Emergent Constraints on Climate-Carbon Cycle Feedbacks.

The power of emergent constraints is that they use the enduring range in model projections to reduce uncertainty in the future of the real Earth System, but there are also risks that indiscriminate data-mining, and systematic model errors could yield misleading constraints. A hypothesis-driven theory-led approach can overcome these risks and also reveal the true promise of emergent constraints-not just as ways to reduce uncertainty in future climate change but also to catalyse advances in our understanding of the Earth System.