Emulation of the Climate Response to Greenhouse Gas and Aerosol Emissions From High‐ and Low‐Income Nations

Abstract Global annual mean temperature change is a useful metric for tracking climate change, but climate impacts are felt locally and over relatively short time periods. It is therefore critical to predict the heterogeneous spatiotemporal pattern of future temperature changes. We use the CESM2 single‐forcing large ensemble to identify spatiotemporal changes in temperature associated with greenhouse gases and anthropogenic aerosols, leveraging the temporal offset of aerosol emissions from high income and developing economies to parse climate impacts of aerosols from these two groups of countries. Our results suggest that aerosol emissions from non‐OECD regions could still mask over 20% of greenhouse gas induced warming for over 40% of the global population in 2050. Parsing climatological impacts from different emission source regions improves our understanding of regional climate impacts and reduces the computational barrier to including regional impacts in simplified modeling frameworks.