Our beautiful but fragile home seen in crescent phase behind our lifeless moon. Photo taken from the Artemis II Orion spacecraft on April 6th 2026. Oceania and the east coast of Australia are within the illuminated, daytime portion of this image. Image courtesy NASA.
With Earth Day fast approaching, it seems appropriate to once again look at the state of the planet. This is something I’ve been doing ever since I started this blog in 2011. At that time, I had just published my first book, Our Dying Planet. That book dealt with the global environmental crisis, attempting an overview, for laypeople, of the many ways in which we were ushering in the Anthropocene through our wanton disregard for the limited capacity of the planetary system to deal with the pressures caused by our enormous and rapidly growing human enterprise.
The global economic system has evolved largely without reference to the limits imposed by the real world, and until recently those who manage economies rarely concerned themselves with such externalities. In a system where natural resources and energy are assumed to be there to be used, and where wastes and unwanted by-products are discarded at no cost, it is easy to contemplate perpetual growth in economic activity leading to growing wealth and rising standards of living for growing populations.
The absurdity of this view, available to anyone who looks at an image of our finite planet, has failed to temper the enthusiasm of those in charge of our nations or our business enterprises. Those of us who appreciate the essential circularity of natural systems speak a language that is unintelligible to those who manage economic life with its assumptions of perpetual growth. They in turn see our concern for the need to manage our impacts on natural systems as unimaginative and a luddite refusal to be optimistic regarding the talents of humans to invent the new.
The Limits to Growth, published in 1972, was an attempt to bridge this divide. It generated criticism almost the moment it was published, primarily from those who viewed any discussion of finite limits as an attack on free enterprise and the capitalistic economic system in place through most of the world. What I find most concerning is the fact that, in broad brush, the pattern of widespread resource depletion and economic collapse that the original study suggested would occur sometime in the middle of this century, seems to be rolling out in real time as mid-century approaches.
Prior to 2011, I had written and talked at conferences about the state of the planet but with specific reference to coral reef systems. In those days I was naively of the belief that if we could convey to people the facts of climate change and other assaults on the planet, and particularly on coral reefs headed for universal elimination, they would understand and they would then act to address these problems. I was very wrong, but I take solace in the fact that many scientists were very wrong. We all seemed to think that if we explained the science, the world would respond. But of course, it didn’t!
As I have now come to understand, people do not make decisions on the important things in life based on the facts. They make their decisions based on emotion and to a large degree on the attitudes and actions of their peer group. I’ve also come to understand that even scientists reach conclusions in this way. It is our monstrous delusion that we approach the world in a rational manner and make our decisions objectively. My decision, as an environmental scientist, to talk about the state of the planet is not based on a rational assessment of the modest value of adding my unique voice. It’s driven emotionally by a feeling that, being some sort of mini-super-hero scientist, perhaps I can save us.
In my 2021 book, Coral Reefs, I explored the many reasons why people do not make their life decisions by way of a rational evaluation of the data, while also doing my best to reveal why coral reefs have been so mesmerizing for me. People only care for those things they love and coral reefs are difficult to love if you don’t know much about them. So if I could make reefs more relatable… Suffice to say, people mostly fail to respond to the environmental crisis for many different reasons. These include apparent implausibility of the claims, strong but invalid arguments to the contrary, and the fact that the crisis is unwinding very slowly – nothing to worry about yet.
For many people, the claim that we are causing an environmental crisis seems impossible: How could we inadvertently do serious damage to the planet’s capacity to sustain our lives? Surely our gods will ensure this cannot happen. Surely the planet is far too big and far too dependable to be damaged by human activities.
Other people readily embrace counter arguments that seem just as plausible. There is a coordinated program of such counter arguments put forward by those with vested interests in our current ways of using natural resources, disposing of waste products and keeping our economies humming. These counter arguments sound just as reasonable as the claims that we are damaging the planet, unless one investigates them in detail, and they are articulated in as professional and authoritative a manner as are the claims we are causing damage.
Finally, many people see the environmental crisis as something happening slowly, if at all, and not directly impinging on their own lives – the crisis is just not important enough to worry about. These people, perhaps the majority, have seemingly more important things to worry about than some wonky ideas about planetary collapse. Today, I want to focus on the pace of the environmental crisis. Because the pace is frighteningly rapid.
And so to 2026
So what is the state of the planet in 2026? Let’s just say it’s less good than it was in 2025. Let’s also say that if we go on at this rate the planet is going to deteriorate quite substantially over the next 100 years or so.
Emissions of greenhouse gases
In February, Climate Trace, a non-profit US-based but global consortium, reported that global emissions of greenhouse gases reached a new record of 60.6 Bt CO2e. (That is 60.6 billion tonnes of CO2 – with methane and other greenhouse gases included proportionally according to their heat-trapping capacity relative to CO2. Bt is also written as Gt, gigatons, but either way a billion tonnes or a gigatonne is 1,000,000,000 tonnes.)
Back to the emissions. The 60.6 BtCO2e was an increase of 0.5% over the emissions in 2024 – 60.3 Bt CO2e.
Well-respected and older, EDGAR, the Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research, is managed by the European Commission’s Joint Research Center based in Brussels. Since 1970 EDGAR has compiled data on emissions by country and region using a well-validated IPCC methodology. I tell you all this because while both sets of data are respected, the numbers from Climate TRACE are a bit higher, and Climate TRACE gets its data out faster. Accounting for emissions in a systematic and comprehensive fashion for the whole planet is not an easy task and if the two bodies produced exactly the same numbers we might even be suspicious.
Normally I would go with EDGAR, but I want to include 2025, and they have not yet reported. In 2024, EDGAR shows global emissions to have been 53.2 Gt CO2e – about 7 Bt or Gt less than reported by Climate TRACE.
Climate TRACE does have data back to 2015, but not easily extracted, and EDGAR recently provided a very clear graphic using its data all the way back to 1970.
Global emissions per year since 1970 broken down into emissions for different economic sectors. Note the dip in emissions in 2009 and in 2020.
Data and graph © EDGAR.
This graph shows clearly that following a possible slight decrease in 1982, the total emissions have grown every year except in 2009 and 2020 – the dot com bubble burst and the covid lockdown year. More to the point, the rate of increase does not appear to have been slowed at all by the Paris agreement in 2015. These are increases in the rates of emission – we have been putting a little more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere almost every year since 1970.
Yes, I know, the growth of solar, wind and other non-fossil energy sources has been strong, far stronger than many people expected. But so has the growth of the global population and the global economy. With the fossil fuel giants ever ready to supply our needs, the human endeavor has been booming like there was no tomorrow. As a result, we have consumed all that new green energy, plus a little bit extra fossil-sourced energy every year.
Climate TRACE provides a much more somber graph – all tones of blue and black, but only back to 2015. And it shows the same relentless climb in emissions except for 2020. You do remember 2020, don’t you? When we all stayed home, the skies got bluer, and the economy tanked.
Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere
The story about greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is simpler, because there has always been one source of definitive measurements. Since 1958, University of California’s Scripps Institute, and subsequently the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration which manages adjacent duplicate instruments, have provided a continuous record of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere above Mauna Loa, Hawaii. The CO2 graph is updated monthly, the data are updated daily, and you can download all the data if you so choose. What is in the atmosphere is the total of all our additions of CO2 year after year minus the CO2 that has moved from the atmosphere to the oceans or back to the land due to photosynthesis by plants and simple dissolving into oceanic waters.
Plot of atmospheric CO2 in ppm above Mauna Loa, Hawaii, since 1958. If anything, this line is slowly curving upwards meaning that the rate of increase is getting faster, precisely the opposite of what we need to see if climate change is to be slowed.
Image courtesy NOAA.
This graph recording the concentration of CO2 above Mauna Loa is the longest-running, direct measurement of this gas in the atmosphere. The graph measures only CO2, not all greenhouse gases, and expresses the amount as the concentration in parts per million of air. The red line tracks monthly means while the black line shows the concentration with the monthly variation taken out. Other instruments monitor other gases, such as methane, and tell similar stories, but CO2 is far more abundant and therefore the most important greenhouse gas out there.
The NOAA site updated its graph for CO2 to February on 5 March 2026 and reported an average of 429.35 ppm CO2 for February, an increase from the 427.09 ppm in February 2025. This graph always fascinates me because of the annual cycle in CO2 abundance due to the annual cycle in photosynthetic activity in the world’s forests. These are predominantly north of the equator and more active in the northern summer, sucking CO2 out of the air. It’s not just people who influence the composition of the atmosphere!
Now, I look at this graph regularly. I keep hoping that I will begin to see it plateauing or even turning down. After all, if we reduce our emissions to the atmosphere the amount up there should decrease. I still don’t see that. If anything, the line is still curving upwards. Our increasing annual additions are clearly having an impact on the atmosphere, exactly as expected.
Average global temperature
When it comes to temperature, rather than just a few instruments clustered on a mountain, we have multiple instruments scattered across the planet and on satellites orbiting above. After all, the measuring of temperature is one of the primary activities of those who monitor, report and forecast the weather and humans have been monitoring temperature for as long as we have had thermometers.
Geoscientists and climate scientists have also developed a number of ways to use proxies for direct temperature measurements, and they use these to determine temperatures far back into the history of the planet. These range from relatively simple proxies, such as the measurement of tree ring thickness, to far more complicated ones, such as the ratio of 16O to 18O atoms of oxygen in the calcium carbonate molecules of shells of marine organism. Trees grow faster, producing thicker annual rings, in warmer climates, while 16Oatoms are minutely lighter than 18O atoms and more likely to be incorporated into carbonate ions in warmer waters. All this to say we know how to measure temperature and we do a lot of temperature measuring.
Unlike atmospheric CO2 however, the global temperature record is affected by many processes in addition to our emissions of greenhouse gases. Most important of these is the el Niño – la Nina cycle in which the equatorial Pacific becomes warmer during the el Niño phase and cooler during the la Nina phase. I call it a quasi-cyclic phenomenon because while the world oscillates between el Niño and la Nina phases the oscillation can take anywhere from three to seven or eight years for one cycle. And the variations in temperature it creates are large enough to ramify across the world. In North America, el Niño years tend to be warmer and stormier than la Nina years. Such changes also lead global average temperatures to fluctuate.
Global average annual temperature expressed as the departure from (anomaly) the average temperature over the 1850 to 1900 period. Image from Berkeley Earth.
The world experienced a particularly strong el Niño during 2023-4 while 2025 was a weak la Nina period, and in 2026 we are once again shifting towards el Niño conditions. The global average temperature for 2025 was the third highest since 1850 at 1.44oC above the average for 1850 to 1900. It was exceeded by 2024, the highest, at 1.52oC, and by 2023, second highest at 1.47oC above the average for 1850 to 1900. The last 11 years are the warmest 11 years in the global temperature record. Again, it is difficult to see any effect of the 2015 Paris agreement. But then, given the continuing increase in the rate of emissions of greenhouse gases, we should not really expect to see any effect of the Paris agreement on global temperature.
How rapid is the warming?
A graph of temperature through time such as the one from Berkeley Earth shows us that the planet is warming up. But it also can show us how quickly it is warming. Since 1980 the planet has warmed about 1oC (from 0.4 to 1.4oC above the preindustrial level). That is a rate of about 0.2oC per year. If we keep warming at that rate, we will reach +14.8oC by 2100, a lot warmer than even the most pessimistic scenarios developed by IPCC suggest (because nobody believes we are going to continue warming the planet at the current rate until the end of the century). Warming is particularly rapid at the present time.
But how does the current rate of warming compare to warming in past geological times? The rapid rise of temperature at the start of the Eocene, 56 million years ago is the most rapid change of global temperature known in the last 450 million years. Over about 5000 years, temperature increased abut 6oC. More recently, the 4o-5oC warming between the last glacial maximum about 20,000 years ago and the start of the Holocene at 11,700 years ago took 8000 years. Both these examples of rapid increase come in around 0.5o – 1.0oC per thousand years. The 2oC increase since preindustrial times took only 100 years, and present rates of warming approach twice that rate. Under these circumstances it is hard to pretend that what the world is going through right now is unlikely to have much impact on the environment.
What does the future hold
Before I go any further, it’s important to acknowledge that the future is still under our control and that what we do in the next few decades will have enormous consequences for our future and the future of the rest of the planet. We are not at a place where it is impossible to make improvements by changing our behavior.
Climate change is perhaps the most important way in which humans are currently influencing the state of the planet. Back in 2015 at the time of the Paris accord there was some optimism that the world was about to turn a corner and that our use of fossil fuels would begin to be reduced. We had already begun to cut back the use of coal. It seemed that oil would be next and that gas would ultimately also be curtailed, but several things happened in subsequent years.
The Paris agreement did have an impact on climate policy. Countries around the world strengthened their efforts to shift towards renewable sources of energy and to increase energy efficiency. Initial efforts were insufficient to reach the Paris goal of not having global average temperature grow by more than 1.5oC, but in subsequent years, many countries increased their commitments. However, in the recent past there has been a slowdown of momentum. This is partly due to the economic impacts of the covid pandemic which forced countries to take action to achieve short-term expansion of economic activity – the recovery – and to the distraction which the covid crisis presented. It is difficult for governments, businesses and individuals to continue to focus on the need to lower carbon footprints when there are much more pressing needs created by the pandemic.
The major fossil fuel producers, post 2015, were beginning to announce policies to wind down their emissions, and therefore their fuel production, but they more recently have backtracked and are seeking expansion of fossil fuel production and use. One can be charitable and suggest that their about face was a responsible recognition of the need to ensure availability of energy for an economy that needed to grow rapidly. Or one can say they took advantage of the economic disruption to get back into fossil fuel extraction, full speed ahead.
Just as important perhaps, was a widespread change towards less liberal politics around the world. Donald Trump’s destabilization of governance in the USA, including a manic effort to remove every climate-friendly policy or program of the US government, has had a chilling effect, but the shift towards the right, and to a focus on economic growth and away from environmental sustainability, has been repeated in a number of countries around the world. In any event, while there is much to applaud in the rapidity with which solar farms, wind farms, heat pumps and electric vehicles have been adopted around the world, there is little reason at present to anticipate a reinvigorated effort to rein in greenhouse gas emissions and bring climate change under control.
We have already seen a year when global mean temperature was more than 1.5oC above the preindustrial average temperature (2024) and we will see more (2026 seems a good bet). Climate scientists are now predicting that it is likely that the Paris threshold – a global climate warmer than 1.5oC above the preindustrial average (1850 to 1900) – will be exceeded by 2030. Indeed, the temperature data are interpreted by some to suggest the rate of warming has speeded up since Paris in 2015.
Tipping points – good and bad
One alarming possibility to consider is that the planet has now warmed sufficiently that several positive feedback mechanisms have kicked in that will continue to accelerate the warming. Expansive wildfires have been a feature of the last several years, and the fires emit copious quantities of CO2 among other gases. These emissions are not the ones the Paris agreement is designed to track, but they still contribute to the warming of the planet. Widescale melting of permafrost is releasing copious quantities of methane, the most potent of the greenhouse gases, and these emissions also warm the planet.
Of course, just as there are tipping points that worsen the rate of warming, there can be tipping points in how we respond to what is happening. The rapidity of the transition under way towards use of green energy to generate electricity and the equally rapid switchover from internal combustion to electric vehicles are signs we could be approaching a tipping point in how we power our lives. Ultimately, we are going to reduce our emissions of greenhouse gases, and the more we experience the consequences of climate change the more likely we are to make that transition. I personally am confident that this particular naked ape will make the right choices sooner than may appear likely at present. It’s just that being a naked ape, we tend to muck about doing stupid stuff for a bit longer than is wise, and we suffer needlessly because of that. Which brings me back to my opening comments: people don’t make decisions based on a rational assessment of the facts. They make their decisions based on emotion and to a large degree on the attitudes and actions of their peer group. When those emotions kick in, we can get positive tipping points in our behavior. On this Earth Day, please ask your Facebook Friends to do all they can individually to reduce the use of oil, gas and coal.