Do Projected Changes in Climate Vary from Region to Region?

Please note that this material is from the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), published in 2007. The latest climate science can be found in the IPCC’s 6th Assessment Report, published in August 2021. For other reports and further updates, please refer to the IPCC website.

This material is extracted from the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) section of the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Working Group 1 (see full reference below).   

Climate varies from region to region. This variation is driven by the uneven distribution of solar heating, the individual responses of the atmosphere, oceans and land surface, the interactions between these, and the physical characteristics of the regions. The perturbations of the atmospheric constituents that lead to global changes affect certain aspects of these complex interactions. Some human-induced factors that affect climate (‘forcings’) are global in nature, while others differ from one region to another. For example, carbon dioxide, which causes warming, is distributed evenly around the globe, regardless of where the emissions originate, whereas sulphate aerosols (small particles) that offset some of the warming tend to be regional in their distribution. Furthermore, the response to forcings is partly governed by feedback processes that may operate in different regions from those in which the forcing is greatest. Thus, the projected changes in climate will also vary from region to region.