One of the biggest challenges in predicting the future climate of Earth is taking account of future human behaviors, which will depend greatly on political and economic factors. Burning coal, for example, contributes both greenhouse gases which warm the climate; dirty coal plants produce sulfate aerosols, which tend to cool it, and black carbon aerosols, which have a warming effect. The unpredictable human factor comes in addition to the remaining uncertainties in our understanding of how various physical effects force the climate. One way to separate those two uncertainties is to examine the impact that human activities have already had on the climate.
Characterizing the accumulated human effect on climate also enables us to predict what happens to future climate if we stop all anthropogenic emissions today. Even though that's an unrealistic situation, it can be informative: if we know what effect our activities up to now have had on the climate, we can also predict what effect the same accumulated human activities will have in the future. This way, we can estimate the changes we are already committed to; thus scientists call this the climate commitment.
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