The Study Revealed That The Planet Is Heating Faster Than Ever
Duvindu Thilan
March 1, 2026
According to sources, global heating accelerated from a steady rate of less than 0.2 °C per decade between 1970 and 2015 to about 0.35 °C per decade over the past 10 years. The rate is higher than scientists have seen since they started systematically taking the Earth’s temperature in 1880.
“If the warming rate of the past 10 years continues, it would lead to a long-term exceedance of the 1.5 °C (2.7F) limit of the Paris agreement before 2030,” said Stefan Rahmstorf, a scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and co-author of the study.
Extreme heat in recent years has been pushed higher by natural fluctuations such as solar cycles, volcanic eruptions, and the weather pattern El Niño, which have led scientists to question whether startling temperature readings are outliers or the result of an increase in global heating.
The researchers applied a noise-reduction method to filter out the estimated effect of nonhuman factors in five major datasets that scientists have compiled to gauge the Earth’s temperature. In each of them, they found an acceleration in global heating emerged in 2013 or 2014.
“There is now pretty widespread – if not quite universal – agreement that there has been a detectable acceleration in warming in recent years,” said Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at Berkeley Earth, who was not involved in the study. “However, it remains unclear how much of the additional warming over the past decade in particular is a forced response versus unforced variability.”
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