November 9, 2026

expert reaction to a modelling study of warming patterns across all IPCC AR6 regions since pre-industrial times

Scientists react to a modelling study of warming patterns across all IPCC AR6 regions since pre-industrial times, as published in Nature Climate Change*.

Prof Richard Allan, Professor of Climate Science, University of Reading, University of Reading, said:

“It’s not a surprise that human caused climate change across the continents has already reached levels expected for a world 1.5 degrees Celsius warmer than pre-industrial times and is a long way on the path towards 2 degrees. The study improves on tried and tested techniques to better account for regions of sparse data and while an even more comprehensive set of simulations could help make the attribution of past regional climate change to human causes even stronger, the findings seem robust. It is already known that this level of excess global warmth presents serious challenges for adapting societies to limit damage while avoiding continued warming beyond these levels is an utmost priority for countries to work together to ensure.”

Prof Peter Stott, Science Fellow in Climate Attribution, Met Office Hadley Centre, said:

“As I wrote in a News and Views article published in the same issue of Nature Climate Change, Tong Li, Francis Zwiers and colleagues have made an important advance by estimating human-induced warming since pre-industrial times even in those parts of the world where there are very few observations. This is important because it is human-induced warming that is most relevant to the 2015 Paris agreement, rather than fluctuations in climate from natural causes.

“The key advance made in this paper is to estimate human-induced warming since pre-industrial times even in those parts of the world with very few or no observations before the mid-twentieth century.  These estimates are scientifically robust, despite the paucity of observations. This is because the technique takes account of the physical principles that constrain how temperatures are likely to be changing in unobserved regions based on how they are changing in those regions where the temperatures have been measured. The pattern of temperature change across the planet, due to human influence, is the key feature this new paper identifies. To do so it employs a state-of-the-art method for attributing climate change (Kriging for Climate Change), which applies a Bayesian method, updating prior estimates of climate change from climate model simulations with observations. Scientific uncertainties remain, as the method could be affected by limitations in current climate models at representing the full range of plausible climate-system responses. Nevertheless, this paper represents an importance advance. The most recent IPCC report (the Sixth Assessment Report) was only able to report the human-induced warming at regional scales since the mid-20^th century. This new paper extends this assessment by estimating human-induced warming since the second half of the nineteenth century, the period taken by IPCC to represent pre-industrial climate.

“Strikingly, their results show that some land regions have already warmed much more than the global average due to human factors. People across the planet are already feeling the impacts of a 1.5 degree world, including the devastating consequences of more intense and frequent heatwaves and floods. If keeping global temperature rise below 1.5 degrees has now become unavoidable, crossing the 2 degrees threshold specified in the Paris agreement is still not inevitable. But time is running out to prevent this.”

* ‘All IPCC AR6 regions are close to their 1.5 °C- and 2 °C-equivalent warming limits’ by Tong Li et al. will be published in Nature Climate Change on Monday 9 November.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-026-02790-y

Declared interests

Prof Richard Allan: “No conflicts of interest”

Prof Peter Stott: Prof Stott has written a corresponding News and Views article. No other relevant declared interests.