Click to open the Surface Temperature Change Relative to 1870-1899 Baseline animation.

The IPCC found there is "high agreement" and "much evidence" that with current policies and practices, global greenhouse gas emissions will continue to grow over the next few decades. They also agreed that if we stopped burning fossil fuels today, the Earth would continue to warm due to long-lived gases and oceanic heat that are already in the system. So some amount of climate change and its impacts is inevitable.

The big unknown is how much and how soon we will reduce greenhouse emissions in the future. For the 2007 IPCC report, modelers looked at a number of scenarios that made various assumptions about fossil fuel use, economic growth, population, and technologies. Their estimates for temperature change by the end of the century are shown in the table and the previous animation.