Danger Dust

This is a critical decade: human-induced global warming rates are at their highest historical level, and 1.5 °C global warming might be expected to be reached or exceeded in around 5 years in the absence of cooling from major volcanic eruptions (Sects. 8 and 9). Yet this is also the decade when global GHG emissions could be expected to peak and begin to substantially decline. The indicators of global climate change presented here show that the Earth's energy imbalance has increased to around 1.0 W m−2, averaged over the last 12 years (Sect. 5), which represents a 25 % increase on the value assessed for 2006–2018 by AR6. This also has implications for the committed response of slow components in the climate system (glaciers, deep ocean, ice sheets) and committed long-term sea-level rise (through ocean thermal expansion and land-based ice melt/loss), to be addressed further in future updates.