In 2022, the IPCC said that limiting warming to 2°C would require global greenhouse gas emissions to peak before 2025 at the latest, and be reduced by a quarter by 2030.
Let's look into it. Did greenhouse gas emissions peak earlier than 2025? The 2025 Global Carbon Budget in a news release projected 38.1 Gt of fossil carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions in 2025, a rise of 1.1%, and warned that climate change is reducing the combined land and ocean sinks. It finds that 8% of the rise in atmospheric CO₂ concentration since 1960 is due to climate change weakening the land and ocean sinks.
So, by how much are CO₂ concentrations rising? The image below shows that the 2024 CO₂ concentration increased by 3.77 ppm, the highest annual growth on record.
The image below shows one year of CO₂ daily and weekly means at Mauna Loa, Hawaii, with the daily CO₂ reaching a record high of 432.69 ppm on March 31, 2026. The image also shows a CO₂ concentration of 431.73 ppm for the week beginning on March 29, 2026, an increase of 4.47 ppm compared to 1 year ago. The annual peak in CO₂ is typically reached in May, so the daily average CO₂ looks set to reach an even higher peak in May 2026. How high could the 2026 peak be?
When taking into account CO₂ concentrations recorded at three further locations, the outlook for 2026 is even more dire.
The average growth for the years 2023, 2024 and 2025 was about 3 ppm. The highest daily CO₂ peak in 2025 was 431.25 ppm, so with 3 ppm growth the 2026 CO₂ concentration could reach a daily peak of 434.25 ppm in May, i.e. at the top end of the scale on the image below, or even higher than that, if growth turns out to be more than 3 ppm per year.
The 2025 annual mean at Mauna Loa was 427.35. If this growth of 3 ppm per year persists, CO₂ concentrations could reach an annual mean of 430.35 ppm in 2026.
High time for the IPCC to warn that we missed the target of limiting the temperature rise to 2°C and that with a 3°C rise in temperature humans are likely to go extinct.
Climate Emergency Declaration
The situation is dire and unacceptably dangerous, and the precautionary principle necessitates rapid, comprehensive and effective action to reduce the damage and to improve the outlook, where needed in combination with a Climate Emergency Declaration, as described in posts such as in this 2022 post and this 2025 post, and as discussed in the Climate Plan group.
Links
https://www.ipcc.ch/2022/04/04/ipcc-ar6-wgiii-pressrelease
• Global Carbon Budget - Fossil fuel CO2 emissions hit record high in 2025 (November 2025 News Release)
• NOAA - Global Monitoring Laboratory - Carbon Cycle Greenhouse Gases - Mauna Loa, Hawaii
https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/mlo.html
• NOAA - Global Monitoring Laboratory - data viewer - Mauna Loa, Hawaii
https://gml.noaa.gov/dv/iadv/graph.php?code=MLO&program=ccgg&type=ts
• Transforming Society
https://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2022/10/transforming-society.html
• Climate Plan
https://arctic-news.blogspot.com/p/climateplan.html
• Climate Emergency Declaration
https://arctic-news.blogspot.com/p/climate-emergency-declaration.html
• Climate Plan
https://arctic-news.blogspot.com/p/climateplan.html
• Climate Emergency Declaration
https://arctic-news.blogspot.com/p/climate-emergency-declaration.html