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An acceleration in human-caused global warming could see the Paris Agreement’s 1.5C limit breached before 2030, a new study suggests.
The paper, published in Geophysical Research Letters, finds that, over the past decade, the planet has been warming at its fastest rate on record.
The authors isolate the trend of human-driven warming in the long-term global temperature record, removing the influence of natural factors, such as El Niño, volcanic eruptions and solar variation.
They find that the world had been warming at a rate of around 0.2C per decade since the 1970s, but has “accelerated” since 2015 to a rate of 0.35C per decade.
The study warns that if the current rate of warming persists, the 1.5C Paris threshold will be breached in the next few years.
“The essential result of this paper isn’t how fast we’re warming, but that warming is now happening faster than before and that the difference isn’t negligible,” an author on the study tells Carbon Brief.
Warming signal
The year 2024 was the hottest on record, with global average temperatures at the surface exceeding 1.5C above pre-industrial levels for the first time.
Crossing the 1.5C threshold in a single year is not equivalent to a breach of the Paris Agreement, which refers to long-term warming – typically interpreted as over a 20-year period.
However, rapidly rising global temperatures are prompting scientists to ask when this internationally recognised threshold might be broken.
Human activity has been the primary driver of rising global temperature in the long term, through greenhouse gas emissions and land-use change. However, natural factors also have warming and cooling effects from year to year.
The study authors identified three main sources of this natural variability.
El Niño and La Niña – collectively referred to as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) – are generally the largest drivers of year-to-year fluctuations in global temperatures. The study authors identify volcanic activity and changes in solar variation as the other two main natural influences on global temperature trends.
Study author Dr Grant Foster, formerly from the consulting firm Tempo Analytics and now retired, describes these sources of natural variability as “random noise” that sits on top of the long-term warming signal. He explains that “the larger the noise, the harder it is to see the real trend”.
To isolate the warming trend, the authors used a statistical technique that they first employed in a 2011 paper to remove the contributions of ENSO, volcanic activity and solar variation from the global temperature record.
The authors carried out this analysis on five separate datasets of global average surface temperature – NASA, NOAA, the Met Office Hadley Centre and University of East Anglia’s HadCRUT5, Berkeley Earth and Copernicus ERA5.
The plots below show the global temperature between 1880 and 2024, relative to pre-industrial temperatures, from the five datasets.
Each plot shows the original warming record (light blue), in which all drivers of warming are included, as well as the adjusted record (dark blue) which excludes the effects of ENSO, volcanoes and solar activity.
Removing the effects of natural variability makes the years 2023 and 2024 slightly cooler, the study notes, but they remain the two warmest years since the beginning of instrumental record.
Acceleration
Record-high temperatures in recent years have led scientists to ask whether global warming is accelerating.
The authors of the new study decided to use two different statistical approaches to test whether they can identify a “statistically significant” acceleration in global warming from the long-term temperature record.
The “noise” from natural drivers of temperature change, such as ENSO, can make it tricky to spot underlying trends. However, Foster tells Carbon Brief that after removing the influence of natural variability, “acceleration is easy to prove statistically – some might even say it becomes obvious”.
Both tests find that warming is accelerating with more than 98% confidence for each of the five datasets. When the same tests were run on the unadjusted data, they failed to reach even 95% confidence, showing the importance of removing natural variability from the warming signal, according to the study authors.
Under the first statistical approach, called a quadratic analysis, the authors applied a single curved trend line to the warming signal.
For the second approach, the authors used a technique to identify the month when the rate of global warming changed noticeably. The different datasets estimated this date to range from February 2013 to February 2014. They then calculated the speed of global warming both before and after these dates.
Global temperatures increased at an average rate of around 0.2C per decade over 1970-2015, according to the study.
In contrast, the authors find that warming rates have increased to 0.34-0.42C per decade, across the five different datasets, since the February 2013-February 2014 period.
The study reveals that the rate of warming observed over the past decade has been higher than any previous decade in the instrumental record.
Foster tells Carbon Brief that “the essential result of this paper isn’t how fast we’re warming, but that warming is now happening faster than before and that the difference isn’t negligible”.
If this warming rate remains constant, the Paris Agreement 1.5C threshold would be breached between 2026 and 2029, the authors find.
(Their approach estimates the 20-year period where the average exceeds 1.5C of warming, and the breach of the limit is taken as the halfway point in this period.)
The table below shows key results for the five different datasets, including estimates for the date that warming started accelerating, the rate of warming and the year that the Paris Agreement will be breached in each.
| Data source | Date of acceleration | Warming rate (C per decade) | Year to cross 1.5C |
|---|---|---|---|
| NASA | April 2013 | 0.36 | 2028 |
| NOAA | February 2013 | 0.36 | 2028 |
| HadCRUT | January 2014 | 0.34 | 2029 |
| Berkley | February 2014 | 0.36 | 2028 |
| ERA5 | February 2014 | 0.42 | 2026 |
Results for the five different datasets, including estimates for the date that warming started accelerating, the rate of warming and the year that the Paris Agreement will be breached in each. Source: Foster and Rahmstorf (2026).
‘Statistical significance’
There are “many opinions” among climate scientists about how fast the planet is currently warming, Foster tells Carbon Brief.
For example, a study from Dr James Hansen calculates a warming rate of 0.27C per decade after 2010. Similarly, the latest Indicators of Global Climate Change report estimates warming of 0.27C per decade over 2015-24.
Foster continues:
“But we all agree it’s higher than before. [The] thing is, we couldn’t prove that statistically.”
Foster tells Carbon Brief that in 2024, Dr Claudie Beaulieu – an assistant professor at the University of California – led a study which concluded that “a recent surge in global warming is not detectable yet”.
Beaulieu used the same statistical method as Foster to investigate whether global temperature data shows an acceleration in warming. However, she did not first remove the natural drivers of temperature change, such as ENSO.
(Carbon Brief wrote about Beaulieu’s work in more detail when it was published.)
Foster tells Carbon Brief that the study was “excellent”, adding:
“They found that confirming acceleration was a close call – the data are very suggestive – but not quite ‘statistically significant.’”
Foster explains that after removing the natural influence, the warming trend is clearer, making it easier to find statistically significant warming levels.
Beaulieu praises the new study, explaining that “the fact that the acceleration signal appears consistently across all five independent datasets is reassuring”.
However, she stresses that “the acceleration may prove temporary”.
She says that “continued monitoring over the next several years will be essential to determine whether the accelerated warming rate identified here represents a lasting shift”.
The study authors say that the main limitation of their work is that the method of removing natural variability is “empirically based, but approximate and imperfect”.
Foster says:
“We estimate the impact of things like El Niño by comparing past values of the El Niño index to past temperature changes, hence we don’t need to know the physics behind it, just the numbers. Statistical results like this are only approximate.”
Meanwhile, an acceleration in warming is supported by many other observations of the Earth’s climate.
For example, ocean heat content – the measure of the amount of energy stored in the ocean – is rising year on year. There is also evidence of acceleration in recent years, with the period from 2020 onward seeing the largest year-to-year increases in ocean heat content on record.
In addition, the Earth’s energy imbalance, which measures the difference between incoming solar radiation and outgoing radiation, has also increased in recent years.
The post Pace of global warming has nearly doubled since 2015, reveals study appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Pace of global warming has nearly doubled since 2015, reveals study
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An older teaching about land acknowledgement
As I have come to understand the spirit and intention of land acknowledgement, I often return to fond memories of my grandmother and her words of wisdom. She taught that the health of the places we call home comes first, because the wellbeing of the people depends on it.
In her teaching, land acknowledgement began with the land. Long before it became a paragraph read at the start of a meeting, it was a way of recognizing a homeland: its waters, its species, its seasons, and the spirit that revealed whether the place was well.
Her teaching echoes a practice found across many Indigenous Nations. Haudenosaunee gatherings, for example, have long opened with the Ohén:ton Karihwatéhkwen, the Thanksgiving Address, often translated as “the words that come before all else.” The speaker greets and gives thanks to the people, the earth, the waters, the plants, the animals, the winds, the sun, the moon and the stars. Only after everything that sustains life has been acknowledged does the gathering turn to its own business.
That order changes what an acknowledgement is for. Its purpose was to share the story of a place with neighbours and to draw them into the work of tending it. People entered the story second, as the ones responsible for what had just been named.
Understood this way, an acknowledgement does more than open a meeting. It asks us to reconsider where we stand, and what we owe the ground beneath us.
Nations among nations
In her teaching, people are one nation among many. The salmon are a nation. So are the cedars, the bison, the medicine plants, and the pollinators. Each belongs to a place, carries its own responsibilities, and offers gifts no other nation can give.
This idea of kinship runs through many Indigenous philosophies. The phrase “all my relations,” heard in ceremonies and gatherings across Turtle Island, is a reminder that family extends beyond people to the animals, plants, waters and lands that make life possible. Some Indigenous languages carry the same understanding in their grammar, speaking of many plants, animals and natural forces as living beings rather than objects.
Sovereignty, understood through this relationship, is a kind of standing more than a form of control. Each nation belongs fully to its place and carries its share of that place’s life. No nation thrives alone, and none thrives by taking over the whole.
The land is also the source of instruction. Over generations, people watched how a river valley or a stretch of prairie kept itself well: who arrived when, who fed whom, and how much could be taken before the giving stopped. In my grandmother’s telling, those observations became instructions, and those instructions helped shape law and protocol. They guided when to harvest, where to camp, how to enter a neighbour’s territory, and what was owed in return.
Indigenous legal scholars today often describe this as law that comes from the land itself, learned by watching how living systems sustain one another. A plainer name for it is knowing how to live somewhere.
The host and the guest
One of the clearest teachings in this understanding of the world is the relationship between host and guest. My grandmother invited us to recognize that relationship in the lives of plants and animals.
A host prepares the place before anyone arrives. A beaver family dams a stream, and the pond becomes a home for fish, frogs, birds and plants. A fallen tree becomes a nurse log, feeding the next generation of seedlings as it returns to the soil.
A host offers first. A flowering plant sets out nectar. A berry bush ripens fruit. These provisions come in their own season, not whenever a visitor happens to want them.
A host also makes its presence known. Birdsong, scent and the marks left along a trail tell newcomers that a place is already inhabited. The visitor does not arrive in an empty world.
The guest has responsibilities too. A guest attends to the season and to what the place can offer. A guest does not assume that everything within reach is theirs to take. A guest leaves something that helps sustain the relationship.
A bee takes nectar and carries pollen. Read through this teaching, that exchange offers an image of visiting well: receiving a gift while helping the host continue its life.
Many Indigenous harvesting protocols carry the same ethic into daily practice: ask before taking, take only what is needed, offer thanks, and leave enough for others and for the plant or animal to recover.
None of this suggests that every relationship in nature is peaceful or generous. These are ways of seeing responsibilities that people can learn to carry.
Everyone is both
No being is only a host or only a guest.
A tree makes room for other life while depending on soil, water, sunlight, fungi, and relationships beyond itself. People, too, may welcome others into their homes while remaining dependent on the larger homeland that sustains them.
The distinction between host and guest is therefore about roles, not ranks. Everyone receives. Everyone has something to give.
The question is whether the exchange sustains the place.
A visitor who takes without restraint leaves less for those who come next. A host who neglects the place has less to offer. Both have responsibilities, and neither can fulfil them alone.
This is the heart of reciprocity, a principle found across Indigenous philosophies: relationships stay healthy when gifts move in both directions. The Haudenosaunee teaching of the seventh generation extends that exchange across time, asking that decisions made today leave the place well for those not yet born.
Mutual benefit begins here, with the recognition that different beings carry different gifts and obligations.
What people carry forward
My grandmother’s teaching connects these relationships to the ways people meet their neighbours.
The host prepares a place, offers food and rest, and explains where the visitor has arrived. The guest makes themselves known, explains why they have come, listens to the terms of the visit, and brings something in return. The gift may be material. It may also be labour, knowledge, news, or a commitment to help.
Nations around the Great Lakes carried this ethic into treaty. The Dish with One Spoon, an agreement among the Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabe and allied Nations, describes shared hunting grounds as a single dish. Everyone eats from it with one spoon, takes only what they need, leaves enough for others, and keeps the dish clean. The Two Row Wampum, between the Haudenosaunee and European newcomers, shows two vessels travelling side by side on the same river, each keeping its own ways and neither steering the other.
In this understanding, acknowledgement is more than naming the people associated with a territory. It is learning enough about a homeland to behave responsibly within it.
Whose home is this? What sustains it? What laws and agreements guide our presence? What can we receive, and what must we return?
These questions make acknowledgement a relationship rather than a recital.
They also make it diplomatic. A guest who recognizes the host’s homeland recognizes that they have entered a place with its own relationships and responsibilities. A host who welcomes the guest makes room for an encounter governed by those relationships.
Neither arrives without standing. Neither arrives without obligations.
Beginning with place
I write from the shores of the Bay of Quinte. Here, the teaching asks me to begin with the water, the shoreline, and the life they sustain. Before I describe myself, I must attend to where I am.
That does not make people or history less important. It places them within the homeland that gives them meaning. The people, their laws, their agreements, and their responsibilities all belong to the place.
In a time of longer fire seasons, troubled waters, and uncertainty about what the next season will bring, this teaching asks something difficult and useful of us: pay attention before you speak.
An acknowledgement cannot tell the story of a place if the speaker has stopped noticing it.
The land came first. Beginning there again means learning to name what sustains us, and accepting that what sustains us also asks something of us.
By Rye Karonhiowanen Barberstock
Photo by Andrik Langfield on Unsplash
The post The Land Came First appeared first on Indigenous Climate Hub.
Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil fuels and cement are projected to fall by around 0.4% in 2026 to 38.2bn tonnes of CO2 (GtCO2), according to new figures from the Global Carbon Project.
This guest post is by:
- Dr Zeke Hausfather, Carbon Brief’s climate science contributor
- Prof Pierre Friedlingstein, chair of mathematical modelling of climate systems at the University of Exeter and part of the Global Carbon Project team.
Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil fuels and cement are projected to fall by around 0.4% in 2026 to 38.2bn tonnes of CO2 (GtCO2), according to new figures from the Global Carbon Project.
The 21st edition of the annual “global carbon budget” report, published today, says that this small decline is largely due to a 1.9% drop in emissions from oil and the energy shock triggered by the Iran conflict and the closure of the strait of Hormuz.
Emissions from coal continue to increase slightly.
The Global Carbon Project’s projections for fossil fuel and cement CO2 emissions in 2026 are preliminary, with a range that spans a fall of -1.5% to a rise of +0.6%.
This means a small increase in emissions can not be ruled out.
Emissions from land-use change, such as deforestation, are projected to rise in 2026.
This is primarily driven by peat fires and forest degradation in south-east Asia and is linked to the development of a strong El Niño event this year.
As a result, total CO2 emissions from fossil fuels and land use are projected to reach a record high of 43.3GtCO2 in 2026 – marginally above 42.8GtCO2 in 2025.
Research published alongside the report by the same team in Nature Climate Change finds that the growth in solar, wind and electric vehicles (EVs) now offsets around two-thirds of the emissions that would otherwise come from rising energy demand.
However, the deployment of these technologies is not yet enough to push global emissions into a sustained decline, according to the study.
The 2026 global carbon budget report also estimates that:
- Fossil emissions are projected to fall in China (-0.9%), the US (-1.3%) and the EU (-1.5%) in 2026, but rise by 4.4% in India.
- Oil emissions are projected to fall in every major region, with the largest drop in China (-4.6%).
- Land-use emissions averaged 4.9GtCO2 per year over 2016-25, around 21% lower than the decade before.
- Total CO2 emissions (fossil and land-use) grew by an average 0.3% per year over the past decade (2016-25), compared with 1.7% per year over the decade before.
- The remaining carbon budget to limit warming to 1.5C is 150GtCO2, or less than four years of current emissions.
- The land sink in 2025 was the highest on record, rebounding after being weakened during the 2023-24 El Niño. The current El Niño is expected to weaken the land sink in 2027.
- The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is set to reach 427.7 parts per million (ppm) in 2026, 54% above pre-industrial levels.
(For more on previous editions of the Global Carbon Project’s annual report, see Carbon Brief’s coverage in 2025, 2024, 2023 and 2022.)
Total emissions edge up as land-use emissions rise
Total global CO2 emissions, which combines fossil fuels and land-use change, are projected to reach a record high of 43.3GtCO2 in 2026, up from 42.8GtCO2 in 2025.
The increase in 2026 comes entirely from a projected rise in land-use emissions, which are more challenging to estimate than fossil emissions.
(The global carbon budget groups emissions from fossil fuels and cement production as “fossil emissions”. Carbon Brief follows this convention throughout this piece.)
If land-use emissions had stayed at 2025 levels, total emissions would have fallen slightly