2 days ago
Three years left before best chance of managing global temperature rise is lost
A team of scientists from 17 countries including Ireland have calculated the remaining 'carbon budget' and warn it is set to run out in 2028.
Their warning comes with a slew of new data that shows all the measurements of climate change moving in the wrong direction.
Sea level, for example, has risen twice as fast over the last six years compared to the previous century as warming oceans expand and ice caps melt more rapidly than before.
The surge is revealed in a collaboration by 61 experts from 54 universities and institutes published today.
They warn that the Earth's atmosphere can take only three more years of carbon and other greenhouse gases being pumped out at today's rate before hitting a critical stage.
At that point, the accumulation of warming gases is expected to be beyond what would provide a 50pc chance of keeping global temperature rise to 1.5C.
Preventing temperature rise exceeding 1.5C is the aim of the landmark Paris Agreement signed by almost all the world's nations in 2015.
Technically, the agreement is not broken by breaching 1.5C because it refers to that level of temperature rise being sustained over several decades.
However, the scientists behind the Indicators of Global Climate Change (IGCC) initiative point out that the 1.5C mark was already exceeded in 2024 and, while this was a record-breaking year, the likelihood of it being repeated sooner and often is increasing all the time.
The IGCC initiative was set up to provide annual updates on climate change in between publication of the flagship reports of the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC), which are produced only every six or seven years.
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Its latest report shows rapid changes since the last report was published in 2021.
Annual emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), the most common and long-lasting greenhouse gas, rose by 1.3pc.
The amount of CO2 accumulated in the atmosphere increased by 3.1pc while concentration of methane, which has a shorter lifespan but greater short-term warming impact, increased by 3.4pc.
Average temperature rise grew by 13.8pc and the remaining carbon budget dwindled by 74pc – from 500 billion tonnes of CO2 to 130 billion tonnes at the start of 2025.
Sea levels rose by 26mm, counting from 2019, giving an average increase of 4.3mm per year compared to an average of 1.8mm per year over the previous 120 years.
'This seemingly small number is having an outsized impact on low-lying coastal areas, making storm surges more damaging and causing more coastal erosion,' said Dr Aimee Slangen, of the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research.
'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.'
