Climate change is not getting better. Global temperatures are still rising, greenhouse gas emissions hit a new record in 2024, and the ocean continues to absorb heat at an accelerating rate. There are, however, real signs of progress in clean energy and deforestation that are beginning to slow the trajectory. The honest answer is: the problem is still getting worse, but the tools to reverse it are scaling faster than most people realize.
Where Temperatures Stand Right Now
The ten warmest years in recorded history have all occurred since 2015. NOAA ranked 2025 as the third-warmest year since records began in 1850, behind 2024 (the hottest ever) and 2023. In 2025, the global surface temperature sat 1.34°C above pre-industrial levels, which is dangerously close to the 1.5°C threshold that international agreements treat as a critical guardrail.
This isn’t a blip. Each decade since the 1980s has been warmer than the one before it, and the warming is accelerating. The oceans, which absorb roughly 90% of the excess heat trapped by greenhouse gases, set another heat record in 2025. The rate of ocean warming between 2005 and 2025 was more than double the rate measured over the longer 1960–2025 period. Warmer oceans fuel stronger storms, bleach coral reefs, and raise sea levels.
Emissions Are Still Rising
The single most important metric for whether climate change is “getting better” is the amount of carbon dioxide humans pump into the atmosphere each year. In 2024, energy-related CO₂ emissions grew by 0.8%, reaching an all-time high of 37.8 billion metric tons. That’s roughly 357 million additional tons compared to the year before.
There is a small silver lining buried in that number. The rate of increase has slowed. Technologies like electric vehicles, heat pumps, and solar panels are beginning to chip away at what emissions growth would have been without them. But “growing more slowly” is not the same as shrinking. To stabilize the climate, global emissions need to fall sharply, not just plateau.
What Current Policies Actually Deliver
Under the Paris Agreement, nearly every country submitted pledges to cut emissions. About 145 countries, covering roughly 77% of global emissions, have announced or are considering net-zero targets. The gap between those promises and reality, though, remains enormous.
The UN Environment Programme’s 2025 Emissions Gap Report lays it out plainly. If every country fully delivers on its current pledges, the world is on track for 2.3 to 2.5°C of warming by 2100. If countries only follow through on the policies they’ve actually implemented so far (rather than what they’ve promised), the projection rises to 2.8°C. Both figures overshoot the 1.5°C target by a wide margin and exceed the 2°C upper limit the Paris Agreement was designed to prevent.
Clean Energy Is Scaling Fast
The brightest spot in the climate picture is the explosive growth of renewable energy. In 2024, renewables generated 32% of the world’s electricity. That share is projected to reach 43% by 2030. Over the next five years, the world is expected to add roughly 4,600 gigawatts of new renewable power capacity, double the amount installed in the previous five years.
Electric vehicles are following a similar curve. More than 20% of all new cars sold worldwide in 2024 were electric, up from single digits just a few years earlier. Global EV sales topped 17 million that year and are expected to exceed 20 million in 2025. By the end of 2025, roughly one in four new cars sold globally will be electric. This kind of market shift was considered wildly optimistic a decade ago.
These trends matter because they represent permanent structural changes. Once a solar farm replaces a coal plant, that swap doesn’t reverse. Once consumers buy electric cars, the gasoline those cars would have burned stays in the ground. The challenge is that clean energy is growing alongside rising total energy demand, so it hasn’t yet pushed fossil fuel use into sustained decline globally.
Forests: A Mixed Picture
Deforestation has slowed significantly over the past three decades. In the 1990s, the world lost a net 10.7 million hectares of forest per year. By 2015–2025, that figure had dropped to 4.12 million hectares. The rate of deforestation itself fell from 17.6 million hectares per year in the 1990s to 10.9 million hectares in the most recent decade.
Forest carbon stocks have actually increased, reaching 714 gigatons globally. But the rate of forest expansion has also slowed, from 9.88 million hectares per year in 2000–2015 to 6.78 million in 2015–2025. Forests remain under pressure from agriculture, logging, and fires intensified by hotter, drier conditions. Keeping existing forests intact is one of the cheapest and most effective ways to prevent additional carbon from entering the atmosphere.
The Risk of Tipping Points
Perhaps the most sobering reason climate change isn’t “getting better” is the growing risk of tipping points: thresholds beyond which certain changes become self-reinforcing and irreversible, regardless of what humans do afterward.
Tropical coral reefs may have already crossed such a threshold, with mass dieback underway worldwide. Greenland is losing 30 million tons of ice every hour, and researchers estimate that its melting could become unstoppable at around 1.5°C of warming, a level the planet is already flirting with. The West Antarctic Ice Sheet faces a similar risk. Arctic permafrost is already thawing, releasing methane, a greenhouse gas far more potent than CO₂ in the short term.
Scientists are also closely watching the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, the ocean current system that includes the Gulf Stream and keeps northwestern Europe relatively mild. Some researchers argue it could shut down within the next 20 to 30 years without aggressive emissions cuts. Others believe that outcome is unlikely this century. A 2025 modeling study found that if the world doesn’t return to 1.5°C by 2100, there’s roughly a one-in-four chance that at least one major tipping point, whether the collapse of the Amazon rainforest, the loss of an ice sheet, or the shutdown of that ocean current, will be crossed.
The Bottom Line on Progress
Climate change is not getting better in the sense that matters most: the planet is still warming, emissions are still climbing, and the risks are compounding. What is genuinely improving is the speed at which clean alternatives are replacing fossil fuels. Solar, wind, and electric vehicles have moved from niche technologies to dominant market forces in under a decade. Deforestation is declining. More countries have binding climate targets than at any point in history.
The gap between where the world is headed (2.3–2.8°C of warming) and where it needs to be (1.5°C) is still enormous. Closing it depends on whether the clean energy transition accelerates fast enough to push total global emissions into decline within the next few years, not just slow their growth. The tools exist. The question is whether they’ll be deployed at the scale and speed the problem demands.