The world has changed dramatically in the decade since leaders celebrated a historic climate agreement in Paris a decade ago, but not quite in ways they expected or wanted.
Earth’s warming climate has gotten nastier faster than society has been able to wean itself from burning the coal, oil and natural gas that emits carbon pollution that triggers global warming, several scientists and officials said.
There’s been progress — more than a degree Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit) has been shaved off future warming projections since 2015 — but the lack of enough of it will be a big focus for the next two weeks as diplomats gather in Belem, Brazil, for annual United Nations climate negotiations.
“I think it’s important that we’re honest with the world and we declare failure,” said Johan Rockstrom, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Research in Germany. He said warming’s harms are happening faster and more severely than scientists predicted.
But diplomats aren’t giving up.
“We’re actually in the direction that we established in Paris at a speed that none of us could have predicted,” said former U.N. climate chief Christiana Figueres, who helped shepherd that agreement, which requires countries to come up with plans to fight warming.
But the speed of humanity’s climate-fighting effort is slower than the acceleration of climate’s harms, she said, adding that means that “the gap between the progress that we see on the ground and where we ought to be, that gap is still there and widening.”
U.N. Environment Programme Executive Director Inger Andersen said that the world is “obviously falling behind.”
“We’re sort of sawing the branch on which we are sitting,” she said.
The planet’s annual temperature jumped about 0.46 degrees Celsius (0.83 degrees Fahrenheit) since 2015, one of the biggest 10-year temperature hikes on record, according to data from the European climate service Copernicus. This year will be either the second or third hottest on record, Copernicus calculated. Each year since 2015 has been hotter than the year of the Paris climate deal.
Deadly heat waves have struck not just traditional hot spots like India and the Middle East, but even in more temperate places such as the Pacific Northwest in North America and Russia’s Siberia.
Earth has been hit repeatedly with more costly, dangerous and extreme weather. The decade since 2015 has seen the most Category 5 Atlantic hurricanes and the most billion-dollar weather disasters in the United States, according to records kept by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. America has been hit by 193 disasters that cost at least $1 billion in the past 10 years for a total bill of $1.5 trillion.
Wildfires have consumed parts of Hawaii, California, Europe and Australia. Floods have devastated parts of Pakistan,China and the American South. And many of those, but not all, have had the fingerprints of human-caused climate change, scientists have calculated.
Since 2015, more than 7 trillion tons of ice in the world’s glaciers and ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica have disappeared, ice scientists calculate. That’s the equivalent of more than 19 million Empire State Buildings.
Sea level rise is accelerating. In the past decade, the world’s seas have gone up 40 millimeters (1.6 inches). It may not sound like much, but it’s enough water to fill 30 lakes the size of Lake Erie, according to Steve Nerem, a University of Colorado professor who researches sea level rise.
Even the Amazon, where the climate negotiations will convene, has gone from a planet-saving region that sucks heat-trapping gases out of the air to a region that, because of deforestation, at times is spewing them.
But there’s also a lot that officials celebrate in the past 10 years.
Renewable energy is now cheaper in most places than polluting coal, oil and natural gas. Last year, 74% of the growth in electricity generated worldwide was from wind, solar and other green choices, according to two July U.N. reports. In 2015, a half-million electric vehicles were sold globally, and last year it was 17 million, the report said.
“There’s no stopping it,” said former U.S. Special Climate Envoy Todd Stern, who helped negotiate the Paris Agreement. “You cannot hold back the tides.”
In 2015, U.N. projections figured that Earth was on path for almost 4 degrees Celsius (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming since the mid-1800s. Now, the world is on track to warm 2.8 degrees (5 degrees Fahrenheit), maybe a little less if countries do as they promise.
But that’s nowhere near the goal of keeping warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), a level that scientific reports say is more or less the danger line and which became the Paris Agreement’s overarching goal.
“Ten years ago we had a more orderly pathway for staying away from 1.5 degrees C entirely,” Rockstrom said. “Now we are 10 years later. We have failed.”
A report examining dozens of indicators of progress — such as solar and wind power installations — in transitioning from a fossil fuel economy found that none were on pace for keeping warming at or below the 1.5 degree goal.
The report by the Bezos Earth Fund, Climate Analytics, the Climate High-Level Champions, ClimateWorks Foundation and World Resources Institute found that 35 of them are at least going in the right direction, although far too slowly.
“Technologies, once hypothetical, are now becoming a reality. And the good news is that reality has outpaced many of the projections a decade ago,” said report author Kelly Levin, science and data chief at the Bezos Earth Fund. “But it’s not nearly fast enough for what’s needed.”
Methane levels in the atmosphere increased 5.2% from 2015 to 2024, while carbon dioxide levels jumped 5.8% in the same time, according to NOAA data.
Several developing countries, including the United States and the rest of the developed world, have reduced their carbon dioxide emissions by about 7% since 2015, but other countries have seen their emissions soar, with China’s going up 15.5% and India’s soaring 26.7%, according to data from the Global Carbon Project.
Oxfam International looked at global emissions by income level and found that the richest 0.1% of people increased their carbon emissions by 3% since 2015. Meanwhile, the poorest 10% of people reduced their emissions by 30%.
“The Paris Agreement itself has underperformed,” said climate negotiations historian Joanna Depledge of the University of Cambridge in England. “Unfortunately, it is one of those half-full, half-empty situations where you can’t say it’s failed. But then nor can you say it’s dramatically succeeded.”
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