Climate change is not slowing down. By nearly every measurable indicator, it is speeding up. Global temperatures, sea levels, ice loss, and greenhouse gas concentrations have all set records in recent years, and the rate of warming itself appears to be accelerating. The short answer to this question is that while some individual metrics show year-to-year variability, the overall trajectory is moving faster, not slower.
Temperatures Are Rising Faster Than Before
The average global temperature in the 2023-2024 period reached 1.58°C above pre-industrial levels, crossing the symbolic 1.5°C threshold that climate scientists have long warned about. That jump wasn’t subtle. The year-over-year increase was 0.36°C, an unusually large spike driven partly by a strong El Niño event in the tropical Pacific.
El Niño, a natural ocean-atmosphere cycle, temporarily boosts global temperatures by releasing heat stored in the Pacific Ocean. Sea surface temperature patterns accounted for roughly 92% of the interannual warming in 2023-2024. So some of that record heat was a natural fluctuation layered on top of a long-term trend. But when researchers strip out the effects of El Niño, volcanic eruptions, and solar variations from the temperature record, the underlying trend still shows a statistically significant acceleration of warming since about 2015, with over 98% confidence. The planet warmed faster in the last decade-plus than during any previous decade on record.
Why Warming May Actually Be Accelerating
One of the more counterintuitive reasons warming is picking up speed involves air pollution. For decades, burning fossil fuels released tiny sulfur particles into the atmosphere that reflected sunlight and partially masked the full warming effect of greenhouse gases. As countries have cleaned up air pollution (a good thing for human health), that cooling mask has thinned.
The energy pushing global warming, known as radiative forcing, increased by about 50% between the 2000s and 2010s. It went from adding 0.4 watts per square meter per decade to 0.6 watts per square meter per decade, largely because of reduced aerosol cooling. A 2020 regulation from the International Maritime Organization required ships to burn cleaner fuel with less sulfur, adding an estimated 0.074 watts per square meter of additional warming pressure. That’s a small number globally, but it stacks on top of everything else.
There is still some scientific uncertainty about exactly how much these cleaner skies are amplifying warming. But the direction is clear: removing pollution particles unmasks warming that was always being caused by greenhouse gases underneath.
Greenhouse Gas Levels Keep Climbing
The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere grew by 3.32 parts per million in 2023 and 3.33 ppm in 2024. To put that in context, the average annual increase over the past several decades has been closer to 2 ppm. Two consecutive years above 3 ppm is unusual and concerning. Early data for 2025 suggests a return closer to 2.23 ppm, but one year doesn’t establish a new trend.
The reason CO2 keeps accumulating is straightforward: emissions haven’t peaked in any meaningful way. Total energy-related CO2 emissions hit an all-time high of 37.8 gigatonnes in 2024, up 0.8% from the previous year. That increase of roughly 295 million tonnes came largely from growing energy demand outpacing the expansion of renewables.
Methane, a greenhouse gas with far more short-term warming punch than CO2, tells a slightly more nuanced story. Atmospheric methane grew by 17.68 parts per billion in 2021, a sharp spike. But the annual increase has since dropped: 12.97 ppb in 2022, 8.56 ppb in 2023, and 7.23 ppb in 2024. That’s a welcome trend, though methane is still accumulating in the atmosphere, just at a slower pace than the post-2020 surge. It reached 1,946 ppb in November 2025, well above anything in the historical record.
Ice Sheets Are Losing Mass Faster
Greenland and Antarctica together lost ice at a rate of 105 gigatonnes per year in the early 1990s. By 2016-2020, that rate had more than tripled to 372 gigatonnes per year. Between 1992 and 2020, the two ice sheets contributed 21 millimeters to global sea level rise.
Greenland’s losses are especially volatile. In 2017, the island lost about 86 gigatonnes. Just two years later, in 2019, it lost 444 gigatonnes, more than five times as much. That kind of variability makes it hard to draw conclusions from any single year, but the long-term direction is unmistakable. In Antarctica, the losses are concentrated in the western portion, which sheds about 82 gigatonnes per year. East Antarctica remains roughly in balance for now, though measurements there carry the most uncertainty.
Sea Level Rise Is Accelerating
Global sea level rose by an average of 3.4 millimeters per year between 1993 and 2024. Over the most recent decade (2014-2023), that rate climbed to 4.7 mm per year. And in 2024 alone, sea level jumped 5.9 mm, the largest single-year increase on record. That acceleration is driven by two forces: ocean water expanding as it absorbs heat, and land-based ice melting into the sea at an increasing rate.
This is one of the clearest signs that climate change is not slowing down. Sea level doesn’t fluctuate with weather patterns the way temperature does. It integrates heat from the entire ocean and ice loss from both poles into a single, relatively smooth signal. That signal is curving upward.
What About Renewable Energy Growth?
The question of whether climate change is slowing down sometimes reflects a hope that the rapid growth of solar panels, wind farms, and electric vehicles is bending the curve. And there is real progress: renewable energy capacity is expanding at record rates globally. But so far, clean energy has mostly met new demand rather than replacing fossil fuels. That’s why emissions hit a new high in 2024 even as solar and wind installations surged.
For climate change to actually slow down, the total amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere would need to stop growing, which requires emissions to fall to the point where natural processes (oceans, forests, soils) can absorb what’s left. We are nowhere near that point. CO2 is accumulating faster than it was a decade ago, methane is still rising, and the warming already locked into the system will continue to play out for decades regardless of what happens next with emissions.
The physical reality is that climate change operates on a delay. Even if emissions dropped sharply tomorrow, the heat already trapped by existing greenhouse gases would continue warming the planet and raising sea levels for years. The question isn’t whether the changes are slowing down. It’s whether human action can slow them down fast enough to limit the worst outcomes, and so far, the atmosphere’s answer is no.