NEW DELHI: Global warming has accelerated significantly since 2015, according to a study that explains natural fluctuations in the rate of warming and the effects of El Niño, volcanic eruptions and a changing solar cycle on temperature data.
Researchers, including those from the German Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, said that natural short-term fluctuations in global temperatures caused by the El Niño phenomenon, volcanic eruptions and solar cycles could mask changes in the rate of long-term temperature rise.
The study, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, analyzed five global temperature datasets, including those managed by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
“We filter out known natural forcings in the observational data, so that the ‘noise’ is reduced, making the underlying long-term warming signal clearer,” said Grant Foster, co-author and US statistician.
“The resulting revised and therefore less noisy data show that there is an acceleration with greater than 98% confidence, with temperatures rising faster in the past 10 years than in any previous decade,” the authors wrote.
Statistical confidence is the chance that a specific statistical method can correctly capture the true value of a population when repeated sampling.
Subtracting the estimated impact of El Niño events, volcanic eruptions and solar variations from the data sets makes the global temperature curve less variable, which “then shows a statistically significant acceleration in global warming since about 2015,” the team said.
They also found that the years 2023 and 2024, which were exceptionally warm, have become somewhat cooler, but they remain the warmest years since the beginning of records.
They added that while the accelerating warming is not unexpected, it is a cause for concern and shows that efforts directed to slow and eventually halt global warming under the Paris Agreement have so far been insufficient.
“If the rate of warming continues over the past 10 years, this will lead to the long-term 1.5°C limit in the Paris Agreement being exceeded before 2030,” said lead author Stefan Rahmstorf, a researcher at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.
“How quickly global warming continues ultimately depends on how quickly global emissions from fossil fuels can be reduced to zero,” Rahmstorf said.
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