New climate data and risk modelling suggest global heating is accelerating far faster than expected, with catastrophic consequences unless fossil fuel use is rapidly reduced.

Hothouse Earth, the state of the planet in which civilisation and possibly even humans can no longer survive, is arriving much faster than predicted, according to new satellite data.

Latest measurements, carefully analysed to exclude anomalies such as El Niño, reveal a planet cooking up at a steady 0.48 degrees per decade since 2015, in what is thought to be the most rapid heating event in all its geological history.

The new rate of warming revealed by the satellites is almost three times that previously measured ( 0.18 degrees C per decade from 1970–2010) and nearly double that of the most recent decade ( 0.27, from 2015–25) scientists warn.

Such an increase could potentially deliver 3 degrees of average global heating by 2050 – a level that will wreck the global food system, smash the economy and kill up to half the Earth’s population.

These latest numbers render obsolete the Paris Climate Accord and its call to keep the Earth’s temperature increase below 1.5 degrees, along with all the actions and promises made by nations worldwide so far. They signal that disaster is arriving much more quickly than originally feared – and will be far worse for those who have to live through it.

However, when El Niños are added to constant global heating, Earth’s temperature could reach 4 by 2050, which is a true Hothouse Earth – a temperature........

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