The world's glaciers will probably continue to shrink over the next decades, irrespective of the magnitude of future warming.

Ben Marzeion at the University of Innsbruck in Austria and his colleagues ran a global glacier model using various twenty-first-century scenarios for greenhouse-gas concentration. They found only small changes in the loss of mass from glaciers under greatly different climate-change conditions.

Projected glacier melting this century is essentially a delayed response to climate changes in the twentieth century, the authors say. The thinning and retreat of glaciers from low-lying areas make them less sensitive to future warmer temperatures, they conclude.

Cryosphere 8, 59–71 (2014)