Earth is getting hotter at a faster rate despite pledges of government action

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"If we don't want to see the 1.5 degrees C goal disappearing in our rearview mirror, the world must work much harder and urgently at bringing emissions down."

The pace of climate warming has accelerated in recent years despite political pledges to stop its progress.
The progress of climate change has accelerated in recent years despite political pledges to curb greenhouse gas emissions. (Image credit: Getty Images)

Average global temperatures are rising at an ever faster rate despite pledges by world leaders to tackle climate change, a new study has revealed.

The new study, released last week during a preparatory meeting for the 2023 United Nations Climate Change Conference that will take place later this year in the United Arab Emirates, found that the pace of global warming has accelerated in recent years despite political commitments to curb the progress of the temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) compared to pre-industrial times. 

Global temperatures increased on average by 1.07 degrees C (1.93 degrees F) in the decade from 2010 to 2019, but the average rise in the decade from 2013 to 2022 was 1.14 degrees C (2.05 degrees F). That means that the pace of human-induced climate change is accelerating at a rate of over 0.2 degrees C per decade. The researchers said that the still- rising levels of human-made greenhouse gas emissions are the main culprit.

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In  2015, at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris, leaders from 195 nations agreed to work toward limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F) compared to preindustrial times. Despite this agreement, emissions of key greenhouse gases are "at an all-time high," the study found. 

In the last decade, humankind has been releasing about 54 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide every year into Earth's atmosphere through various industrial activities. The failure to curb these emissions means that humankind can now only release about 250 more gigatonnes of carbon dioxide before global warming reaches the 1.5 degrees C limit. In a previous carbon budget assessment in 2020, researchers found that humankind still had over 500 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide left to reach the threshold, which shows that without significant changes, the world will be through its global carbon budget in less than five years. 

"Even though we are not yet at 1.5 degrees C warming, the carbon budget will likely be exhausted in only a few years as we have a triple whammy of heating from very high carbon dioxide emissions, heating from increases in other greenhouse gas emissions and heating from reductions in pollution," Professor Piers Forster, Director of the Priestley Centre for Climate Futures at Leeds University and one of the authors of the study said in a statement. "If we don't want to see the 1.5 degrees C goal disappearing in our rearview mirror, the world must work much harder and urgently at bringing emissions down."

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The researchers describe the results as a "wake-up call" and stress that with every small increment in average global temperatures, the world is set for more frequent and severe weather disasters such as droughts, floods and tropical storms. 

"It is critical that policy makers and the general public be made aware of how quickly we are changing the climate through our collective activities," Professor Peter Thorne, Director of ICARUS Climate Research Centre at Maynooth University and co-author of the research, said in the statement. "Already since the IPCC assessment of the physical science basis in 2021, key numbers have changed markedly and we remain well off track globally to avert warming above 1.5 degrees."

The study was published on June 8 in the journal Earth System Science Data.

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Tereza Pultarova
Tereza Pultarova
Senior Writer

Tereza is a London-based science and technology journalist, aspiring fiction writer and amateur gymnast. Originally from Prague, the Czech Republic, she spent the first seven years of her career working as a reporter, script-writer and presenter for various TV programmes of the Czech Public Service Television. She later took a career break to pursue further education and added a Master's in Science from the International Space University, France, to her Bachelor's in Journalism and Master's in Cultural Anthropology from Prague's Charles University. She worked as a reporter at the Engineering and Technology magazine, freelanced for a range of publications including Live Science, Space.com, Professional Engineering, Via Satellite and Space News and served as a maternity cover science editor at the European Space Agency.

13 Comments Comment from the forums
  • Atlan0001
    Environmentalists have a choice, an imperative of breakout into the Space Frontier (Noah's Ark-like space stations and colonies) or extinction by tyrannies and wars and collapse of civilization and civilization's structures and infrastructures in an Iron Curtain Gestapo police state martial law closed system! Their Earth Utopia, their instant "green energies," their total quality management, controls, regulations of energies, of peoples, activities, societies, economies, cultures, religions and all human thought, are not an option. Not even in the least!

    Humans at the apex of the pyramid of life on Earth are as complexly varied as all the rest of the pyramid of life put together on Earth. That makes the species need space as frontiers' spatial as all the frontier universes. It is our greatest genius and our greatest curse. As Stephen Hawking prophesied, breakout, expansion, from Earth into solar systemic wide and deep networks of space colony complexes capable of handling a mass and energy of life thousands to millions of times greater than life on Earth now, is an imperative of human life, and if we don't begin now, right now, we will have only 1,000 years more of human existence, if not all life existence. Nothing whatsoever having to do with Earth alone will work for prosperity, thus for survival either. The perfect energy source for sought clean energy could be discovered and it still would not be enough or contradict an ultimate of "Murphy's law" in an Iron Curtain closed system of Earth alone.
    ----------------------------------

    "Aim at and get Earth thrown in. Aim at Earth and get neither." -- C. S. Lewis (the bracketed change is mine which I'm certain C. S. Lewis would not have minded).
    Reply
  • murgatroyd
    Agree with Atlan in general terms. However, breakout if it comes won't look like Star Trek (there will never be "warp speed") nor, probably, like Avatar (Humans 1.0 traveling at sub light speed while frozen*).

    Rather, I suspect the choice will be between artificial general intelligence (re-defined as "our descendants because we made them") or extreme bio-engineered lifeforms capable of withstanding the rigors of centuries-long space travel and harsh conditions on only somewhat habitable planets.

    For the latter, my money is currently on a tardigrade-human hybrid. To us, they would look like aliens ... or monsters from a nightmare.

    *Even if it were possible to put humans into a deep freeze for centuries and wake them no worse for the wear ... while it may be possible to halt biological processes, nothing can halt the decay of radio-isotopes naturally present in our bodies: in the absence of repair mechanisms in our cells performing their work, deadly cancers are guaranteed.
    Reply
  • Atlan0001
    Murgatroyd, I'm pretty doggone sure wormholes exist. Whether or not they do, it makes no difference, because if we break out and start putting out billions of ships into traffic lanes in the solar systemic mini-galaxy network extending all the way into interstellar space, we will find a way to locally superconduct our ships through spacetime.

    We will find that the interstellar spacetime medium is not the same warp medium that interplanetary spacetime is, no more than Earth's local medium is the same as the interplanetary medium. And to reach it soonest we will go perpendicular to the equatorial of the solar disk rather than through the equatorial of the solar disk. We will even use it to arc from one area of the interplanetary medium to another (damn, this anticipatory app. works almost too well). Then one day we will find the same change in mediums and do the same superconducting arcing with the galaxy.

    Our problem won't be speed because we will solve the problem of relativity (as Michio Kaku calls it) by finding that spacetime has no absolute measure and can be power-slipped. We will be our own soliton warp waves through spacetime. By making the solar system a miniature galactic model with space stations, colonies, other facilities and countless ships and other conveyances we will have enough of an intermediate time to discover and/or invent our way out into the galaxy and beyond. We may even get beyond it before we even get to it.

    The imperative point, though, is that we have to get out there into the solar system soonest possible or Hawking will be right in his prophecy that we will end up extinct within at most 1,000 years. We are well on the way in that direction right now. We are running late to our survival as an energetic Space Age structure and infrastructure civilization and species. There is no third way for us. The cost of not doing it is growing exponentially and the weight of that cost will soon enough pin us to the Earth incapable any longer of Space Age structure, civilization and moving out.
    Reply
  • murgatroyd
    Traversable wormholes? I don't think so. Like anything that allows travel faster than the speed of light (perhaps "speed of causality" would be a better term), this would run into un-resolvable paradoxes.

    "locally superconduct our ships through spacetime" no idea what this is supposed to mean.

    "warp medium" no idea what this is supposed to mean.

    "equatorial of the solar disk" do you mean the ecliptic?

    "arc from one area of the interplanetary medium to another" no idea what this is supposed to mean.

    "superconducting arcing with the galaxy" no idea what this is supposed to mean.

    "spacetime has no absolute measure and can be power-slipped" no idea what this is supposed to mean.

    "We will be our own soliton warp waves through spacetime" no idea what this is supposed to mean.
    Reply
  • Atlan0001
    Then you've never flown, arced, from Seattle to Tokyo via south Alaska as the shortest route and have no idea what that means.

    You've never thought about why flying, arcing, above the curvature of the Earth beats the curvature of the earth for speed from one place to another on Earth.

    Wormholes have nothing to do with the speed of light. They are quantum entangled gateway portal points, the same gateway-point in two places in the universe, with no distance whatsoever between them no matter how far separated in the universe they are (the naked singularity of the portal is).

    There is no absolute of metric measure (spacetime or mass-energy) in quantum mechanics or the universe at large.

    The speed of light is a constant, and there is no such thing as positioning regarding it. The principle of uncertainty applies with a vengeance! The observations of observers are relative. In space, in expanding / contracting mediums position and velocity will not mean the same thing they mean on Earth locally, There is no two points, observer and traveler, there are three points, in fact six points of superposition, and universe quality expansive / contractive triangulations.

    Sheez! Why do I bother?!
    Reply
  • Ken Fabian
    The climate problem needs to be addressed, aggressively. Decades of top level science based advice consistently and persistently warns of how dangerous it is to alter the heat balance of our world and politicians, parties and governments should feel obliged to act; the failure to act and worse, to deliberately encourage public distrust in that advice is dangerously irresponsible.

    It has never been up to Environmentalists to fix it - except in the sense that mainstream politics chose not to and handed the issue off in hot potato style - "you care so much, you fix it", in combination with framing the issue as radical and fringe. I strongly suspect in the certainty their "alternative energies" would fail spectacularly and that discredit them and somehow the issue would just go away, without the inconvenience of being responsible and accountable for something that serious. It wasn't Environmentalists who let us down or got things wrong - although of course it was scientists and engineers and (capitalist) entrepreneurs that have made solar and wind the most built kinds of new energy supply.

    Grand space ambitions are mostly irrelevant and offer no viable or significant solutions even as more modest (and real) space capabilities - the use of a multitude of observation satellites clearly show global warming (well over 100 used for climate observations) - are useful for measuring rates of change and providing better data for better modeling and projections. But they don't fix anything. Some potential for space shades, maybe, although that scale of space project in time seems unrealistic.

    The Planet B options don't fix anything either and they are either unachievable on any appropriate time scales or will be dependent on the enduring health and wealth of planet Earth to be achievable in some future, later. If at all. I'd much rather all out space agency efforts to provide Earth with protection from big meteor impactors than provide a small select few with a Planet B that Earth would have to support indefinitely, and will be more at risk of extinction level catastrophes than Earth. And if permanent habitations emerge out of a global meteor defense program, good. But, meanwhile the future of >8 billion people, many of whom can expect to be around in 2100AD, are dependent on the health and wealth of this planet.
    Reply
  • murgatroyd
    The "science" of the alarmists is bogus and does not add up. There is no climate emergency.

    https://clintel.org/world-climate-declaration/
    The jig is up. Their gravy train is about to come to an end, and not a moment too soon.
    Reply
  • Unclear Engineer
    The problem with "fixing it" is that it will necessarily cost real people a lot of real money and real effort. Those are things that most people feel like they can't handle, because they are already stressed economically. So, it is in human nature to not believe bad news, especially when it comes from activists who clearly have an agenda, and even just a bit of the rhetoric turns out to be over-blown, even if none of it can be proven absolutely false. People just don't want to think about it, and any excuse to not think about it now helps them avoid it.

    Thinking that "the government" is going to "fix it" is also very naive. Actual democracies are not going to be able to elect people who tell them what they don't want to hear until things have gotten to the point where the problems are too obvious to ignore - and that is often when it is far past the time when counter actions were needed to make the impacts least. Think Winston Churchill and the "blood sweat and tears" speech situation.

    When the U.S. and most other "Western" counties had the chance 40-to-50 years go to build lots of nuclear power reactors and phase out a lot of fossil fuel use, the "environmentalists" didn't want them and fought them and "won" in just about all the "Western" countries except for France. Now, they are having "second thoughts", but still many don't agree to use nuclear. It is just that the public is changing its mind, again, because there hasn't been a nuclear accident very recently.

    Dictatorships are not run by people who care more for the planet, or their own people, more than their own power preservation, so they have been more willing to use nuclear power and coal, which still doesn't address the problem.

    So, where is there a solution? Maybe nowhere. But, worth at try, is to convince the public that there are technological solutions available now (rather than some time in the future) that they can afford, now. Some politicians are trying that now, usually with "government subsidies" that "others" (e.g., "the rich") are supposedly going to pay for. The tactic is to get votes with promises and then, later, blame the ending of the subsidies on their political opponents. But, that has been done so often in the past that there are a lot of voters who are not buying it.

    What the U.S. really needs is a central planning process that develops a plan to cut CO2 that is realistic, so that there can be technical consensus that it will actually work, both to cut CO2 and in a manner that has life style ramifications that most voters can accept. That is a tall order, and we don't seem to be capable of coming together to do that in the U.S. right now. The idea still seems to be that the government just pushes without knowing the methods for achievement so that the "commercial system" will be forced to develop the methods on a government specified time frame. Right now, there are a lot of people who are not happy with that approach, and they are pushing back, politically.

    Activists are going to need a feasible and comprehensive plan to convince the public before it is too late. It needs to address what the sources of energy will be in all sectors (manufacturing, travel, heating, electric power, mining, etc.) and what the resources will be needed to make the necessary infrastructure changes and where those will be obtained, and what the costs will be to various population sectors.

    And, "show me" works much better than "tell me about your hopes". When activists can show people that they are driving electric cars instead of (not in addition to) ICE cars, generating solar power and storing it sufficiently to support those electric cars plus their other electric power uses, and eating only low CO2 and methane producing agricultural products, then they will have a convincing message.
    Reply
  • Dendroman
    Unfortunately people are oblivious until directly affected, e.g., all the people who live at the seashore until the sea comes calling. Dangerous heat waves are becoming much more frequent and the UN estimates that over 800 million people will have to migrate or die, displaced by lethal heat. Yet people continue to make unwise choices. As an example, there was a bad hail storm in my neighborhood. Every roof had to be replaced. Our old roof was dark shingles and we replaced it with a blindingly white metal roof. Our solar panels were going to have to be removed and reinstalled anyway (I have battery backup). Ours is now the only white roof in the neighborhood, everybody else went with what they had before, dark shingles, although white shingles are readily available. Our walls are 13" thick, made of ICFs with a core of 8" of steel reinforced concrete inside 4" of styrofoam. There is 3' of overhang all the way around. We drive a 2016 Prius that gets an honest 50mpg driving locally. When the charging infrastructure gets better we intend to get an EV. So, yes, there is a climate crisis that is already here. Just ask the people in FL and Puerto Rico that got hit with really bad hurricanes if they think there's an increase in climate damage. Houston had 5' of rain in 2 days during Harvey! People were looking for the parade of animals 2 by 2 so they could find the ark.
    Reply
  • Atlan0001
    Dendroman said:
    Unfortunately people are oblivious until directly affected, e.g., all the people who live at the seashore until the sea comes calling. Dangerous heat waves are becoming much more frequent and the UN estimates that over 800 million people will have to migrate or die, displaced by lethal heat. Yet people continue to make unwise choices. As an example, there was a bad hail storm in my neighborhood. Every roof had to be replaced. Our old roof was dark shingles and we replaced it with a blindingly white metal roof. Our solar panels were going to have to be removed and reinstalled anyway (I have battery backup). Ours is now the only white roof in the neighborhood, everybody else went with what they had before, dark shingles, although white shingles are readily available. Our walls are 13" thick, made of ICFs with a core of 8" of steel reinforced concrete inside 4" of styrofoam. There is 3' of overhang all the way around. We drive a 2016 Prius that gets an honest 50mpg driving locally. When the charging infrastructure gets better we intend to get an EV. So, yes, there is a climate crisis that is already here. Just ask the people in FL and Puerto Rico that got hit with really bad hurricanes if they think there's an increase in climate damage. Houston had 5' of rain in 2 days during Harvey! People were looking for the parade of animals 2 by 2 so they could find the ark.
    You would be totalitarian martial law police state tyrants have two options and two options only. The Space Frontier Age or World War III without end. Utopia Earth, perpetual Heavenly state Earth, is not an option. Tear down the Iron Curtain and open the Space Frontier. Fund colonization of space, and I mean the great surface of space itself!!! Fund opening!!! Or you will be in a lose-lose, mass extinction, state no matter what you do!!!!
    Reply