Global sea levels rising twice as fast as they did last century, according to major scientific report
Global sea levels are now rising twice as fast as they did last century, according to a major new scientific report.
The study - which takes a laser focus on climate change in the 2020s, a critical decade to stop the worst damage - finds all 10 measures are going in the wrong direction.
And most of them are doing so at a faster rate.
The findings are "unprecedented" but "unsurprising", given the world continues to pump record levels of planet-warming gases into the atmosphere.
"We see a clear and consistent picture that things are getting worse," said lead author Professor Piers Forster.
However, the rate by which emissions are increasing has slowed down, offering a ray of hope they will soon reach their peak.
Rising seas
The new study found sea levels are now rising on average twice as fast, at 4.3mm a year on average since 2019, up from 1.8mm a year at the turn of the 20th century.
The acceleration is stark, but within the realms of what scientists expected.
That's because the warming atmosphere has sent more melting ice flowing into the sea, and the ocean water expands as it warms.
For the island nation of the UK, which risks coastal flooding, cliff falls and damage to homes and buildings, with 100,000 properties expected to be threatened with coastal erosion in England within 50 years.
Dr Aimee Slangen, from the NIOZ Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research, said: "The concerning part is that we know that sea-level rise in response to climate change is relatively slow, which means that we have already locked in further increases in the coming years and decades."
A UK government spokesperson said: "We owe it to future generations to tackle the climate crisis, by becoming a clean energy superpower."
They are also spending £7.9bn on flood defences to "strengthen our resilience" and protect thousands of "homes, small businesses, and vital infrastructure from this growing threat".
Meanwhile, the amount of greenhouse gases the world can still emit while limiting warming to safer levels has plummeted by 74% - from 500 billion tonnes of Co2 to 130bn.
That leaves just three years' worth of emissions in the budget if the world is to limit warming to no more than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels - the threshold widely agreed to be the best chance of avoiding very severe impacts.
The report, involving more than 60 scientists, also warned the world is warming faster than ever before, by an "unprecedented" rate of 0.27C per decade.
Professor Forster later told Sky News: "There is little good news across the entire indicator set."
"This is why I don't have my normal optimism."
He added: "Greenhouse gas emissions needed to have started dropping significantly in 2024 if we were to keep a chance of keeping long-term warming below 1.5C.
"The world has failed to do this."
Change is possible
Scientists urged leaders to draw up more ambitious national climate plans before the COP30 climate summit in Brazil in November.
"In a rapidly changing climate, evidence-based decision-making benefits from up-to-date and timely information," said the study, Indicators of Global Climate Change 2024, published today in Earth System Science Data.
Dr Valérie Masson-Delmotte, from Institut Pierre Simon Laplace, said: "What happens next depends on the choices which will be made: it is possible, by sharply reducing greenhouse gas emissions, to limit the magnitude of future warming, and protect young generations from the intensification of extreme events."
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BBC News
3 hours ago
- BBC News
Three years left to limit warming to 1.5C, top scientists warn
The Earth could be doomed to breach the symbolic 1.5C warming limit in as little as three years at current levels of carbon dioxide the stark warning from more than 60 of the world's leading climate scientists in the most up-to-date assessment of the state of global 200 countries agreed to try to limit global temperature rises to 1.5C above levels of the late 1800s in a landmark agreement in 2015, with the aim of avoiding some of the worst impacts of climate countries have continued to burn record amounts of coal, oil and gas and chop down carbon-rich forests - leaving that international goal in peril. "Things are all moving in the wrong direction," said lead author Prof Piers Forster, director of the Priestley Centre for Climate Futures at the University of Leeds."We're seeing some unprecedented changes and we're also seeing the heating of the Earth and sea-level rise accelerating as well."These changes "have been predicted for some time and we can directly place them back to the very high level of emissions", he the beginning of 2020, scientists estimated that humanity could only emit 500 billion more tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) - the most important planet-warming gas - for a 50% chance of keeping warming to by the start of 2025 this so-called "carbon budget" had shrunk to 130 billion tonnes, according to the new reduction is largely due to continued record emissions of CO2 and other planet-warming greenhouse gases like methane, but also improvements in the scientific global CO2 emissions stay at their current highs of about 40 billion tonnes a year, 130 billion tonnes gives the world roughly three years until that carbon budget is could commit the world to breaching the target set by the Paris agreement, the researchers say, though the planet would probably not pass 1.5C of human-caused warming until a few years later. Last year was the first on record when global average air temperatures were more than 1.5C above those of the late 1800s.A single 12-month period isn't considered a breach of the Paris agreement, however, with the record heat of 2024 given an extra boost by natural weather human-caused warming was by far the main reason for last year's high temperatures, reaching 1.36C above pre-industrial levels, the researchers current rate of warming is about 0.27C per decade – much faster than anything in the geological if emissions stay high, the planet is on track to reach 1.5C of warming on that metric around the year this point, long-term warming could, in theory, be brought back down by sucking large quantities of CO2 back out of the the authors urge caution on relying on these ambitious technologies serving as a get-out-of-jail card."For larger exceedance [of 1.5C], it becomes less likely that removals [of CO2] will perfectly reverse the warming caused by today's emissions," warned Joeri Rogelj, professor of climate science and policy at Imperial College London. 'Every fraction of warming' matters The study is filled with striking statistics highlighting the magnitude of the climate change that has already the most notable is the rate at which extra heat is accumulating in the Earth's climate system, known as "Earth's energy imbalance" in scientific the past decade or so, this rate of heating has been more than double that of the 1970s and 1980s and an estimated 25% higher than the late 2000s and 2010s."That's a really large number, a very worrying number" over such a short period, said Dr Matthew Palmer of the UK Met Office, and associate professor at the University of recent uptick is fundamentally due to greenhouse gas emissions, but a reduction in the cooling effect from small particles called aerosols has also played a extra energy has to go somewhere. Some goes into warming the land, raising air temperatures, and melting the world's about 90% of the excess heat is taken up by the oceans. That not only means disruption to marine life but also higher sea levels: warmer ocean waters take up more space, in addition to the extra water that melting glaciers are adding to our rate of global sea-level rise has doubled since the 1990s, raising the risks of flooding for millions of people living in coastal areas worldwide. While this all paints a bleak picture, the authors note that the rate of emissions increases appears to be slowing as clean technologies are rolled argue that "rapid and stringent" emissions cuts are more important than Paris target is based on very strong scientific evidence that the impacts of climate change would be far greater at 2C of warming than at has often been oversimplified as meaning below 1.5C of warming is "safe" and above 1.5C "dangerous".In reality, every extra bit of warming increases the severity of many weather extremes, ice melt and sea-level rise."Reductions in emissions over the next decade can critically change the rate of warming," said Prof Rogelj."Every fraction of warming that we can avoid will result in less harm and less suffering of particularly poor and vulnerable populations and less challenges for our societies to live the lives that we desire," he added. Sign up for our Future Earth newsletter to keep up with the latest climate and environment stories with the BBC's Justin Rowlatt. Outside the UK? Sign up to our international newsletter here.
The Independent
3 hours ago
- The Independent
World now in ‘crunch time' to avoid higher levels of warming, UN scientists warn
UN scientists have warned that the world is in 'crunch time' to avoid higher levels of warming beyond the key threshold of 1.5C but that drivers of climate change are 'all moving in the wrong direction'. In their annual report, a team of more than 60 international scientists have put together a comprehensive picture of the current state of the climate and calculated the human-driven factors behind the changes the world is experiencing. It comes as part of efforts to provide regular updates between landmark UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports, the last of which was published in 2021 and the next of which is expected in 2028. The group examined the amount of planet-heating carbon dioxide (CO2) the world can release into the atmosphere in the coming years while limiting warming to the UN target of 1.5C. The report estimates that the remaining 'carbon budget' for 1.5C is emitting 130 billion tonnes of C02 from the beginning of 2025, if the world is to have a 50% chance to stay within the threshold. However, this budget will be exhausted in little more than three years at current levels of CO2 emissions, according to the findings published on Wednesday night in the journal Earth System Science Data. This means that without drastic cuts to emissions, the world will be unable to prevent warming from surpassing the dangerous threshold, which will lead to a rise in extreme weather events, climate-related disasters and increase the risk of triggering irreversible changes. The report also warned the carbon budget for 1.6C or 1.7C could also be exceeded within nine years, which will significantly intensify these impacts. The scientists' long-term estimates show current average global temperatures to be 1.24C higher than in pre-industrial times. Professor Joeri Rogelj, research director at the Grantham Institute, said: 'Under any course of action, there is a very high chance that we will reach and even exceed 1.5C and even higher levels of warming. '1.5C is an iconic level but we are currently already in crunch time… to avoid higher levels of warming with a decent likelihood or a prudent likelihood as well and that is true for 1.7C, but equally so for 1.8C if we want to have a high probability there.' But Prof Rogelj added that reductions in emissions over the next decade can still 'critically change' the rate of warming and limit the magnitude and the extent by which the world exceeds 1.5C. 'It's really the difference between just cruising through 1.5C towards much higher levels of 2C or trying to limit warming somewhere in the range of 1.5,' he said. Piers Forster, professor of Climate Physics at the University of Leeds, who has helped author IPCC reports, said the report highlights how climate policies and pace of climate action 'are not keeping up with what's needed to address the ever-growing impacts'. 'I certainly tend to be an optimistic person but if you do look at this year's annual update, things are all moving in the wrong direction,' he said. 'They're not only moving in the wrong direction, we're seeing some unprecedented changes.' Reflecting on the IPCC reports, he said: 'What we had hope to see by this time is these emissions beginning to turn a corner and unfortunately that hasn't occurred.' Instead emissions have increased year on year since the 2021 report, remaining at all-time highs, he said. This year's update covers key climate system indicators such as greenhouse gas emissions and concentrations, Earth energy imbalance, human-induced climate change, remaining carbon budgets and maximum land surface temperatures. But for the first time, the annual update also included sea-level rise and global land precipitation. In 2024, the best estimate of observed global surface temperature rise was 1.52C, of which 1.36C can be attributed to human activity, caused by global greenhouse gas emissions, the scientists said. The report said last year's high temperatures are 'alarmingly unexceptional' as the combination of human-driven climate change and the El Nino weather phenomenon push global heat to record levels. While global average temperatures exceeded 1.5C for the first time, this does not mean the world has breached landmark UN agreement, which would require average global temperatures to exceed the threshold over multiple decades. When analysing longer-term temperature change, the scientists' best estimates show that between 2015 and 2024 average global temperatures were 1.24C higher than in pre-industrial times, with 1.22C caused by human activities. Elsewhere, the report found that human activities were found to be affecting the Earth's energy balance, with the oceans storing about 91% of the excess heat, driving detrimental changes in every component of the climate system, including sea level rise, ocean warming, ice loss, and permafrost thawing. Between 2019 and 2024, global mean sea level also increased by around 26mm, more than doubling the long-term rate of 1.8mm per year seen since the turn of the twentieth century. Dr Aimee Slangen, research leader at the NIOZ Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research, said the rise is already having an 'outsized impact' on low-lying coastal areas, causing more damaging storm surges and coastal erosion. 'The concerning part is that we know that sea-level rise in response to climate change is relatively slow, which means that we have already locked in further increases in the coming years and decades,' she said. IPCC's last assessment of the climate system, published in 2021, highlighted how climate change was leading to widespread adverse impacts on nature and people. Professor Rogelj said: 'Every small increase in warming matters, leading to more frequent, more intense weather extremes. 'Emissions over the next decade will determine how soon and how fast 1.5C of warming is reached. They need to be swiftly reduced to meet the climate goals of the Paris Agreement.'
Times
4 hours ago
- Times
Robots won't replace us, say judges
Artificial intelligence could cut paperwork, allow courts to focus on complex cases and deliver 'audience specific' summaries of rulings — but robots won't replace human beings on the bench. At least that is the view of judges themselves, according to a report published this week by three international academics specialising in law and technology. Human judgment in the courts is 'non-negotiable', the professors say, as they reflect the view of a judicial focus group. 'Moral reasoning, fact-finding in first-instance trials and the dignity of face-to-face justice must remain human-led,' is the message from a group of a dozen judges, including five from the Supreme Court. The authors of the report are an interesting factor because none is based in the UK and therefore the team is arguably free of romantic bias for red gowns and long ceremonial wigs.
