Human activities are accelerating global warming at record levels, leading to a rise of 1.19 degrees Celsius between 2014 and 2023, according to new research on Wednesday by over 50 leading international scientists.
This is an increase from the 1.14 degrees C seen between 2013-2022, revealed the second annual Indicators of Global Climate Change report, led by the University of Leeds, UK.
It showed that global warming caused by humans is advancing at 0.26 degrees C per decade — the highest rate since records began.
“Our analysis shows that the level of global warming caused by human action has continued to increase over the past year, even though climate action has slowed the rise in greenhouse gas emissions,” said Professor Piers Forster, Director of the Priestley Centre for Climate Futures at the University of Leeds.
“Global temperatures are still heading in the wrong direction and faster than ever before,” Forster added.
Published in the journal Earth System Science Data, the report attributed the increased rate of warming to a combination of greenhouse gas emissions being consistently high, equivalent to 53 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) per year.
The high greenhouse gas emission levels are also affecting the Earth’s energy balance: ocean buoys and satellites are tracking unprecedented flows of heat — 50 percent higher than its long-term average — into the Earth’s oceans, ice caps, soils, and atmosphere, said the report.
“Fossil fuel emissions are around 70 percent of all GHG emissions and clearly the main driver of climate change, but other sources of pollution from cement production, farming and deforestation and cuts to the level of sulfur emissions are also contributing to warming,” Forster said.
The report noted that while 2023 turned out to be the hottest year, the record high temperature was the result of natural climate variability, in particular El Nino.
Further, the researchers said that around 200 gigatonnes (billion tonnes) or about five years’ worth of current emissions are left to be emitted before reaching the threshold of 1.5 degrees C, above the pre-industrial average.
