According to climate researchers, the amount of ice in the world’s oceans is continuing to decline.Image: AP/AP
Nov 4, 2025, 7:24 amNov 4, 2025, 7:24 am
Before the UN climate conference in Belém, Brazil, leading climate research organizations listed the alarming consequences of increasing global warming.
Their climate fact paper published on Tuesday, a summary of the current state of knowledge on climate change, shows that several climate indicators have reached record levels this year or last. “We are observing that sea and land ice are shrinking worldwide, sea level rise is accelerating and weather extremes such as heat waves, droughts and heavy rain are increasing,” explained Professor Hans-Otto Pörtner from the Alfred Wegener Institute. According to the climate fact paper, the world’s 10 warmest years on record all occurred in the past 10 years – with 2024 as the most recent record year. According to the EU climate service Copernicus, Europe is the continent that is warming the fastest. According to the list, the goal set in the Paris Climate Agreement to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees compared to the pre-industrial era will be permanently exceeded within the next decade.
This means the Earth is at risk of reaching several climate tipping points. “We have probably already lost the tropical coral reefs,” explained the organizer of the extreme weather congress, Frank Böttcher. “At the latest from 1.5 degrees of warming, we also enter the high-risk area for other tipping elements, such as the ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica or the Atlantic overturning circulation.”
It is already too late to save the coral reefs in the world’s oceans.Image: keystone
Andreas Becker, climate expert at the German Weather Service, emphasized that exceeding the 1.5 degree limit does not mean that climate protection measures no longer make sense. “Every tenth of a degree of global warming that is avoided helps and, not least, contributes to reducing the otherwise enormous costs of climate adaptation,” he explained.
The authors of the climate fact paper therefore call for more decisive measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Accordingly, this demand is supported by the majority of humanity. “A representative survey of around 130,000 people in 125 countries showed that 89 percent of people worldwide want their governments to have an ambitious climate policy,” explained the board of the German Climate Consortium (DKK), Thomas Hickler from the Senckenberg Biodiversity and Climate Research Center in Frankfurt am Main.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz will also travel to Brazil. Image: keystone
The two-week world climate conference begins next Monday in Belém. Before that, some heads of state and government, including Chancellor Friedrich Merz (CDU), will meet there on Thursday and Friday for climate consultations. With the current climate protection commitments of the 190 signatory states to the Paris Agreement, the earth is currently heading towards dangerous warming of three or four degrees. (sda/afp)