Uh-Oh—Global Warming Is Actually Speeding Up, Scientists Say

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Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:

• In humanity’s ambitious quest to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial levels, scientists have relied on an estimated temperature rise of 0.2 degrees Celsius per decade from 1970 to 2015.

• A new study suggests that the past decade actually saw a 0.35 degrees Celsius increase, suggesting that global warming may be accelerating.

• Scientists arrived at this number by stripping away natural influences, such as El Niño weather patterns and solar activity, to get a clearer look at the underlying rate of change.

On December 12, 2015, the world came together to tackle a Herculean climate task: limiting global warming to just 1.5 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial levels. Now, with yearly averages nearly peaking above those levels already, it’s all but certain we’ll fail at this all-important mission, and scientists estimate that Earth will permanently pass the 1.5-degree warming threshold by the end of the decade.

But the world might need to contend with another unfortunate fact—global warming is actually accelerating. At least that’s the conclusion of a new study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters analyzing global temperature measurement datasets from five major organizations, including NASA and NOAA. According to co-author Stefan Rahmstorf, a researcher at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, the new finding was made by stripping away natural influences, such as El Niño events, volcanic eruptions, and solar activity, to analyze the underlying rate of warming.

What Rahmstorf, along with fellow co-author and U.S. statistician Grant Foster, discovered was that the world warmed an average rate of 0.35 degrees Celsius in the past decade, a significant increase from the 0.2 degrees Celsius increases typically recorded since 1970. This is obviously worrying, since not only is the planet warming, but the rate at which it’s warming may be accelerating, complicating the timeline for addressing the climate crisis.

“The adjusted data show an acceleration of global warming since 2015 with a statistical certainty of over 98 percent, consistent across all data sets examined and independent of the analysis method chosen,” Rahmstorf said in a press statement.

In the past few years, Earth experienced both El Niño weather events and the Sun’s solar maximum—part of the star’s natural 11-year cycle when it produces sunspot activity, frequent solar flares, and coronal mass ejections, which peaked around October 2024. Stripping away those influences means adjusting the average temperatures for 2023 and 2024 to be lower than they were in reality, but even with these alterations, the data showed that warming has been accelerating.

While Rahmstorf and Foster aren’t alone in their science-backed assertions that warming is accelerating, previous studies have shown a more modest uptick of 0.27 degrees Celsius per decade, not 0.35 degrees Celsius—a huge difference when every single percentage of a degree can have widespread impact across the globe. Speaking with Nature, Robert Rohde, chief scientist at Berkeley Earth—which produces one of the climate datasets used in the study—suggests that removing natural fluctuations could impact these estimates, leaving them “imperfect,” but still suggests that an estimate around 0.30 degrees Celsius is likely.

The solution to this problem, as Popular Mechanics has reported for more than a century, is to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions, invest in green energy technologies, and develop strategies for removing carbon that’s already in the atmosphere.

“If the warming rate of the past 10 years continues, it would lead to a long-term exceedance of the 1.5°C limit of the Paris Agreement before 2030,” Rahmstorf said in a press statement. “How quickly the Earth continues to warm ultimately depends on how rapidly we reduce global CO2 emissions from fossil fuels to zero.”

The well-intentioned ambition of the 2015 Paris Climate Accords has been eclipsed by humanity’s inability to kick its fossil fuel addiction, but the fight goes on.

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