Scientists warn of record heat and threats to climate monitoring

Planetary warming is intensifying and key climate indicators are deteriorating, leading scientists said Thursday, warning that funding decisions regarding Earth observation systems in the United States and other countries are threatening efforts to track global warming, UNN reports, citing AFP.

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More than 70 scientists, including members of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), expressed concern over record anthropogenic warming and a sharp increase in marine heatwaves in an annual study published between major IPCC assessments.

"These indicators are essential monitoring of the vital signs of a patient who is showing increasingly alarming symptoms," said Peter Thorne, co-author and professor of physical geography at Maynooth University in Ireland.

"They all rely on a suite of global observation capabilities that, for the first time in my lifetime, are systematically or actively deteriorating or under threat," said Thorne, who is also vice-chair of the Global Climate Observing System (GCOS), a UN-backed Earth monitoring program.

According to the study published in the journal Earth System Science Data, by 2025, global temperatures reached approximately 1.39°C above pre-industrial levels, with almost all of this warming — 1.37°C — caused by human activity.

Scientists warned that human-induced warming will reach 1.5°C by approximately 2030.

Under the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate, countries agreed to limit warming to well below 2°C — and preferably 1.5°C — to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.

However, the report emphasizes that the world is rapidly accumulating heat, intensifying the "Earth's energy imbalance" — the rate at which energy enters and leaves the planet.

"Without human influence, this figure should be close to zero, but it has been rising since the 1970s and has now reached a record level, doubling in recent decades," said the study's lead author Piers Forster, professor of climate change physics at the University of Leeds in the UK.

The high rates of warming are driven by a combination of greenhouse gas emissions reaching an all-time high and a reduction in aerosol pollution, which has weakened the cooling effect as these particles reflect sunlight.

However, CO2 emissions remain the primary driver of global warming and are at a record high.

While scientists say emissions are slowing, the "carbon budget" — the amount of CO2 that can still be emitted to keep warming below 1.5°C — could be exhausted in about three years.

"Given that greenhouse gas emissions are still rising, keeping global warming below this (1.5°C) threshold now seems unattainable," said Aurélien Ribes, a climatologist at the French meteorological service. Sea levels rose by about 23 cm between 1901 and 2025, and this rise is accelerating — to 3.84 mm per year — due to the melting of land ice and thermal expansion as the ocean warms.

The number of marine heatwave days — a new indicator added to this year's report — has more than tripled since 1991, reaching an average of 65 in 2025.

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Launched in 2023, the Indicators of Global Climate Change report provides policymakers with annual information on the state of the planet amid accelerating climate change. The last IPCC assessment was completed in 2023, and the next is expected in 2028 or 2029.

The annual indicators report is based on approximately 40 global datasets derived from satellites and a multitude of ground, sea, and air instruments, including weather stations, ships, buoys, and weather balloons.

However, the publication writes, "efforts to combat climate change are increasingly taking a back seat to wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, while governments face a global energy crisis, budget constraints, and a climate-skeptical President Donald Trump."

"Future monitoring of these indicators, such as oceanographic and satellite measurements of Earth's energy imbalance, is under threat due to geopolitical decisions and public funding decisions," the report says.

It notes that funding for the UN World Meteorological Organization has decreased, and the Global Climate Observing System (GCOS) is also under threat.

Several satellite programs are at risk, including those in the United States.

The authors pointed to a recent decision by the Trump administration to decommission hundreds of deep-sea instruments.

Such instruments are "incredibly important" for understanding how oceans absorb heat and how this affects weather patterns and ocean circulation, said Samantha Burgess, strategic climate lead at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF).

"We really need these in-situ observations to continue monitoring the climate," she said.

Scientists also mentioned a decrease in the number of in-situ measurements in Africa, the Western Pacific, and South America.

Burgess said that an aircraft carrying an atmospheric observation system in the UK was recently defunded.

"So, unfortunately, this is not just about one country," she said.

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