Global temperatures in 2023 blew past expectations to set the warmest year on record, even topping 1.5C in one of the main datasets.
This warmth has continued into 2024, meaning that this year is also on track to potentially pass 1.5C in one or more datasets.
Crossing 1.5C in one or even two years is not the same as exceeding the 1.5C limit under the Paris Agreement. The goal is generally considered to refer to long-term warming, rather than annual temperatures that include the short-term influence of natural fluctuations in the climate, such as El Niño.
Nonetheless, recent warming has led to renewed debate around whether the world might imminently pass the 1.5C Paris Agreement limit – sooner than climate scientists and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have previously estimated.
Here, Carbon Brief provides an updated analysis of when the world will likely exceed the Paris 1.5C limit (in a scenario where emissions are not rapidly cut), using both the latest global surface temperature data and climate model simulations.
The findings show that, while the best estimate for crossing 1.5C has moved up by approximately two years compared to Carbon Brief’s earlier 2020 analysis, it remains most likely to happen in the late 2020s or early 2030s – rather than in the next few years.
Understanding global temperature targets
Human emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gasses have substantially warmed the planet over the past 150 years. On top of this human-driven warming, there is year-to-year natural variability largely associated with El Niño and La Niña events.
A big El Niño or La Niña event can result in global temperatures up to 0.2C warmer or cooler, respectively, than they would otherwise be.
As the world has been warming by around 0.2C per decade, a large El Niño event can represent an early look at what typical global temperatures will be a decade in the future. Or, to put it another way, human emissions are adding a permanent super-El Niño’s worth of heat to the climate system each decade.
In the 2015 Paris Agreement, the international community agreed to limit warming to well-below 2C above pre-industrial levels and “pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5C”. While there is no set definition for the time period against which the goal is measured, it is generally interpreted to refer to long-term, human-driven warming.
For example, the IPCC’s recently completed sixth assessment report (AR6) uses the midpoint of a 20-year period as a way to avoid overinterpreting short-term natural variability.
While a useful approach, this definition has the unfortunate side-effect that scientists will not know for sure that the world passed 1.5C until 10 years after it has happened.
This has led the community to propose a number of alternative approaches, such as Carbon Brief’s 2020 analysis and a 2023 Nature commentary by Prof Richard Betts and colleagues at the UK Met Office.
An updated approach for determining exceedance
Here, Carbon Brief provides an update to our 2020 analysis of both observations and the latest generation of climate models to assess when the world will likely pass the 1.5C limit across different surface temperature datasets.
While the IPCC’s 20-year average is one approach to remove short-term variability, it comes with the important downside of not being able to extend up to the present day. An alternative approach is a smoothed average using a local regression (LOWESS).
LOWESS provides an estimated value at each point in time based on a weighting where nearby points are given the highest weights and those further away are given less weight. It is an approach commonly used in timeseries analysis that can account for changes in the behaviour of data over time without assuming it is linear.
However, LOWESS approaches still require a choice on the part of the user; namely, how many nearby points should be considered when determining the smoothed average. The figure below shows three potential options that could be used: a window of the nearest 10 years, 20 years or 30 years around each point.
The data shown are a composite average of four different global surface temperature records – NASA’s GISTEMP; NOAA’s GlobalTemp; Hadley/UEA’s HadCRUT5; and Berkeley Earth – that extend back into the 1800s.
Annual global mean surface temperatures from a composite average of NASA’s GISTEMP, NOAA’s GlobalTemp, Hadley/UEA’s HadCRUT5, and Berkeley Earth (black dots) along with LOWESS fits using 10-year, 20-year, and 30-year windows. Chart by Carbon Brief.
In this case, both 20-year and 30-year windows show similar long-term changes in temperature, while a shorter 10-year window does not fully remove short-term variability associated with El Niño and La Niña events.
For this analysis, Carbon Brief selected a 30-year window for removing natural variability, though a 20-year window would have given nearly identical results. (As discussed above, there are a number of alternative approaches that could be used. These are assessed in the UK Met Office’s Climate Dashboard, though they all give comparable results to the LOWESS approach used here.)
To determine when the world will pass 1.5C and 2C, Carbon Brief combines smoothed averages of both observed temperatures and climate model projections.
The observed temperatures are used to determine the level of warming to date – 1.3C in the composite average – while climate models are used to assess the range of possible warming into the future. This approach has an advantage over just using climate models as it avoids any historical mismatch between modelled and real-world temperatures.
The figure below shows the combined smoothed average from the observations and climate models, with the climate models normalised to the observations in 2023. Global temperatures are assessed to be 1.3C in 2023, with a wide range of possible future warming determined by the spread in warming after 2023 across 37 different climate models in the CMIP6 ensemble using the SSP2-4.5 current-policy-type scenario.
Annual global average surface temperatures from the composite average (black dots) along the 30-year LOWESS fit (black line), combined with 37 CMIP6 models smoothed using the same 30-year LOWESS fit. Models and observations are aligned using the smoothed average values for 2023. Chart by Carbon Brief.
This approach suggests that the world will pass 1.5C around the year 2030 (representing the 50th percentile, or central estimate, of all the model runs), with a range of anywhere from 2028 (5th percentile) up to 2036 (95th percentile).
Similarly, the world will pass 2C around the year 2048, with a range of 2040 to 2062 across all models assessed.
The figure below shows distribution of exceedance years (that is, the year in which the target is exceeded) across all of the different CMIP6 models. The width of the plot indicates the portion of models that show the temperature limit passed in a given year – the wider the plot, the more agreement across the models.
The results are broadly similar to Carbon Brief’s 2020 analysis, though the best estimate of when the world will pass 1.5C has moved up from 2032 to 2030, reflecting both a higher estimate of warming to date (including the development of HadCRUT5) and an inclusion of more CMIP6 model runs than were available at the time.
The 5th and 95th percentile has narrowed to 2028-36 compared to 2026-42 in the 2020 analysis, showing the impact of three additional years of data on reducing the resulting model spread.
Sensitivity to the choice of datasets
While the averaging of different datasets into a composite average follows the approach used in the IPCC AR6 and by the WMO, it somewhat obscures important differences in estimates of warming since pre-industrial times across different research groups.
While the long-term warming the world has experienced in the composite average is 1.3C as of 2023 (similar to the results in the new Forster et al study), applying the same LOWESS smoothing approach to each individual record yields fairly different results, ranging from as low as 1.22C to 1.41C across the four different groups:
- Composite Average: 1.30C
- Berkeley Earth: 1.41C
- HadCRUT5: 1.30C
- NASA GISTEMP: 1.24C
- NOAA GlobalTemp: 1.22C
These differences reflect a number of factors, including what land station data is included in each record, the ocean sea surface temperature datasets used and how different groups fill in the gaps between observations – particularly in the early part of the record when station data is more sparse.
The table below gives the resulting 1.5C exceedance years when Carbon Brief’s approach is applied to each different temperature record:
| Projected year of 1.5C breach | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Dataset | 50th percentile | 5th percentile | 95th percentile |
| Composite | 2030 | 2028 | 2036 |
| Berkeley Earth | 2027 | 2025 | 2031 |
| HadCRUT5 | 2030 | 2028 | 2036 |
| NASA GISTEMP | 2032 | 2029 | 2040 |
| NOAA GlobalTemp | 2033 | 2030 | 2041 |
Using the Berkeley Earth record gives a central estimate of passing 1.5C as early as 2027 (ranging from 2025 to 2031), while NOAA gives an estimate as late as 2033 (2030 to 2041).
Similarly, here are the results for the 2C exceedance year:
| Projected year of 2C breach | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Dataset | 50th percentile | 5th percentile | 95th percentile |
| Composite | 2048 | 2040 | 2062 |
| Berkeley Earth | 2045 | 2037 | 2056 |
| HadCRUT5 | 2048 | 2040 | 2062 |
| NASA GISTEMP | 2050 | 2041 | 2067 |
| NOAA GlobalTemp | 2051 | 2042 | 2068 |
It is worth noting that there is no “correct” answer as to the best surface temperature record to use. Rather, the range of results across the different records represent real uncertainty around when the world will pass 1.5C and 2C.
Other approaches get similar results
This analysis is far from the first time the scientific community has asked when the world will pass various climate limits or how to best calculate the level of warming the world has experienced to date.
Copernicus/ECMWF provide a regularly updated “global temperature trend monitor” that uses a more simple approach – a linear trend over the past 30 years – to assess when global temperatures will likely exceed 1.5C in their ERA5 dataset.
This approach gives a slightly later date, 2033, than the climate model-based approach Carbon Brief uses. This reflects the fact that most models anticipate a modest acceleration in the rate of warming that might not be fully captured using a linear trend over the past 30 years.
An alternative approach to determining when the world will pass 1.5C is to use the “assessed warming projections” developed for AR6. These assessed warming projections more closely match observed temperatures than the full CMIP6 ensemble.
They also provide a narrower range of future warming than the full set of CMIP6, as they give less weight to “hot models” in CMIP6 that are inconsistent with the IPCC’s assessment of the likely range of climate sensitivity.
Annual global average surface temperatures from the composite average (black dots) along the 30-year LOWESS fit (red line), combined the AR6 assessed warming projection for SSP2-4.5 as published and without any baseline alignment. Chart by Carbon Brief.
In addition, AR6 features an estimate of 1.5C exceedance dates based on the ScenarioMIP assessment of CMIP6 models (and previously covered by Carbon Brief here).
These three different approaches are compared to Carbon Brief’s new assessment in the table below:
| Approach | 1.5C exceedance year |
|---|---|
| Carbon Brief (Composite, SSP2-4.5) | 2030 (2028 to 2036) |
| Copernicus | 2033 |
| AR6 Assessed Warming (SSP2-4.5) | 2031 (2024 to 2043) |
| AR6 ScenarioMIP (SSP2-4.5) | 2030 (2021 to 2046) |
Both AR6 approaches include a wider range than the Carbon Brief approach as they rely on models that have differing estimates of current global temperatures relative to pre-industrial.
For example, the AR6 assessed warming projections give a best estimate of 2023 global temperatures (in the absence of short-term natural variability) as 1.31C, with a range from as low as 1.15C to as high as 1.48C. However, these are comparable to the range of warming to date (1.22C to 1.41C) across the different surface temperature records.
There is no single best way to assess when the world will likely pass 1.5C. But both Carbon Brief’s approach and those of other groups all agree it will most likely happen in the late 2020s or early 2030s in a world (SSP2-4.5) where global emissions remain around current levels.
The post Analysis: What record global heat means for breaching the 1.5C warming limit appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Analysis: What record global heat means for breaching the 1.5C warming limit
Sydney, Thursday 19 March 2026 — In response to escalating attacks on gas fields in the Middle East, including Israeli strikes on Iran’s giant South Pars gas field and Iranian retaliations on gas fields in Qatar and Saudi Arabia, the following lines can be attributed to Solaye Snider, Campaigner at Greenpeace Australia Pacific:
“The targeting of gas fields across the Middle East is a perilous escalation that reinforces just how vulnerable our fossil-fuelled world really is.
“Oil and gas have long been used as tools of power and coercion by authoritarian regimes. They cause climate chaos and environmental pollution and they drive conflict and war. The energy security of every nation still hooked on gas, including Australia, is under direct threat.
“For countries that are reliant on gas imports, like Sri Lanka, Pakistan and South Korea, this crisis is just getting started. It can take months to restart a gas export facility once it is shut down, meaning the shockwaves of these strikes will be felt for a long time to come.
“It is a gross and tragic injustice that while civilians are killed and lose their homes to this escalating violence, and families struggle with a tightening cost-of-living, gas giants like Woodside and Santos have seen their share prices surge on the prospect of windfall war profits.
“We must break this cycle. Transitioning to local renewable energy is the way to protect Australian households from the inherent volatility of fossil fuels like gas.”
-ENDS-
Images available for download via the Greenpeace Media Library
Media contact: Lucy Keller on 0491 135 308 or lkeller@greenpeace.org
Greenpeace response to escalating attacks on gas fields in Middle East
Climate Change
DeBriefed 20 March 2026: Energy crisis deepens | Brazil’s new climate plan | New Zealand climate case
Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
Iran war fallout continues
WORK FROM HOME: The International Energy Agency has advised its member countries to take 10 steps in response to the ongoing energy crisis fuelled by the Iran war, including reducing highway speeds and encouraging people to work from home, said the Guardian. It came after retaliatory attacks between Israel and Iran continued to destroy energy infrastructure in the Middle East, causing energy prices to soar further, said Reuters.
SUPPLY DISRUPTED: The IEA also said it is prepared to make more of its member nations’ 1.4bn-barrel oil reserves available to help ease the impacts of what it called the “biggest supply disruption in the history of the oil market”, reported Bloomberg. The outlet noted that Asian countries have been hit hardest by the shortages, caused by a “near-halt” of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.
EU SUMMIT: The energy crisis dominated talks at an EU leaders summit on Thursday, said Politico. Arriving at the summit, Spain’s prime minister Pedro Sánchez attacked other European leaders for using the energy crisis as an excuse to “gut climate policies”, according to the EU Observer. The Financial Times said that some European leaders have asked the European Commission to overhaul its flagship emissions trading system (ETS) by summer in response to the energy crisis.
COAL BOOST: In response to the conflict, utility companies in Asia are “boosting coal-fired power generation to cut costs and safeguard energy supply”, said Reuters. UN climate change executive secretary Simon Stiell told Reuters: “If there was ever a moment to accelerate that energy transition, breaking dependencies which have shackled economies, this is the time.”
Around the world
- WINDFARM WINDFALL: The Trump administration in the US is considering a nearly $1bn settlement with TotalEnergies to cancel the French energy company’s two planned windfarms off the US east coast and have it instead invest in fossil-gas infrastructure in Texas, according to documents seen by the New York Times.
- BUSINESS CLASH: Following “clashes” with the agribusiness sector, Brazil launched its new climate plan, which calls for a 49-58% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from 2022 levels by 2025 and includes “specific guidelines for different sectors”, reported Folha de Sao Paolo.
- SALES SLUMP: Sales of liquified petroleum gas from India’s state-run oil companies have fallen by 17% this month due to cuts in deliveries to commercial and industrial consumers “amid the widespread logistical bottlenecks triggered by the Iran war”, said the Economic Times.
- CUBAN ENERGY CRISIS: The US imposed an “effective oil blockade” on Cuba, leaving the country facing its “worst energy crisis in decades”, reported the Washington Post. Meanwhile, Chinese exports of solar panels to the island have “skyrocketed” since 2023, it added.
- RECORD HIGHS: An “unprecedented” heatwave in the western and south-western US is “shattering dozens of temperature records” and could lead to drought in California in the coming months, reported the Los Angeles Times.
- VULNERABILITY CONCERNS: Landslides that killed more than 100 people in southern Ethiopia have “renewed concerns about Ethiopia’s vulnerability to climate-related disasters”, said the Addis Standard.
1%
The percentage of England’s land surface that could be devoted to renewables by 2050, according to the long-awaited “land-use framework” released by the UK government this week and covered by Carbon Brief.
Latest climate research
- Approaching international climate action by shifting the burden of mitigation onto higher-income countries could avoid 13.5 million premature deaths from air pollution in middle- and lower-income countries by 2050 | The Lancet Global Health
- Beavers can turn the ecosystems surrounding streams into “persistent” sinks of carbon that can sequester an order of magnitude more than non-beaver-modified ecosystems can store | Communications Earth & Environment
- Mobile-phone data from seven diverse countries during the summer heatwaves of 2022-23 showed a “widespread tendency to withdraw into homes” and an increase in out-of-home activities that can offer cooling, such as indoor retail | Environmental Research: Climate
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Captured
Carbon Brief this week published a significant update to its map of how climate change is affecting extreme weather events around the world. The map now includes 232 new extreme weather events from studies published in 2024 and 2025. Of these events, 196 were made more severe or more likely to occur by human-driven climate change, 12 were made less severe or less likely to occur and 10 had no discernible human influence. (The remaining 14 studies were inconclusive.)
Spotlight
New Zealand breaks new ground on climate litigation
This week, Carbon Brief speaks to experts about a first-of-its-kind climate lawsuit in New Zealand.
Earlier this week, representatives from two environmentally focused legal advocacy groups challenged the New Zealand government’s climate-action plan in court.
The plaintiffs argued that the measures laid out in the plan are insufficient to achieve the country’s legal obligation to hold global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial temperatures.
The case could be “influential” in shaping lawsuits and rulings around the world, one legal expert not involved in the case told Carbon Brief.
Reductions vs removals
The new case contends that there are several issues regarding the New Zealand government’s response to climate change.
One of the key arguments the plaintiffs make is that New Zealand’s second emissions reduction plan, which covers the period from 2026-30, is overreliant on the use of tree-planting to achieve its targets.
When the plan was released in December 2024, it was “immediately clear that it was a pretty lacklustre plan”, Eliza Prestidge Oldfield, senior legal researcher at the Environmental Law Initiative, one of the groups behind the legal case, told Carbon Brief.
The plan called for large-scale planting of pine tree plantations, which are not native to New Zealand and have a high risk of burning. Because of this, there are concerns about how permanent any carbon removal provided by these plantations actually can be, experts told Carbon Brief.
Catherine Higham, senior policy fellow at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment who was not involved in the case, said:
“The lawyers are arguing that there are real challenges with equating the emissions that you may be able to remove from the atmosphere through afforestation with actual emissions reductions, which are much more certain.”
‘Global dialogue’
While other climate lawsuits elsewhere in the world have also focused on the inadequacy of a government’s plan to meet its stated emissions-reduction targets, this is the first such case that addresses the role of removals head-on.
Lucy Maxwell, co-director of the Climate Litigation Network, told Carbon Brief that the lawsuit “builds on a decade of climate litigation” in national, regional and international courts.
Maxwell, who was not involved in the New Zealand case, added that there is a “real global dialogue” between, not just plaintiffs, but national courts as well. She said:
“[National courts] look to common issues that have been decided in other countries. They’re not binding on that court if it’s at the national level, but they are influential.”
Given that many other countries have legal frameworks requiring their governments to create plans outlining the pathway to their long-term climate targets, Prestidge Oldfield told Carbon Brief that other jurisdictions “should be interested in these questions around the level of certainty”.
Higham noted that, even if the case is successful, addressing the plan’s shortfalls will face its own set of challenges. She told Carbon Brief:
“A lot of these decisions are political and they can be politically contentious…Those [measures] have to be put into action through legislation and that is then subject to the usual political process. So that’s where the challenge comes in.”
While she could not speculate on the outcome of the case, Prestidge Oldfield said it was “very heartening” to see that both the judge and the opposing counsel “appreciated how much of a concern climate change is globally”.
She added:
“It’s not a given that the judge would even be interested in climate change.”
Watch, read, listen
COMMON APPROACH: The Heated podcast analysed fossil-fuel advertisements and highlighted the most common deception tactics they employed.
THREAT ASSESSMENT: Mongabay mapped the potential threat that oil extraction poses to Venezuela’s ecosystems, including the Amazon rainforest and its coral reefs.
SALT LAKES? GREAT!: High Country News interviewed journalist Dr Caroline Tracey about her new book on saline lakes – such as Utah’s Great Salt Lake – the threats that face them and what they can teach us.
Coming up
- 23 March-2 April: Third meeting of the preparatory commission for the High Seas Treaty, New York
- 24-27 March: 64th session of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Bangkok
- 26-29 March: 14th ministerial conference of the World Trade Organization, Yaoundé, Cameroon
Pick of the jobs
- International Centre of Research for the Environment and Development (CIRAD), IPCC chapter scientist | Salary: €3,200-3,750 per month. Location: Nogent-sur-Marne, France
- Avaaz, chief of staff | Salary: Dependent on location. Location: Remote, with preferred time zones
- Green Party, social media officer | Salary: £31,592-£32,192. Location: Remote or Westminster, UK
DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org.
This is an online version of Carbon Brief’s weekly DeBriefed email newsletter. Subscribe for free here.
The post DeBriefed 20 March 2026: Energy crisis deepens | Brazil’s new climate plan | New Zealand climate case appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Around 300 scientists, civil servants, journalists and climate experts took part in the 11th annual Carbon Brief quiz on Wednesday 18 March 2026.
For the second time, this year’s quiz was hosted by Octopus Energy at its headquarters in central London.
In total, 39 teams participated – 25 teams in person and 14 teams joining via Zoom.
Competing teams reflected a wide range of climate change and energy professionals. The list included journalists, civil servants, climate campaigners, policy advisers, energy experts and scientists.
Organisations represented included: Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW) in India; New Scientist; the Times; Business Green; the Bartlett School of Environment, Energy and Resources (BSEER), UCL; Verisk Maplecroft; BBC; World Weather Attribution; Grantham Institute at Imperial; DESNZ; WWF; European Climate Foundation (ECF); the ENDS Report; C40 Cities; Ricardo; Met Office; Meliore; E3G; Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI); Energy Transitions Commission; Carbon Tracker; Ember; Royal Meteorological Society; Civil Service Climate and Environment Network (CSCEN); Changing Markets Foundation; Cerulogy; Oxford Sustainable Law Programme; Université de Lausanne; University of Exeter; Centre for Environment and Sustainability, University of Surrey; UK Parliament; Skeptical Science; ECIU (Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit); Octopus Energy; DeSmog; Department for Transport and Royal School of Mines.
Teams were tested with five rounds of questions – general knowledge, policy, science and two picture rounds. (See the slideshow of the questions and answers below).
After two hours of playing, this year’s winners were announced.
Comprised of players from the Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW) in India, last time’s second place team, “Emissions Impossible” won the coveted Carbon Brief trophy with a total score of 76 out of 100 available points.
In joint second place, with 59 points, were the “Potato-sized nodules”, a mixed team of journalists from New Scientist, the Times and Business Green.
Sharing second place, after leading at the half-way point, were “You cannot BSEERious” from the Bartlett School of Environment, Energy and Resources at UCL.
In fourth place, with 57 points, were “Risky Quizness”, from Verisk Maplecroft.
A certificate was awarded to the BBC for the best team name, as voted for by Carbon Brief staff: “High hopes [low confidence]”.
See the full leaderboard:
All the questions and answers from this year’s quiz can be found in this PDF document.
This year’s trickiest round was picture round two, which asked teams to match the quote to the author, with an average score of 5.9 out of 20 available points.
No team correctly guessed that “Chris Funk: Drought, Flood, Fire” was the source of the quote: “How greenhouse gases warm the atmosphere is pretty straightforward. It is really important that we understand this. But almost nobody does, because it is not something that we are taught in school.”
Science was the second hardest round, earning an average score of 6.1 points out of 20.
No team correctly guessed “religious leaders” as the least trustworthy source of climate information, according to a 2025 study using public polling from seven global south countries.
The highest-scoring round was general knowledge, with an average of 13.8 out of 20 questions answered correctly.
Carbon Brief would like to thank all the teams who took part and we look forward to hosting the quiz again in the spring of 2027.
If you would like to participate in next year’s quiz, please contact us in advance at quiz AT carbonbrief DOT org.
Photos by Kerry Cleaver
The post The Carbon Brief Quiz 2026 appeared first on Carbon Brief.
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