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It’s a well-established fact that the Earth has been warming ever since the advent of industrialization. While climate skeptics have traditionally argued that the timing of this is merely a coincidence — that burning huge amounts of fossil fuels isn’t a significant factor contributing to long-term climate change — a new piece of research means they might have to come up with a new thesis, and fast.
The study, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, found that the rate of global warming is not merely chugging along at a steady clip. Instead, it’s accelerating at an astonishing rate. Scientists found that, between 2015 and 2025, the Earth warmed at rate of 0.35 degrees Celsius (0.63 degrees Fahrenheit), compared to an average of around 0.2 degrees Celsius (0.36 degrees Fahrenheit) per decade between 1970 and 2015.
Because of all the factors that impact climate data, it can be tough to say for certain whether our planet is actually warming at a faster or slower rate compared to previous eras. To cut through the clutter, the study authors looked at five global temperature datasets, controlling for non-human factors like El Niño cycles, solar patterns, and volcanic activity.
“We filter out known natural influences in the observational data, so that the ‘noise’ is reduced, making the underlying long-term warming signal more clearly visible,” study co-author and retired statistician Grant Foster explained in a press release.
Unfortunately, the acceleration came with a statistical certainty of over 98 percent — the first statistically significant evidence that the climate isn’t just getting warmer, it’s doing so at an increasingly faster clip.
In the release, the study’s other co-author Stefan Rahmstorf warned that the faster warming puts us at a major risk of blowing past the 1.5 degree Celsius limit before 2030, a threshold that experts have warned would have huge consequences for planet Earth (indeed, other studies show we may have already blown past it.)
“If the warming rate of the past 10 years continues, it would lead to a long-term exceedance of the 1.5 degree C limit of the Paris Agreement before 2030,” Rahmstorf explained. “How quickly the Earth continues to warm ultimately depends on how rapidly we reduce global CO2 emissions from fossil fuels to zero.”
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