Robust acceleration of Earth system heating observed over the past six decades

Abstract

Global heating of the Earth system is unequivocal. However, detecting an acceleration of Earth heating has remained elusive to date, despite suggestive evidence of a potential increase in heating rates. In this study, we demonstrate that since 1960, the warming of the world ocean has accelerated at a relatively consistent pace of 0.15 ± 0.05 (W/m2)/decade, while the land, cryosphere, and atmosphere have exhibited an accelerated pace of 0.013 ± 0.003 (W/m2)/decade. This has led to a substantial increase in ocean warming, with a magnitude of 0.91 ± 0.80 W/m2 between the decades 1960–1970 and 2010–2020, which overlies substantial decadal-scale variability in ocean warming of up to 0.6 W/m2. Our findings withstand a wide range of sensitivity analyses and are consistent across different observation-based datasets. The long-term acceleration of Earth warming aligns qualitatively with the rise in CO2 concentrations and the decline in aerosol concentration during the same period, but further investigations are necessary to properly attribute these changes.

Indicators of Global Climate Change 2023: annual update of key indicators of the state of the climate system and human influence

“…The contributions to increases in the Earth heat inventory throughout 1971-2018 remained stable: 91 % for the full-depth ocean, 5 % for the land, 3 % for the cryosphere and about 1 % for the atmosphere (Forster et al, 2021). Two recent studies demonstrated independently and consistently that since 1960, the warming of the world ocean has accelerated at a relatively consistent pace of 0.15 ± 0.05 W m −2 per decade (Minière et al, 2023;Storto and Yang, 2024), while the land, cryosphere, and atmosphere have exhibited an accelerated pace of 0.013 ± 0.003 W m −2 per decade (Minière et al, 2023). The increase in EEI over the most recent quarter of a decade (Fig.…”

Is Recent Warming Exceeding the Range of the Past 125,000 Years?

“…The overall low (165 years) and temporally fading (up to 184 years) resolution of the global proxy network, plus the generally high and temporally increasing dating uncertainty characteristic to many of the records (schematically illustrated in Figure 5), massively mutes the variability in Holocene GST reconstructions derived from these data, and obscures any comparison with modern-day, short-term, temperature observation [25,26]. We therefore argue that comparisons of decadal-scale instrumental GSTs with centennialscale proxy-derived GSTs, as included in the IPCC Technical Summary, are of limited meaning.…”