Planetary warming has significantly accelerated over the past 10 years, with temperatures rising at a higher rate since 2015 than in any previous decade on record, a new study showed.
The Earth warmed around 0.35 degrees Celsius in the decade to 2025, compared to just under 0.2C per decade on average between 1970 and 2015, according to a paper published on Friday in the scientific journal Geophysical Research Letters. This is the first statistically significant evidence of an acceleration of global warming, the authors said.
The past three years have been the hottest on record, compared to the average before the Industrial Revolution. In 2024, warming went past 1.5C, the lower limit set by the Paris Agreement. That target refers to temperature increases over 20 years, but breaching it for one year shows efforts to slow down climate change have been insufficient, the scientists who wrote the new paper said.
Demonstrating that was difficult due to natural fluctuations in temperatures. The researchers filtered out the “noise” to make the “underlying long-term warming signal” more clearly visible, said Grant Foster, a co-author of the study and a US-based statistics expert.
Researchers isolated phenomena including the El Niño weather phase, volcanic eruptions and solar irradiance. When looking at temperature increases without their influence, the authors concluded the evidence is “strong” that the accelerated warming was not due to an unusually hot 2023 and 2024, but that since 2015 global temperatures departed from their previous, slower path of warming.
The new report adds to a growing body of work that indicates climate change is having a quicker and larger impact on the planet than scientists have understood. A separate paper published this week found that many studies on sea-level increases underestimate how much water along the coast has already risen.
“If the warming rate of the past 10 years continues, it would lead to a long-term exceedance of the 1.5C limit of the Paris Agreement before 2030,” said Stefan Rahmstorf, the lead author of the warming study and a researcher at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. “How quickly the Earth continues to warm ultimately depends on how rapidly we reduce global CO2 emissions from fossil fuels to zero.”
A new study, published in Nature Communications, shows that reducing air pollutionhas inadvertently diminished the brightness of marine clouds, which are key regulators of global temperature.
Between 2003 and 2022, clouds over the Northeastern Pacific and Atlantic oceans, both sites of rapid surface warming, became nearly 3% less reflective per decade. Researchers attribute approximately 70% of this change to aerosols—fine particlesthat float through the atmosphere and influence both cloud cover and cloud composition.
Research showing that some aerosols are harmful drove efforts to limit particulate pollution that specifically targeted products of fossil fuel combustion. Aerosol levels will likely continue to fall as clean energy replaces oil and gas. To improve the accuracy of global temperature forecasts, scientists need to capture the true relationship between aerosols, clouds and heat from the sun in climate models.
“This paper is a substantial contribution to the evidence that reductions in particulate air pollutants are contributing to accelerated warming.” said Sarah Doherty, a principal research scientist at the UW Cooperative Institute for Climate, Ocean and Ecosystem Studies.