Earth is now heating up twice as fast as in previous decades

Global warming has accelerated and is now occurring twice as fast as in previous decades, meaning major climate disasters could occur sooner than expected.

The Earth was warming about 0.18°C per decade before 2013-2014. Since then, it has warmed by about 0.36°C per decade, according to an analysis by Stefan Rahmstorf of the University of Potsdam, Germany, and his colleagues.

If warming continues at this rate, humanity could fail to meet the Paris Agreement’s goal of limiting warming to 1.5°C in 2028, even earlier than other research has predicted.

“Every tenth of a degree counts and worsens the impact of global warming in terms of extreme weather events, in terms of impacts on ecosystems, as well as the risk of crossing tipping points,” explains Rahmstorf. “The world, with the exception of the United States, is trying to stop global warming, to reduce it, and that’s why the fact that they are now doing the opposite, accelerating it, is very concerning.”

After a series of years of record heat, climate scientists began widely debating in 2023 whether global warming is accelerating. But natural fluctuations, such as the El Niño climate phase, which caused additional warming in 2023 and 2024, made it difficult to determine whether the faster rise in temperatures was due to climate change or just random weather.

Rahmstorf’s study is the first to find a statistically significant acceleration due to climate change, with a confidence level of 98%.

The team analyzed five different global temperature datasets, some of which showed a higher figure. According to analysis of data from the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, global warming this year could reach 1.5°C above the pre-industrial period, based on a 20-year average.

Warm water coral reefs are beginning to collapse, and exceeding 1.5°C risks crossing other tipping points such as the irreversible melting of Greenland and West Antarctica and the dieback of the Amazon rainforest.

Many scientists believe that the acceleration of global warming is mainly due to the fight against sulfur dioxide emissions from shipping in 2020. Although this substance is harmful to human health, it also formed an aerosol haze that blocked sunlight and cooled the planet.

Now that this sunlight has been unlocked, the rate of warming could slow, but it’s hard to say for sure, Rahmstorf says. A shift away from fossil fuels will continue to reduce the air pollution that masks warming.

“There will be further reductions in aerosols, [but] probably not as fast as the reduction in emissions from shipping,” he says. “It’s entirely possible that the rate of warming will be lower over the next decade.”

In addition to El Niño, the authors estimated the effects of volcanic eruptions, which also create sun-blocking haze, and increased solar radiation during high sunspot cycles. After excluding these effects, they fitted two types of curves to global temperatures, both of which showed accelerating warming, although at different times.

However, it is unlikely that researchers could completely eliminate the temperature effects of El Niño, volcanoes and sunspots, according to Zeke Hausfather of Berkeley Earth in California. This means they could slightly overestimate the acceleration of global warming. But the study offers compelling evidence that this acceleration has accelerated, he says.

“The broader takeaway is that we have strong evidence of an acceleration even if we don’t yet know precisely how much the rate of warming has increased,” Hausfather says. “We will have to wait a few more years to get more data. »