1.47°C above the world we inherited
The planet is now about 1.47 °C warmer than it was before we started burning fossil fuels — the gap between the climate your great-grandparents were born into and today1. That figure is the global average surface temperature in 2024, measured against the 1850–1900 baseline. It is the single most-watched number in climate science, and 2024 set a fresh record for it.
The number on this page keeps climbing because it’s projecting forward along the trajectory the world’s current policies actually imply: from +1.47 °C today toward roughly +2.70 °C by 21005. That second figure isn’t a forecast — it’s where existing policy points if nothing changes. What actually happens depends on what we do next.
warmer than the pre-industrial world — and 2024 was the hottest year ever recorded
Three agencies, one answer
Three credible sources publish global temperature anomalies; we used the two most recent annual figures:
- NASA GISS (GISTEMP v4): +1.28 °C above its 1951–1980 baseline; +1.47 °C above the pre-industrial baseline
- NOAA NCEI: +1.29 °C above the 20th-century average; +1.46 °C above the pre-industrial baseline
- IPCC AR6 Synthesis Report (2023): +1.1 °C — but this is the 2011–2020 decadal average, not a single year, so it’s an older reference point
NASA and NOAA agree within 0.01 °C — well within the methodological spread expected from different ways of handling sparse Arctic data and ship-versus-buoy ocean records. We use the NASA figure as the published value.
Where current policy is taking us
The IPCC AR6 Working Group I (2021) published five Shared Socioeconomic Pathway (SSP) scenarios4:
| Scenario | Description | Warming by 2100 |
|---|---|---|
| SSP1-1.9 | Paris-aligned, rapid decarbonisation | 1.0 – 1.8 °C |
| SSP1-2.6 | Strong mitigation | 1.3 – 2.4 °C |
| SSP2-4.5 | Middle of the road, roughly current policies | 2.1 – 3.5 °C |
| SSP3-7.0 | Regional rivalry, weak cooperation | 2.8 – 4.6 °C |
| SSP5-8.5 | Fossil-fuelled development | 3.3 – 5.7 °C |
Climate Action Tracker, which assesses what real-world national policies actually add up to, currently puts the planet on a ~2.7 °C trajectory by 2100 under current policies (range 2.2 – 3.4 °C)5. That sits in the middle of SSP2-4.5 and is what the counter projects toward.
If every country fully achieved its 2030 pledges (the Nationally Determined Contributions), the trajectory would drop to ~2.4 °C. If every long-term net-zero pledge were achieved on time, it would drop further to ~1.9 °C. The counter shows the more honest line: where current implementation actually goes.
Why we count from 1880
The 1.5 °C and 2 °C targets in the Paris Agreement are defined against the pre-industrial baseline. That’s why this counter uses the same reference: it lets you read the number against the policy goal directly. A reading of “+1.47 °C” means we’re 0.03 °C below the 1.5 °C threshold the world’s governments collectively committed to staying under — as a single year.
That margin is narrower than it sounds. At the current rate of warming (~0.2 °C per decade), 1.5 °C is crossed as a single-year value sometime in the late 2020s, and as a sustained 20-year average around the mid-2030s.
The warming is driven by what we’ve put in the atmosphere. CO₂ concentrations track every degree of it.
Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, parts per million
Globally, right now
What a degree and a half already costs
The IPCC AR6 Synthesis Report is blunt: human activities “have unequivocally caused” the warming, and “every increment of global warming will intensify multiple and concurrent hazards”3. The evidence from 2024 alone reads like a series of records falling at once. Every one of the ten warmest years ever measured has occurred in the past decade2, and the heat ran in an unbroken streak — fifteen consecutive months, June 2023 through August 2024, each setting a new monthly record1. The oceans absorbed the brunt of it: heat content in the top two kilometres of seawater reached an all-time high2, and that stored heat is what drives sea-level rise, marine heatwaves, and the quiet melting of ice shelves from below.
And then the reefs. Marine heatwaves bleached 80% of the world’s warm-water coral in 2024 — a die-off so severe that researchers now describe it as the first climate tipping point Earth has actually crossed6. The phrase is precise, not rhetorical: a tipping point is a threshold beyond which a system shifts to a new state and does not shift back on any timescale that matters to us. The first one has been crossed at +1.47 °C — comfortably below the ceiling the Paris Agreement was built to defend.
The first tipping point looks like this in real time.
What’s waiting further up the curve
Recent research catalogues sixteen possible tipping elements in the Earth system8. Five become possible at 1.5 °C of sustained warming; ten become possible at 2 °C. The ones drawing the most attention:
- Greenland ice sheet — accelerating mass loss. Collapse threshold may sit at 1.5 °C of sustained warming. Complete loss adds ~7 m of sea level over centuries to millennia.
- West Antarctic ice sheet — instability already underway in the Amundsen sector. Possibly already past its tipping point. Adds another ~3 m.
- Amazon rainforest — dieback risk between 20% and 40% deforestation; the basin has lost ~17%. Self-reinforcing once started.
- Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) — the Gulf Stream system. Weakening confirmed; collapse possible this century under high-warming scenarios.
- Permafrost — Arctic soils hold roughly twice as much carbon as the atmosphere. Thawing in leaps rather than gradually.
A 2024 Earth System Dynamics review made the most uncomfortable point: tipping elements interact. Crossing one raises the probability of crossing others — a cascade structure7. Coral first; ice sheets and Amazon plausibly next.
Most of the locked-in sea level rise from ice sheet loss is decades to centuries away. But the curve has already bent.
What bends the line back down
The IPCC’s number for keeping warming under 1.5 °C is a 60% reduction in global greenhouse gas emissions by 2035 versus 2019 levels3. Global emissions are currently still rising — they grew about 1% in 2024 by IEA estimates. The gap between the trajectory the counter is projecting toward (+2.7 °C) and the trajectory that would stabilise temperature (≤+1.5 °C) is the central political question of this century.
The counter at the top of this page will keep climbing as long as the policy trajectory underneath it stays where it is. The question is no longer whether the line is rising. The question is what bends it.
