A team of 50 top scientists from across the world have sounded alarm bells warning that the world is getting hotter at 0.2 degrees Celcius per decade.

From 2013 to 2022, “human-induced warming has been increasing at an unprecedented rate of over 0.2 degrees Celsius per decade,” they reported in a peer-reviewed study aimed at policymakers.

“Even though we are not yet at 1.5C warming, the carbon budget. will likely be exhausted in only a few years,” lead author Piers Forster, a physics professor at the University of Leeds was quoted as saying by AFP.

Greenhouse gas emission remains the biggest contributor to rising temperatures. (Photo: Reuters)

That budget has shrunk by half since the UN’s climate science advisory body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), gathered data for its most recent benchmark report in 2021, according to Forster and colleagues, many of whom were core IPCC contributors.

The latest analysis comes against the backdrop of the IPCC report, which warned that the planet is on the brink of irreversible damage to the climate.

The report concluded that to stay under the warming limit set in Paris, the world needs to cut 60 per cent of its greenhouse gas emissions by 2035, compared with 2019, adding a new target not previously mentioned in six previous reports issued since 2018.

World leaders will be confronted with the new data at the critical COP28 climate summit later this year in Dubai, where a “Global Stocktake” at the UN talks will assess progress toward the 2015 Paris Agreement’s temperature goals.

The IPCC reports identified human activity as the key driver of the rising temperatures across the world.

Human activities, principally through emissions of greenhouse gases, have unequivocally caused global warming, with the global surface temperature reaching 1.1°C above 1850–1900 in 2011–2020.

Scientists said that emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, and other drivers of warming generated mostly by burning fossil fuels must not exceed 250 billion tonnes (Gt), if we want to have the slightest chance of staying under the 1.5C threshold.

The group further added that keeping the Paris temperature targets in play would require slashing CO2 pollution at least 40 percent by 2030, and eliminating it entirely by mid-century, the IPCC has calculated.

The UN-led IPCC had hinted that if the world continues to use all the fossil fuel-powered infrastructure either existing now or proposed, Earth will warm at least 2 degrees Celsius since pre-industrial times, the report said.

Researchers have reported a startling rise in temperature increases over land areas — excluding oceans — since 2000.