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

Summary

Ocean warming has led to widespread bleaching of warm-water coralsSirachai Arunrugstichai/Getty Images Global warming has accelerated and is now happening twice as fast as in previous decades, meaning major climate catastrophes could happen sooner than expected. Earth was warming by about 0.18°C per decade prior to 2013-14. Since then, it has been heating up by about 0.36°C per decade, according to an analysis by Stefan Rahmstorf at the University of Potsdam, Germany, and US statistician Grant Foster. If warming continues at this rate, humanity could breach the Paris Agreement goal of limiting warming to 1.5°C in 2028, even sooner than other research has projected. “Every tenth of a degree matters and makes the impact of global warming worse in terms of extreme weather events, in terms of ecosystem impacts, also the risk of crossing tipping points,” says Rahmstorf. “The world, apart from the US, is trying to halt global warming, reduce it, and that’s why the fact that it’s now actually doing the opposite, accelerating, is of great concern.” After a string of record-hot years, climate scientists began widely debating in 2023 whether global warming is speeding up. But natural fluctuations, such as the El Niño climate phase, which caused additional warming in 2023 and 2024, made it difficult to tell if the faster rise in temperatures was due to climate change or just random weather. Rahmstorf and Foster’s study is the first to find a statistically significant acceleration due to climate change, making that attribution with 98 per cent confidence. The team analysed five different datasets of global temperature, some of which show a higher number. According to the analysis of the dataset from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, global warming could reach 1.5°C above the preindustrial period this year, based on a 20-year average. Warm-water coral reefs are starting to collapse, and breaching 1.5°C risks crossing other tipping points like irreversible m...