Global greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase. As a result, the Earth system is becoming further out of balance and the oceans are warming drastically, as a current report shows.
Are the sea creatures getting warm too? Beluga whale surfacing near Svalbard. Imago / Imagebroker/alimdi / Arterra
Greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, the Earth is absorbing more and more energy, and days with marine heat waves are becoming more frequent. This emerges from the latest report Indicators of Global Climate Change (IGCC), which leading scientists are presenting at the current meeting U.N.-Climate conference in Bonn. The annual evaluation is considered an interim balance for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports IPCCwhich only come out every few years.
Co-author Thomas Frölicher from the University of Bern summarizes the data in three principles: “We are emitting more greenhouse gases than ever before. This leads to an increase in greenhouse gas concentrations such as CO2, methane or nitrogen in the atmosphere. And as a result, we store more heat in the Earth system and throw the world out of balance.” The core statements:
Total global emissions in 2024 corresponded to the effect of around 56.8 billion tons of CO2. Of this, 38.6 billion tonnes (gigatons of CO2; GtCO2) were CO2 from fossil fuels and industry. The average for the years 2015-2024 was 54.6 GtCO2 – of which 36.7 came from fossil fuels and industry.
Accordingly, the global average concentration of important greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has continued to rise in 2025 compared to 2019 – the most recent data from the World Climate Report. For CO2 by 15.6 to 425.6 ppm (parts per million), for methane by 70.2 to 1936.3 ppb (parts per billion).
As a result, the Earth’s so-called energy imbalance is increasing: This arises because more energy comes into the Earth system than leaves it, for example due to greenhouse gases. This shows how quickly heat accumulates in the air conditioning system. According to the report, the value more than doubled from 0.40 watts per square meter in the period 1976-1995 to 1.04 watts per square meter in the period 2006-2025.
The report cites the causes as increasing concentrations of long-lived greenhouse gases, but also declines in the emission of cooling aerosols such as sulfur dioxide and the Earth’s increased absorption of solar radiation due to lower reflection from clouds and shrinking sea ice areas.
The global warming of the earth is therefore continuing at high speed: in the period 2010-2019 it was 0.23 degrees per decade. For 2016-2025, the researchers calculated 0.27 degrees per decade – this corresponds to the rate from 2015-2024.
Since the 1970s, the oceans have stored around 90 percent of excess heat absorption, according to the report. The remaining part is distributed between the warming of land areas and the atmosphere and the melting of ice. According to the report, “a robust increase in warming has been observed in the ocean at depths between 700 and 2000 meters” since the 1990s. Temperatures over land areas have increased by 1.81 degrees from the period 1850-1900 to the decade 2016-2025.
Newly included in the report are the days with marine heat waves, the number of which has more than tripled from 1991 to 2025. In 2025, on average, every location on the ocean surface experienced 65 days of marine heat waves. The temperature is increased by a certain value.
According to co-author Karina von Schuckmann, an acceleration over a longer period of time has been demonstrated for two important climate indicators. In addition to the Earth’s energy imbalance, this is the rise in sea levels caused by the warming of the oceans and the melting of ice on land. According to the report, from 1971 to 2018 it was around 2.33 millimeters per year, and from 2018 to 2025 it was 3.84 millimeters per year. Schuckmann is a consultant at the research organization Mercator Ocean International in Toulouse.
According to the IGCC, if humans want to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees with a 50 percent probability, they can only produce 130 GtCO2. With current emissions, the budget will be used up in three years. With a limit of 1.7 degrees it would still be 500 GtCO2 and therefore twelve years.
For the report, more than 70 researchers evaluated over 40 data sets, many of which, according to the authors, are now at risk due to decisions about public funding. A coordinated international approach is necessary to ensure the continuity of climate observations.
According to the report, greenhouse gas emissions are not increasing as quickly as in the 2000s, but they are still increasing. Humanity is therefore very far from “now on a declining path,” says co-author Sonia Seneviratne from ETH Zurich. The increase in emissions “I find very difficult to understand when we know that the Paris Agreement existed in 2015,” she says. “You can see that emissions simply continue to increase, even though we have many alternatives.”
She referred to Ethiopia, which has banned the import of combustion engines. “So if Ethiopia can do it, I think a lot of countries in Europe could do it too.” (APA/dpa)
