Global Warming Speeding Up Since 2015 With 98% Certainty, Says Report

Global warming has accelerated since 2015, with a statistical certainty of over 98%, according to a Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) report published on March 6.

After correcting for the effects of El Niño and the solar maximum, 2023 and 2024, which were exceptionally warm years, become somewhat cooler, but remain the two warmest years since the beginning of instrumental records. In all datasets, the acceleration begins to become apparent in 2013 or 2014.

After accounting for known natural influences on global temperature, the research team detected a statistically significant acceleration of the warming trend for the first time. Over the past ten years, the estimated warming rate has been around 0.35 degrees Celsius per decade, depending on the dataset, compared with just under 0.2 degrees Celsius per decade on average from 1970 to 2015. This recent rate is higher than in any previous decade since the beginning of instrumental records in 1880, the report noted.

Accelerating Global Temperature Trend

According to the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), global temperatures from 2023 to 2025 averaged more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels (1850-1900). This unprecedented three-year period marked the first time such a sustained breach of the critical threshold.

“We can now demonstrate a strong and statistically significant acceleration of global warming since around 2015,” Grant Foster, a US statistics expert and co-author of the study, which was published in the scientific journal Geophysical Research Letters, stated in the news release.

“We filter out known natural influences in the observational data, so that the ‘noise’ is reduced, making the underlying long-term warming signal more clearly visible,” Foster added.

Short-term natural fluctuations in global temperature caused by El Niño, volcanic eruptions, and solar cycles can mask changes in the long-term rate of warming. In their data analysis, which is based on measurement data, the two researchers work with five large, established global temperature data sets (NASA, NOAA, HadCRUT, Berkeley Earth, ERA5).

The study does not investigate the specific causes of the observed acceleration. However, climate models show that an increasing rate of warming is fundamentally within the scope of current climate modelling, according to the authors.