PARIS: From carbon pollution to sea-level rise to global heating, the pace and level of key climate change indicators are all in uncharted territory, more than 60 top scientists warned on Thursday.

Greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels and deforestation hit a new high in 2024 and averaged, over the last decade, a record 53.6 billion tonnes per year — that is 100,000 tonnes per minute — of CO2 or its equivalent in other gases, they reported in a peer-reviewed update.

Earth’s surface temperature last year breached 1.5 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels for the first time, and the additional CO2 humanity can emit with a two-thirds chance of staying under that threshold long-term — our 1.5C “carbon budget” — will be exhausted in two years, they calculated.

Investment in clean energy outpaced investment in oil, gas and coal last year two-to-one, but fossil fuels account for more than 80 per cent of global energy consumption, and growth in renewables still lags behind new demand.

Included in the 2015 Paris climate treaty as an aspirational goal, the 1.5C limit has since been validated by science as necessary for avoiding a catastrophically climate-addled world. The hard cap on warming to which nearly 200 nations agreed was “well below” two degrees, commonly interpreted to mean 1.7C to 1.8C.

With the 1.5C level now expected to be breached in the coming years, “we are already in crunch time for these higher levels of warming,” co-author Joeri Rogelj, a professor of climate science and policy at Imperial College London, told journalists in a briefing. “The next three or four decades is pretty much the timeline over which we expect a peak in warming to happen.”

‘The wrong direction’

No less alarming than record heat and carbon emissions is the gathering pace at which these and other climate indicators are shifting, according to the study, published in Earth System Science Data.

Human-induced warming increased over the last decade at a rate “unprecedented in the instrumental record”, and well above the 2010-2019 average registered in the UN’s most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, in 2021. The new findings — led by the same scientists using essentially the same methods — are intended as an authoritative albeit unofficial update of the benchmark IPCC reports underpinning global climate diplomacy.

They should be taken as a reality check by policymakers, the authors suggested.

“If you look at this year’s update, things are all moving in the wrong direction,” said lead author Piers Forster, head of the University of Leed’s Priestley Centre for Climate Futures.

The rate at which sea levels have shot up in recent years is also alarming, the scientists said. After creeping up, on average, well under two millimetres per year from 1901 to 2018, global oceans have risen 4.3 mm annually since 2019.

What happens next?

An increase in the ocean watermark of 23 centimetres (nine inches) over the last 125 years has been enough to imperil many small island states and hugely amplify the destructive power of storm surges worldwide.

Published in Dawn, June 20th, 2025