Don't quite know what you mean by "locked in warming" (nor didn't have time to look at this report yet), but the previous scenarios have massive scale future magic carbon takeback tech baked in. I assume if there was something like that ongoing on a global scale and almost no new emissions, 1.5 degrees might be theoretically possible?
Thanks, good call out. This was largely based on some charts from An Inconvenient Truth which showed temp as a latent responding variable to CO2 PPM.
Obviously a lot of research has happened since then, so I looked it up, and the lag period between CO2 and temperature rise is much shorter than I expected. It seems it is just a decade - so if we went to carbon negative today, we could see results in under 10 years [1] [2].
Kind of unclear if the baseline carbon we could achieve will result in YoY decrease in temperature, given the feedback loops and it already raising temperatures every year.
If the research you mentioned is predicated on massive carbon takeback then I am highly suspicious. The public sector doesn't have the will, and the private sector doesn't have the incentive.
