Greenhouse gas emissions reached record levels with annual emissions equivalent to 54 billion tons of carbon dioxide. Humans have caused a 1.14°C increase in surface temperatures since the late 1800s, and this warming is increasing at an unprecedented rate of over 0.2°C per decade. The highest temperatures recorded on land (what climatologists call maximum land surface temperatures) are rising twice as fast. And it’s these temperatures that are most important whether there are record heats or wildfires people experience.

These changes mean that the remaining carbon budget for 1.5°C—the amount of carbon dioxide that the global community can still emit and sustain with a 50% chance of bringing the temperature to 1.5°C—is currently only 250 billion tons. In current emissions, this will be exhausted in less than six years.

These are the findings of a new report I’ve published, along with 49 other scientists from around the world. It monitors recent changes in emissions, temperatures and energy flows in the Earth system. Data that can inform climate action. For example, to report how quickly emissions need to be lowered to meet international temperature targets. The first report, which would become a series of annual reports, described the rate at which the Earth is warming.

We are launching an initiative called Global Climate Change Indicators, which for the first time brings together all the necessary components to monitor anthropogenic warming from year to year. We monitor greenhouse gas and particulate matter emissions and their warming or cooling effects to determine their role in changing surface temperatures.

We use rigorous methods based on those identified in the Integrated Assessments of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Governments and climate policy negotiators rely on IPCC assessments as a reliable source of information. However, they are released eight years apart. In a rapidly changing world where policies can change rapidly, this leaves an information gap: the UN’s annual climate talks lack reliable indicators of the state of the climate.

Climate data for everyone

In this first report, we collected data on all greenhouse gas emissions and their changes during the pandemic. Based on this, we built evidence to quantify human-induced temperature variation. This shows us how close the world is to the goal of keeping long-term temperatures below 1.5°C set by the Paris Agreement, and how quickly we are reaching that goal.

In this first report, we describe how much has changed since the IPCC’s last comprehensive review (Sixth Assessment Report, or AR6), which evaluated data up to 2019.

To estimate how much of the observed temperature changes were due to human activities, we needed to monitor how these activities changed energy flows in the Earth system. While greenhouse gas emissions accumulate in the atmosphere, trapping heat, particulate pollutants such as sulfate aerosols from burning coal tend to reflect more sunlight, cooling the Earth. Greenhouse gas emissions have increased significantly in recent years, but pollution has decreased worldwide. Both of these trends are contributing to climate warming. We estimated that this causes the highest rate of global warming of over 0.2°C per decade.

In the coming years, we want to involve the wider scientific community and make it possible to monitor extreme climatic conditions such as heat waves, floods and wildfires, especially those currently affecting Canada. We are expressing our intention to do so in this first year by tracking how the daily maximum temperature on land increases. They are rising twice as fast as the average temperature and are already 1.74 °C higher than they were in the 1800s.

We hope that these data will be used by key users of IPCC information, namely state actors in climate negotiations, to understand the scale of action required. We also want a much wider audience to have access to timely and reliable climate data in a completely transparent way where scientific methods are documented for public record, so we are creating an open data dashboard that anyone can access to view the data.

We want to build trust in our business, so we provide this data without advocating any particular policy. We embrace the IPCC’s mantra of “policy compliance”, but not “policy attribution.” We want the data to speak for itself, policymakers to understand the pace of climate change and what action is needed.

In preparing a series of these reports in the coming years, we may observe sustained high emissions or warming rates, or rapid reductions in emissions as the level of warming begins to stabilize, depending on the decisions taken by society. Regardless, the global climate community will be watching and reporting. Source