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The world is on track to breach the 1.5C global warming threshold in the next three years, scientists have warned in a new international study.

If current emissions continue, humans will have released enough carbon dioxide by early 2028 to lock in 1.5C of long-term warming since preindustrial times, according to the study.

The 1.5C target set under the 2015 Paris Agreement is considered a critical limit beyond which climate impacts such as extreme heat, drought, storms and sea level rise could become far more dangerous, especially for the poorest and most vulnerable populations.

“Things aren’t just getting worse. They’re getting worse faster,” said Zeke Hausfather, study co-author from the tech firm Stripe and climate group Berkeley Earth.

“We’re actively moving in the wrong direction in a critical period of time that we would need to meet our most ambitious climate goals. Some reports, there’s a silver lining. I don’t think there really is one in this one.”

The annual Indicators of Global Climate Change report, published in Earth System Science Data, brings together research from almost 60 leading climate scientists. It notes that the remaining “carbon budget”, the amount of CO2 that can still be emitted while staying below 1.5C, has shrunk to just 143 billion tonnes.

At current emission rates of 46 billion tonnes per year, the limit will be reached in less than three years.

open image in gallery Greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase year on year ( David Jones/PA )

So far, global temperatures have risen by about 1.24C, the study points out. And for the first time ever, the planet passed the 1.5C mark for an entire year in 2024, though the Paris target refers to sustained long-term warming typically measured over two decades.

Scientists say without drastic emissions cuts, the world will be unable to prevent warming from surpassing the threshold, leading to a rise in extreme weather events and climate-related disasters and increasing the risk of triggering irreversible changes.

The report also warns the carbon budget for 1.6C or 1.7C could be exceeded within nine years, which will significantly intensify these impacts.

Long-term estimates show current average global temperatures to be 1.24C higher than in the pre-industrial age. “Under any course of action, there is a very high chance that we’ll reach and even exceed 1.5C and even higher levels of warming,” Prof Joeri Rogelj, research director at the Grantham Institute, said. “1.5C is an iconic level but we are currently already in crunch time…to avoid higher levels of warming with a decent likelihood or a prudent likelihood as well and that is true for 1.7C, but equally so for 1.8C if we want to have a high probability there.”

But Prof Rogelj added that reductions in emissions over the next decade could still “critically change” the rate of warming and limit the magnitude and the extent by which the world would exceed 1.5C.

“It’s really the difference between just cruising through 1.5C towards much higher levels of 2C or trying to limit warming somewhere in the range of 1.5,” he said.

Piers Forster, professor of climate physics at the University of Leeds who has helped author the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, said the new study highlighted how climate policies and pace of climate action were “not keeping up with what’s needed to address the ever-growing impacts”.

open image in gallery ( Copernicus/EU )

In 2024, the best estimate of observed global surface temperature increase was 1.52C, of which 1.36C could be attributed to human activity, caused by global greenhouse gas emissions, the scientists said.

The latest study found last year’s high temperatures were “alarmingly unexceptional” as the combination of human-driven climate change and the El Nino weather phenomenon pushed global heat to record levels.

While global average temperatures exceeded 1.5C for the first time last year, this didn’t mean the world had breached the Paris agreement, which would require average global temperatures to exceed the threshold over multiple decades.

When analysing longer-term temperature change, the best estimates show that average global temperatures were 1.24C higher between 2015 and 2024 than in pre-industrial times, with 1.22C caused by human activities.

Elsewhere, the study noted that human activities were affecting the Earth’s energy balance, with the oceans storing about 91 per cent of the excess heat, driving detrimental changes in every component of the climate system such as sea level rise, ocean warming, ice loss, and permafrost thawing.

Between 2019 and 2024, mean sea level also increased by around 26mm, more than doubling the long-term rate of 1.8mm per year seen since the turn of the 20th century.

Dr Aimee Slangen, research leader at the NIOZ Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research, argued the rise was already having an “outsized impact” on low-lying coastal areas, causing more damaging storm surges and coastal erosion.

“The concerning part is that we know that sea-level rise in response to climate change is relatively slow, which means that we have already locked in further increases in the coming years and decades,” she said.

IPCC’s last assessment of the climate system, published in 2021, highlighted how climate change was leading to widespread adverse impacts on nature and people.

“Every small increase in warming matters, leading to more frequent, more intense weather extremes,” Professor Rogelj said.

“Emissions over the next decade will determine how soon and how fast 1.5C of warming is reached. They need to be swiftly reduced to meet the climate goals of the Paris Agreement.”

Three years left to limit warming to 1.5C, leading scientists warn

5 hours ago Share Save Mark Poynting Climate reporter, BBC News Share Save

EPA

The Earth could be doomed to breach the symbolic 1.5C warming limit in as little as three years at current levels of carbon dioxide emissions. That’s the stark warning from more than 60 of the world’s leading climate scientists in the most up-to-date assessment of the state of global warming. Nearly 200 countries agreed to try to limit global temperature rises to 1.5C above levels of the late 1800s in a landmark agreement in 2015, with the aim of avoiding some of the worst impacts of climate change. But countries have continued to burn record amounts of coal, oil and gas and chop down carbon-rich forests – leaving that international goal in peril.

“Things are all moving in the wrong direction,” said lead author Prof Piers Forster, director of the Priestley Centre for Climate Futures at the University of Leeds. “We’re seeing some unprecedented changes and we’re also seeing the heating of the Earth and sea-level rise accelerating as well.” These changes “have been predicted for some time and we can directly place them back to the very high level of emissions”, he added. At the beginning of 2020, scientists estimated that humanity could only emit 500 billion more tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) – the most important planet-warming gas – for a 50% chance of keeping warming to 1.5C. But by the start of 2025 this so-called “carbon budget” had shrunk to 130 billion tonnes, according to the new study. That reduction is largely due to continued record emissions of CO2 and other planet-warming greenhouse gases like methane, but also improvements in the scientific estimates. If global CO2 emissions stay at their current highs of about 40 billion tonnes a year, 130 billion tonnes gives the world roughly three years until that carbon budget is exhausted. This could commit the world to breaching the target set by the Paris agreement, the researchers say, though the planet would probably not pass 1.5C of human-caused warming until a few years later.

Last year was the first on record when global average air temperatures were more than 1.5C above those of the late 1800s. A single 12-month period isn’t considered a breach of the Paris agreement, however, with the record heat of 2024 given an extra boost by natural weather patterns. But human-caused warming was by far the main reason for last year’s high temperatures, reaching 1.36C above pre-industrial levels, the researchers estimate. This current rate of warming is about 0.27C per decade – much faster than anything in the geological record. And if emissions stay high, the planet is on track to reach 1.5C of warming on that metric around the year 2030. After this point, long-term warming could, in theory, be brought back down by sucking large quantities of CO2 back out of the atmosphere. But the authors urge caution on relying on these ambitious technologies serving as a get-out-of-jail card. “For larger exceedance [of 1.5C], it becomes less likely that removals [of CO2] will perfectly reverse the warming caused by today’s emissions,” warned Joeri Rogelj, professor of climate science and policy at Imperial College London.

‘Every fraction of warming’ matters

The study is filled with striking statistics highlighting the magnitude of the climate change that has already happened. Perhaps the most notable is the rate at which extra heat is accumulating in the Earth’s climate system, known as “Earth’s energy imbalance” in scientific jargon. Over the past decade or so, this rate of heating has been more than double that of the 1970s and 1980s and an estimated 25% higher than the late 2000s and 2010s. “That’s a really large number, a very worrying number” over such a short period, said Dr Matthew Palmer of the UK Met Office, and associate professor at the University of Bristol. The recent uptick is fundamentally due to greenhouse gas emissions, but a reduction in the cooling effect from small particles called aerosols has also played a role. This extra energy has to go somewhere. Some goes into warming the land, raising air temperatures, and melting the world’s ice. But about 90% of the excess heat is taken up by the oceans. That not only means disruption to marine life but also higher sea levels: warmer ocean waters take up more space, in addition to the extra water that melting glaciers are adding to our seas. The rate of global sea-level rise has doubled since the 1990s, raising the risks of flooding for millions of people living in coastal areas worldwide.

While this all paints a bleak picture, the authors note that the rate of emissions increases appears to be slowing as clean technologies are rolled out. They argue that “rapid and stringent” emissions cuts are more important than ever. The Paris target is based on very strong scientific evidence that the impacts of climate change would be far greater at 2C of warming than at 1.5C. That has often been oversimplified as meaning below 1.5C of warming is “safe” and above 1.5C “dangerous”. In reality, every extra bit of warming increases the severity of many weather extremes, ice melt and sea-level rise. “Reductions in emissions over the next decade can critically change the rate of warming,” said Prof Rogelj. “Every fraction of warming that we can avoid will result in less harm and less suffering of particularly poor and vulnerable populations and less challenges for our societies to live the lives that we desire,” he added.

Emissions up in Cherwell despite 4% cut target

Cherwell District Council has received £1.1m from central government to continue in investing in decarbonising its leisure centres

It added the rise was down to more visitors to its leisure centres, and an increase in the carbon intensity of the UK electricity grid, among other factors.

The authority said it was “committed” to doing more to tackle the problem.

According to the latest figures, its emissions total went from 4,071 tonnes of CO2e in 2022/23 to 4,119 tonnes of CO2e in 2023/24.

Emissions from Cherwell District Council’s facilities have risen – despite a target to cut the amount by 4.2%.

A council report said the “main reason” was related to decarbonisation equipment installed previously “not realising reductions in gas demand”, particularly at leisure centres.

The council has announced that four leisure centres are set to go undergo further eco-friendly enhancement works, after receiving a government grant worth £1.1m.

A spokesperson said: “Work is ongoing to optimise the technology that supports the decarbonisation programme across the council, such as air source heat pumps, installed at council leisure centres so that it can reach its full potential and help us reduce our reliance on gas heating.

“Contributing factors that can be aligned to the increase in emissions include: the need to complete the optimisation of the technology; a welcome increase of around 4% in visitors to our leisure centres; the fact that we are for the first time reporting emissions linked to water supply, water treatment and waste disposal; and an overall 5% increase in the carbon intensity of the UK electricity grid – something that will be affecting emissions reporting by councils and other public bodies up and down the country.”

Ian Middleton leads the Green party group on Cherwell District Council, who are part of a Liberal Democrat minority administration that have been running the authority since May 2024.

He said the rise took place under the previous Conservative administration – but he was hopeful for the future.

“Since the new administration took over last year, there has been much more focus on opportunities to reduce emissions, which I hope will bear fruit soon,” he said.

“In general, I’m pleased that the council are being transparent about their emissions reduction performance as I think that’s a key factor in getting to grips with decarbonisation.”

From carbon pollution to sea-level rise to global heating, the pace and level of key climate change indicators are all in uncharted territory, more than 60 top scientists warned Thursday.

Greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels and deforestation hit a new high in 2024 and averaged, over the last decade, a record 53.6 billion tonnes per year — that is 100,000 tonnes per minute — of CO2 or its equivalent in other gases, they reported in a peer-reviewed update.

Earth’s surface temperature last year breached 1.5 degrees Celsius for the first time, and the additional CO2 humanity can emit with a two-thirds chance of staying under that threshold long-term — our 1.5C “carbon budget” — will be exhausted in a couple of years, they calculated.

Investment in clean energy outpaced investment in oil, gas and coal last year two-to-one, but fossil fuels account for more than 80 percent of global energy consumption, and growth in renewables still lags behind new demand.

Included in the 2015 Paris climate treaty as an aspirational goal, the 1.5C limit has since been validated by science as necessary for avoiding a catastrophically climate-addled world.

The hard cap on warming to which nearly 200 nations agreed was “well below” two degrees, commonly interpreted to mean 1.7C to 1.8C.

“We are already in crunch time for these higher levels of warming,” co-author Joeri Rogelj, a professor of climate science and policy at Imperial College London, told journalists in a briefing.

“The next three or four decades is pretty much the timeline over which we expect a peak in warming to happen.”

No less alarming than record heat and carbon emissions is the gathering pace at which these and other climate indicators are shifting, according to the study, published in Earth System Science Data.

Human-induced warming increased over the last decade at a rate “unprecedented in the instrumental record”, and well above the 2010-2019 average registered in the UN’s most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, in 2021.

The new findings — led by the same scientists using essentially the same methods — are intended as an authoritative albeit unofficial update of the benchmark IPCC reports underpinning global climate diplomacy.

They should be taken as a reality check by policymakers, the authors suggested.

“I tend to be an optimistic person,” said lead author Piers Forster, head of the University of Leed’s Priestley Centre for Climate Futures.

“But if you look at this year’s update, things are all moving in the wrong direction.”

The rate at which sea levels have shot up in recent years is also alarming, the scientists said.

After creeping up, on average, well under two millimetres per year from 1901 to 2018, global oceans have risen 4.3 mm annually since 2019.

An increase in the ocean watermark of 23 centimetres — the width of a letter-sized sheet of paper — over the last 125 years has been enough to imperil many small island states and hugely amplify the destructive power of storm surges worldwide.

An additional 20 centimetres of sea level rise by 2050 would cause one trillion dollars in flood damage annually in the world’s 136 largest coastal cities, earlier research has shown.

Another indicator underlying all the changes in the climate system is Earth’s so-called energy imbalance, the difference between the amount of solar energy entering the atmosphere and the smaller amount leaving it.

So far, 91 percent of human-caused warming has been absorbed by oceans, sparing life on land.

But the planet’s energy imbalance has nearly doubled in the last 20 years, and scientists do not know how long oceans will continue to massively soak up this excess heat.

Dire future climate impacts worse than what the world has already experienced are already baked in over the next decade or two.

But beyond that, the future is in our hands, the scientists made clear.

“We will rapidly reach a level of global warming of 1.5C, but what happens next depends on the choices which will be made,” said co-author and former IPCC co-chair Valerie Masson-Delmotte.

The Paris Agreement’s 1.5C target allows for the possibility of ratcheting down global temperatures below that threshold before century’s end.

Ahead of a critical year-end climate summit in Brazil, international cooperation has been weakened by the US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement.

President Donald Trump’s dismantling of domestic climate policies means the United States is likely to fall short on its emissions reduction targets, and could sap the resolve of other countries to deepen their own pledges, experts say.

Disappearing clouds are contributing to faster global warming and tumbling temperature records.

Scientists have seen a decline of somewhere between 1.5 per cent and three per cent in the world’s storm cloud zones each decade over the past 24 years.

The shrinking coverage, observed by a National Aeronautics and Space Administration-led team, results in less sunlight reflected back into space, allowing more in to boost global warming.

Overall clearer skies, a trend driven by evolving wind patterns, the expanding tropics and other shifts linked to climate change, is now thought to be the largest contributor to the planet’s higher absorption of solar radiation.

Christian Jakob, a co-author of the study and director at the Monash-led Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for 21st Century Weather, said the major heating consequences of shrinking cloud cover was now evident.

“It’s an important piece in the puzzle of understanding the extraordinary recent warming we observed, and a wake-up call for urgent climate action,” Professor Jakob said.

Warmer Australian ocean temperatures have resulted in coral bleaching, fish kills and algal blooms. (HANDOUT/Wendy Mitchell, Environs Kimberley)

Last year was the hottest on record, the United Nation’s World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said, clocking in at about 1.55 degrees above the pre-industrial era average.

A single year above 1.5C is not enough to breach the Paris Agreement, however, as the global pact’s goals are based on long-term averages measured over decades.

The UN weather agency expects temperatures to keep rising, with a 70 per cent chance the 2025-2029 five-year mean will exceed 1.5C.

Unprecedented ocean heating has been felt particularly acutely in the waters surrounding Australia, leading to coral bleaching, fish kills and algal blooms.

The elevated rate of warming is due to global greenhouse gas emissions holding at all-time highs, largely due to burning fossil fuels and deforestation, according to the latest Indicators of Global Climate Change study released on Thursday.

If current emissions trends continue, the report prepared by dozens of scientists from around the world says there will be just over three years left in the carbon budget to achieve 1.5C of heating.

Policymakers and experts have gathered in Germany for a mid-year convention ahead of the main UN Climate Change Conference in Brazil scheduled for November.