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Letter

Nature Geoscience 2, 484–487 (1 July 2009) | doi:10.1038/ngeo555

Committed terrestrial ecosystem changes due to climate change

Chris Jones , Jason Lowe , Spencer Liddicoat & Richard Betts

Targets for stabilizing climate change are often based on considerations of the impacts of different levels of global warming, usually assessing the time of reaching a particular level of warming. However, some aspects of the Earth system, such as global mean temperatures and sea level rise due to thermal expansion or the melting of large ice sheets, continue to respond long after the stabilization of radiative forcing.