Climate crisis accelerated in last 10 years: Study

Global warming has accelerated over the past 10 years, a new study has concluded with 98% certainty, the first time scientists have confirmed this rapid acceleration with statistical confidence

New Delhi:

The study concluded that if the warming rate of the past 10 years continues, the Paris Agreement 1.5 degrees Celsius warming limit will be breached by 2030. (Hindustan Times)

Global warming has accelerated over the past 10 years, a new study has concluded with 98% certainty, the first time scientists have confirmed this rapid acceleration with statistical confidence.

After accounting for known natural influences like El Niño events, volcanic eruptions and solar variations on global temperatures, the research team detected a statistically significant acceleration of the warming trend. Over the past 10 years, the estimated warming rate has been around 0.35 degrees Celsius per decade, depending on the dataset, compared with an average of just under 0.2 degrees Celsius per decade from 1970 to 2015, the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) said on Friday.

This recent rate is higher than in any previous decade since the beginning of instrumental records in 1880, the authors stated.

HT reported on January 15 that global temperatures over the past three years (2023-2025) averaged more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, marking the first three-year period to exceed the threshold, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S).

Berkeley Earth, which focuses on land temperature data analysis, warned that the warming spike from 2023 to 2025 appears to have deviated significantly from the previous largely linear trend. If we were to assume that global warming was continuing at the same rate as during the 50-year period from 1970 to 2019, then the 2023 to 2025 excursion would be by far the largest deviation from that trend, Berkeley Earth said.

“We can now demonstrate a strong and statistically significant acceleration of global warming since around 2015,” said Grant Foster, a US statistics expert and co-author of the study, which was published in Geophysical Research Letters.

The study concluded that if the warming rate of the past 10 years continues, the Paris Agreement 1.5 degrees Celsius warming limit will be breached by 2030.

“Stopping this trend is in our hands: studies show that global warming will stop around the time humanity reaches zero CO2 emissions, but it can hardly be reversed. In the current political climate, however, it is quite possible that warming may continue its fast pace or even accelerate further. This much is clear: if the warming rate of the past 10 years continues, the Paris Agreement 1.5°C warming limit will be breached by ∼2030,” the study stated.

Short-term natural fluctuations in global temperature caused by El Niño, volcanic eruptions, and solar cycles can mask changes in the long-term rate of warming. In their data analysis, the researchers worked with five established global temperature data sets (NASA, NOAA, HadCRUT, Berkeley Earth, and ERA5) based on measurement data.

“The adjusted data show an acceleration of global warming since 2015 with a statistical certainty of over 98%, consistent across all data sets examined and independent of the analysis method chosen,” said Stefan Rahmstorf, PIK researcher and lead author of the study.

The study comes at a time when there is major disruption in climate action. HT reported in January that the US withdrew from 66 international organisations and conventions, with its most significant exit from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) likely to deal a crippling blow to global efforts to tackle the climate crisis. Further, on February 12, the US Environmental Protection Agency rescinded its 2009 “endangerment finding” for greenhouse gases, which had concluded that a range of greenhouse gases were a threat to public health. Experts have noted that the Iran conflict is also a distraction from urgent efforts to curb emissions.

“Along with its brutal human costs, this newest upheaval shows yet again that fossil fuel dependence leaves economies, businesses, markets and people at the mercy of each new conflict or trade policy lurch. But there is a clear solution to this fossil fuel cost chaos - renewables are now cheaper, safer and faster-to-market, making them the obvious pathway to energy security and sovereignty,” UN Climate Change executive secretary Simon Stiell said last week.

“How quickly the Earth continues to warm ultimately depends on how rapidly we reduce global CO₂ emissions from fossil fuels to zero,” Rahmstorf said in a statement.