The pace of global warming almost doubled in just 10 years. The hoax is the pretense that climate change isn't happening
The pace of global warming almost doubled in just 10 years. The hoax is the pretense that climate change isn't happening
10:15 AM • March 11 2026 IST
There are so many things to worry about, from the picayune – will El Al lose my suitcase? – to the significant – the planet is being destroyed and there is no alternative to living on Earth. We would rather fret about the missing valise than the fact that sooner than thought, we may not need suitcases any more.
Global warming is accelerating. Deniers begone, dreamers wake up: The pace of warming nearly doubled in the last 10 years. Average global warming is on track to 1.5 degrees Celsius not by the end of the century but by 2030, according to a new paper by Grant Foster, a retired statistician formerly of Tempo Analytics, with Stefan Rahmstorf of the University of Potsdam. It is published in Geophysical Research Letters and is titled "Global Warming Has Accelerated Significantly."
That is in less than four years and Foster and Rahmstorf say they have 98% confidence in their calculation, which is very high. This isn't a problem some vaguely imagined future generations might face. You will.
What have we? As the average global temperature keeps rising and people keep pretending it isn't, our Goldilocks climate is losing its fairy-tale quality and heading for nightmare territory at increasing speed, science formally warned for the first time this week.
If once there was argument over whether Earth's climate is warming, that's over. It is. As the climate destabilizes, weather conditions are becoming more extreme. No, Donald, blizzards in Florida and record cold in 40 American states don't mean global warming is a hoax.
The hoax is pretending climate change isn't happening.
Meanwhile, as temperatures broke records time and again in the last ten years, a different question emerged.
Is global warming not steady as widely assumed? Is it… accelerating?
Yes. "We can now demonstrate a strong and statistically significant acceleration of global warming since around 2015," Foster stated.
By how much? Until now the increase had been about 0.2 degrees Celsius per decade. As of 2015 it has accelerated to around 0.35 degrees Celsius per decade, they calculate. Almost double.
From the 1970s, the pace of global warming was widely thought to be more or less steady – though it couldn't have been. We can flaunt green credentials until the cows burp their way home but global greenhouse-gas emissions in 2025 were the highest ever recorded.
Greenhouse gases trap the sun's heat. As their proportion in the atmosphere increases, they trap more heat.
In any case, even steady warming was not okay. What that meant is that the average temperature on the planet surface was rising, but steadily – about 0.2 degrees Celsius per decade. Yay team. Non-scientists thought we could deal with that; we had time to invent new technologies – one keeps hearing that "we will be fine because we are smart apes and future generations will invent new technologies to capture carbon" or whatever.
Carbon capture is a technology still under development to remove carbon dioxide from industrial emissions or from the atmosphere itself. Ideally the capture process would remove more CO2 than it adds through the energy expended to remove the CO2. Processes to date have yet to achieve efficiency, certainly at large scale.
So, acceleration of global warming was inevitable because while we smart apes chatted about wind farms and the ecological merits of veganism, humankind has not scaled back on fossil fuel emissions. We all need to make an effort. The impact of one ant versus 8 billion ants is not the same.
Once upon a time, climatologists warned that an average increase of 1.5 degrees Celsius would be catastrophic. But the people shrugged, "If climate change is even real, let the kids deal with it. They'll invent technologies we can't even imagine. They'll fix everything." Or move to Mars. (Sneak peek; nobody is moving to Mars. Ever.)
Meanwhile not only the temperature but climate denial is on the rise. That's partly because the truth staring us in the face is hard to accept. But you can tell a bear it's a rabbit and it will still be a bear.
Why has dubiety persisted? Skeptics cling to natural extremes in temperatures and other parameters. They happen and do not necessarily demonstrate climate change, they argue. But in their study, Foster and Rahmstorf corrected the data for the influence of natural events such as El Niño cycles (periodic warming in the Pacific that disrupts weather patterns), volcanic eruptions, and solar variations.
With those influences cleaned out of the global temperature curve, what's left is a statistically significant acceleration of global warming since about 2015, they say. "Warming proceeding faster is not unexpected by climate models," they understate, and suggest that "it is a cause of concern and shows how insufficient the efforts to slow and eventually stop global warming under the Paris Agreement have so far been."
Yes, because the efforts are insincere. As Rahmstorf explains, natural variations caused "noise," that coupled with our reluctance to see what's in front of our eyes, helped to create the false impression that climate change had stopped, especially after the strong 1998 El Niño event. That event had temporarily boosted the average global temperature by 1.5 degrees Celsius But once they factored Nino and Nina into the data, including in the years 2024 and 2025, their effect is reduced to insignificance, Rahmstorf explains. The world is heating.
"Climate models have a relatively broad uncertainty range, and we're still within that," Rahmstorf said, adding that even so, acceleration this drastic "is a bit unexpected."
Could the last decade have been an outlier? Maybe but as Rahmstorf points out, 2030 is in four years' time. "The current rate doesn't need to continue long, and then we're above 1.5," he said.
What is predicted for 1.5 degrees Celsius past the pre-industrial average temperature? More of what we are seeing; increasingly intense weather featuring storms, droughts, floods, extreme heatwaves and cold snaps, ecosystem destabilization, extinctions and sea level rise. Landslides as extreme rain and ice melt destabilize hills and mountains.
Why is global warming accelerating? That isn't clear but actually it may have to do with a global reduction in aerosol pollution. The aerosols may have made us sick as dogs but also helped reflect sunlight.
What is to be done? "Studies show that global warming will stop around the time humanity reaches zero carbon dioxide emissions," the authors write, so evidently the formula includes ceasing CO2 (and methane) emissions, which so far are just increasing. We need to consume less.
The paper is a pure data analysis, but fingers can be pointed.
"We are not doing enough in terms of climate policy. We see this terrible rollback in the United States and, to a lesser extent, in Germany," Rahmsttorf said. "How quickly the Earth continues to warm ultimately depends on how rapidly we reduce global CO2 emissions from fossil fuels to zero."
That depends on how rapidly we admit that we need to do that. In his first term, Trump argued for climate change denialism, and this time he's arguably moving the needle. Less than a month ago, Trump announced that to foil the "Green New Scam" he was "officially erasing the scientific finding that climate change endangers human health and the environment," the New York Times reported.
Wipey wipey, Donald. Bombs away. You can eliminate the American government's legal authority to control the pollution coating our planet and pretend it doesn't matter to your heart's content. But your heart is about to get warmer and not in a good way. The political climate of denialism you are promoting portends that climate change will just accelerate even more.
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