The world could cross the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C warming limit as soon as 2029, according to new analysis from the European Union’s Copernicus climate service — sixteen years earlier than scientists projected when the pact was adopted in 2015.
When the Paris Agreement was approved in December 2015, Copernicus’s temperature-trend monitor projected the long-term 1.5°C threshold would be reached around March 2045. Eleven years on, with warming accelerating, the same monitor now puts the crossing in early 2029. Copernicus data put global warming at 1.44°C above pre-industrial levels as of August 2026, leaving the threshold little more than two years away on current trends.
The finding was one of two stark assessments released on Thursday at the COP31 climate conference in Antalya, Turkey. The Climate Action Tracker, which measures government policies against their pledges, found the planet remains on track to warm by nearly 5 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100 — far beyond the Paris goal of holding warming well below 2°C and pursuing efforts to limit it to 1.5°C.
Climate Analytics policy analyst Sarah Heck said collective government action has stalled for a fifth consecutive year, even as fossil fuel development continues to grow. Greta Thunberg, attending the talks for the first time since 2021, said the warming already locked in has caused deadly floods, wildfires and glacier collapses.
The acceleration is backed by independent research. A study from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, published in Geophysical Research Letters, found the planet has warmed by about 0.35°C per decade over the past ten years — nearly double the rate of just under 0.2°C per decade recorded before 2015 — with the acceleration statistically significant. A separate study in Nature Climate Change put the 1.5°C crossing at around 2029 and the 2°C threshold at about 2042, and found that 90 to 94 per cent of the regional warming expected at 1.5°C has already taken place.
The 1.5°C figure is a long-term average, not a single hot year: 2024 already exceeded it on an annual basis, and 2026 is set to rank among the four hottest years on record. Crossing it on a sustained basis would not end the world, scientists stress, but every fraction of a degree brings more extreme heat, heavier rainfall, longer droughts and faster sea-level rise.
COP31, co-hosted by Turkey and Australia, runs until 20 November, with negotiators still divided over fossil fuels in the summit’s final week.
Sources: Ars Technica, “Scientists warn 1.5°C climate change threshold could arrive by 2029”; Copernicus Climate Change Service (https://climate.copernicus.eu/); Climate Action Tracker (https://climateactiontracker.org/).
