John Williams, from the Department of Geography, University of Wisconsin, Madison, and colleagues attempted to forecast the risk of novel or disappearing climates by the year 2100, using global climate models and greenhouse gas emission scenarios from the recent assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change(IPCC).

Their findings are being published Tuesday in this week's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The researchers found that under both high and low emissions scenarios, many regions would experience biome-scale changes. Biomes are types of major ecological communities, such as rainforest, grassland, or desert.

Tropical and subtropical regions may experience previously unrecorded climates, with the greatest changes in Amazonian and Indonesian rainforests. Areas like the southeastern United States and the Arabian Peninsula may also be affected.

Tropical mountains and poleward regions, such as the Peruvian and Colombian Andes, Siberia, and southern Australia, face a risk of climates disappearing altogether.

In the high-end scenario, up to 39 percent and 48 percent of the planet's land surface could experience novel or disappearing climates, respectively, while in the low-end scenario, the projections are up to 20 percent and 20 percent, respectively.

The regions facing climate disappearance have also been recently identified as biodiversity hotspots, suggesting that standard conservation solutions may fail to protect the fragile biodiversity in these areas.