temperatures, which will result in increasingly severe impacts on human and environmental systems. There are many aspects of the science of climate change, however, which are not well understood. In particular, there are substantial uncertainties with respect to how much of the greenhouse gases we emit remain in the atmosphere, as well as the amount by with those emissions influence the Earth's climate. Advancing our ability to measure the climate response to human greenhouse gas emissions is critical to efforts to decrease our impact on the climate system, as well as to prepare for the impacts of global warming.