A new study confirms the global warming rate has nearly doubled since 2015 to 0.35 degrees Celsius per decade, risking the 1.5° C limit before 2030. A new study confirms that the global warming rate has nearly doubled since 2015, accelerating the timeline of severe climate impacts worldwide. Credit: Jjurieee / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA-4.0).
Global warming has nearly doubled its pace since 2015, reaching approximately 0.35° degrees Celsius per decade compared with just under 0.2°C per decade from 1970 to 2015, according to a study published on March 6, 2026, in the peer-reviewed journal Geophysical Research Letters by researchers at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) in Germany, making this the fastest warming rate (measured rise in average global temperature) recorded in any decade since instrumental measurements began in 1880.
The confirmation carries direct implications for the 2015 Paris Agreement, the international climate treaty signed by 195 countries that set 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels as the threshold beyond which climate change becomes widespread and severe, since lead author Stefan Rahmstorf stated plainly: “If the warming rate of the past 10 years continues, Earth will permanently exceed that limit before 2030, several years ahead of earlier projections.”
Filtering out nature’s noise
The core challenge in detecting an acceleration in the warming rate is that short-term natural events mask the underlying trend, since an El Niño (a temporary warming of Pacific Ocean surface waters), a volcanic eruption, or a peak in solar activity can each raise or lower global temperatures by fractions of a degree over a period of months to a few years, creating statistical noise that can hide genuine long-term shifts in either direction.
To verify these claims, researchers combined the five most widely used global temperature datasets, namely NASA, NOAA, HadCRUT, Berkeley Earth, and ERA5, and then systematically stripped out the measured effects of El Niño cycles, volcanic eruptions, and solar activity, so that what remained reflected only the underlying long-term warming signal, free from temporary fluctuations.
The result was unambiguous: The adjusted data showed an acceleration consistent across all five datasets, with a statistical certainty above 98%, and the shift became detectable around 2013 or 2014, slightly before the study’s headline date of 2015.
A livable Earth is fast slipping away
Scientists detect a sudden acceleration in global warming
Over past decade, global temperatures climbed at an estimated rate of about 0.35°C per decade
Compared to just under 0.2°C per decade from 1970 to 2015https://t.co/R2LW3RdWeb
— GO GREEN (@ECOWARRIORSS) March 10, 2026
From 0.2°C to 0.35°C: a rate that matters
Between 1970 and 2015, the global average warming rate held relatively stable at just under 0.2°C per decade, a figure consistent with climate model projections and recognized as the background pace of human-caused climate change. The shift to 0.35°C represents not a gradual drift but a near-doubling in the speed at which the planet accumulates heat, which compresses timelines for every climate target currently on record.
Worth noting, even after the researchers corrected for El Niño and the recent solar cycle maximum, 2023 and 2024 still ranked as the two warmest years since records began, confirming that the heat accumulation runs deeper than any single weather pattern, and the last 11 consecutive years stand as the 11 warmest ever recorded since 1880.
What caused the shift, and what comes next
The study did not investigate the specific drivers of the acceleration, though the authors and independent scientists point to two leading candidates: Continued fossil fuel burning, which raises atmospheric CO₂ (carbon dioxide, the main heat-trapping gas), and the reduction of aerosols that had previously reflected some sunlight into space, with the unintended consequence that cleaner air has allowed more solar energy to reach Earth’s surface.
Even within the uncertainty range of current climate models, Rahmstorf called the pace “a bit unexpected,” and co‑author Grant Foster described the acceleration as “strong and statistically significant,” while he also warned that if aerosol reduction primarily drives the change, policymakers cannot slow those reductions because air pollution exacts a severe public health toll.
To this day, the question of whether the 0.35°C warming rate represents a temporary spike or a durable new baseline will ultimately be answered by how rapidly the world moves to reduce CO₂ emissions from fossil fuels to zero, since Rahmstorf’s own conclusion closes on that single variable: The pace at which carbon is removed from the energy system is the only lever humanity retains over the warming rate it faces in the years ahead.