Climate science attempts to answer a lot of questions, but Earth’s population probably cares about just one of them: what is the amount of global warming we should expect from a given amount of greenhouse gas emissions?

There are a variety of metrics researchers use to describe that variable, differing mainly in how long you give the climate system to equilibrate. One handy metric is called the “transient climate response to cumulative carbon emissions”—TCRE for short. Given a total amount of CO2 emitted up until a point in time, this relationship tells you about how much warming will have already occurred.

Pattern of temperature change per CO2 emission | Source: Martin Leduc, H. Damon Matthews, Ramon de Elia/Concordia University

But this number is an average across the entire globe; we should expect significant regional differences. A new study led by Martin Leduc and Damon Matthews at Concordia University in Montreal produced something simple but interesting: a map of how TCRE varies around the world.