Nature Climate Change study: global warming to reach 1.5°C in 2029, Arctic already at 3.3°C
A team led by Francis Zwiers (University of Victoria) estimates that the 1.5°C mark will be reached globally in 2029; regional warming already ranges from about 1°C to 3.3°C.
An international team led by Francis Zwiers of the University of Victoria (British Columbia, Canada) estimates that global warming will reach 1.5°C above the pre-industrial level in 2029. This follows from a study in Nature Climate Change, as reported by spiegel.de. spiegel.de
spiegel.despiegel.deOpen source ↗ The authors stress that regions are warming at different rates. By 2025 the Russian Arctic had warmed by about 3.3°C, northeastern North America by 2.6°C, and Western and Central Europe by well over 2°C.
Regional warming
Some regions of Central Africa, Southeast Asia and the South Pacific have warmed considerably more slowly; New Zealand stands at slightly above 1.0°C. According to the team, regional warming has already reached 90–94% of what is expected at 1.5°C of global warming, and 65–76% of what would be expected at 2°C.
In a commentary in the same journal, Peter Stott of the Met Office Hadley Centre in Exeter called the method an important advance. He wrote that many land areas have already warmed by well over 1.5°C, some high-latitude regions by more than 2.5°C, and Canada and much of Europe by more than 2°C. Among the consequences already felt worldwide he named heat waves, floods and melting glaciers and ice sheets.
Method and attribution
To reconstruct temperature change since industrialization, the team used a statistical method called Kriging for Climate Change (KCC). It compares a number of climate models with observations and examines influences such as greenhouse gases and aerosols separately. spiegel.de
spiegel.despiegel.deOpen source ↗
The authors report that human influences account for practically all observed regional warming. Greenhouse gases are the dominant factor, while other anthropogenic forcings, mainly aerosols, partly offset greenhouse-gas warming, especially in industrial regions of the Northern Hemisphere. The team acknowledges that the quality of the results depends on the climate models used.
The EU's Copernicus Earth observation programme reported that the 1.5°C mark was reached globally in 2024 and most likely also in 2026. Under the Paris Agreement, however, the decisive figure is a multi-year average, not a single year. According to the German Weather Service (DWD), Germany has warmed by 2.5°C on average since 1881.
