Lets clarify something about "committed warming". A world where concentrations of CO2 and other GHGs remain constant in the atmosphere is not the same as a world where emissions go to zero. The former has ~0.5C or more warming "in the pipeline", while the latter is closer to 0C.
If concentrations stay constant (e.g. atmospheric CO2 remains at 412 ppm indefinitely), the oceans continue to heat up for the next few millennia. The vast heat capacity of the deep oceans currently buffers warming, as some of the heat diffuses down to the deep ocean.
If emissions actually fall all the way to zero (or net-zero), atmospheric CO2 concentrations start declining. This mostly counteracts the warming in the pipeline as the oceans continue to warm to reach equilibrium. https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2007GL032388
The new paper by Zhou et al does not suggest that climate models are getting this wrong. Rather, they suggest that warming in the real world (not in models) has been a bit too small due to patterns of warming in the Pacific driven by natural variability. https://twitter.com/hausfath/status/1346160335925911552
They suggest that if this pattern shifts to more balanced warming, it could add 0.2C to 0.5C to global temperatures over the course of the next few centuries. This would make it more difficult to meet Paris agreement goals.
Some caution is warranted here, however. This is a single paper, and pattern effects are a topic of very active research by the scientific community. We do not know when (or even if) warming patterns in the Pacific may shift.
So I think this conclusion holds: this does not fundamentally change our understanding of committed warming, but it should temper our confidence that we will necessarily have zero additional warming once emissions reach net-zero. https://twitter.com/hausfath/status/1346160339432349696
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