TIME CO₂ Leadership Report

LOOK THROUGH THE NEW FIVE-year outlook from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), and you won't see the U.N. atmospheric-science body use the words emergency or disaster.

- Justin Worland

And yet it would be hard for anyone even semi-literate in the science of climate change to flip through it without a sense of urgency and alarm.

The report finds that global temperatures will continue at or near record levels with a possibility that the temperature rise since the Industrial Revolution nears 2°C by 2030. Already, warming momentarily breached 1.5°C in 2024. It’s a big marker: decades ago policy-makers settled on 2°C as an ideal cap of sorts. That’s because at some point between 1.5°C and 2°C, we might expect to begin seeing climate effects that are both dire and, perhaps more important, irreversible. The WMO report reaffirms that the world has entered that danger zone—and the risks posed by the planet’s warming are on the verge of growing dramatically.