Another three years of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions at the current rate will lock Earth in to 1.5°C of warming, a new climate report finds.
The annual Indicators of Global Climate Change (IGCC) update, created by an international group of dozens of researchers, shows that the planet was 1.24°C warmer, on average, between 2015 and 2024 compared to between 1850 and 1900, the birth of the Industrial Revolution. Of that increase, 1.22°C of warming was human-caused, the researchers found.
The average global surface temperature in 2024 was 1.52°C higher than the pre-Industrial average, but that single-year measurement doesn’t mean humanity has yet tipped permanently past the 1.5°C warming mark set by the international Paris Agreement to avoid the worst impacts of global warming. There is some variability in temperatures around El Niño and in Atlantic Ocean currents that nudged 2024 slightly warmer than it otherwise would have been. Unfortunately, humanity will need to emit less than 130 gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalent to have a 50% chance of avoiding a climate permanently warmer than the 1.5°C threshold. That’s only about three years of emissions at the 2024 rate, the researchers reported.
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