I’ve repeated a couple times that if emissions were stabilized today, the climate would continue warming for decades. I am not a complete idiot, because this was the scientific understanding at one time, but it is time for me to update my understanding. Michael Mann explains:

The conventional wisdom was once that warming would continue on for decades even if we stopped emitting carbon into the atmosphere due to the sluggishness of the oceans, which continue to warm up even after CO₂ stops increasing. This is known as committed warming. But committed warming is only half of the story, an artifact of simplistic early climate modeling experiments in which CO₂ levels are kept fixed after the hypothetical cessation of emissions.

Later, more comprehensive simulations with interactive ocean carbon cycle dynamics revealed that CO₂ levels actually drop after emissions cease as the oceans continue to draw carbon down from the atmosphere. That decrease in the greenhouse effect cancels out the committed warming, and the result is an essentially flat line. In other words, global temperatures stabilize quickly once net carbon emissions drop to zero.

aps.org

So today’s temperatures are the result of emissions over the past decades, but today’s rate of increase in temperature is about the current rate of emissions or at least very recent emissions. This article doesn’t explain, but I think it makes sense, that global temperatures would start to drop at some point as the oceans continued to soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. (I’m ignoring ocean acidification for the moment – perhaps this would never be reversed?) This would be encouraging if there were any serious commitment among the world’s governments and institutions to stop emissions in the near future. Nonetheless, Mann points out that the damage already done is not a logical excuse to stop doing further damage. Any action will reduce the severity of future impacts, even if the floor for those impacts has already been baked in.