Wholestory

Two years of negotiation aimed at a successor to the Kyoto Protocol ended in a five-page document that the conference noted rather than adopted. The Copenhagen Accord recognised “the scientific view that the increase in global temperature should be below 2 degrees Celsius” — the first time that figure entered a UN climate text — but set no binding targets. Instead it invited industrialised countries to file their own 2020 targets by the end of January 2010, and recorded a collective promise by developed countries “to a goal of mobilizing jointly USD 100 billion dollars a year by 2020” for developing countries. The pledge-and-review architecture that the Paris Agreement would formalise six years later begins here, in a text widely reported at the time as a failure.

195 countries agreed a legally binding treaty at the Paris conference committing them to hold “the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels” and to pursue efforts “to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C”. It abandoned the Kyoto model of targets negotiated for industrialised countries in favour of the architecture sketched at Copenhagen: every country files its own contribution, revisits it every five years, and is held to it by disclosure rather than sanction. The bargain is that universality is worth more than enforceability. It entered into force on 4 November 2016, far faster than expected — and of the 195 parties that adopted it, 194 remained in it as of January 2026.

Asked by the Paris conference to assess what 1.5°C of warming would actually mean, the IPCC approved a special report finding that the extra half-degree to 2°C is not a rounding error — it would expose an additional 420 million people to severe heatwaves, among sharply worse regional impacts. The arithmetic of avoiding it was equally stark: global carbon dioxide emissions would have to fall about 45% from 2010 levels by 2030 and reach net zero around 2050, requiring “unprecedented” transitions across energy, land, urban and industrial systems. Overshooting and returning below the line later would mean leaning on carbon-removal techniques unproven at scale. This is where 1.5°C stopped being an aspiration bolted onto the Paris text and became the number the argument is now conducted in.

A review by working climate scientists went back over the run of ice-free-Arctic predictions made between 2007 and 2016, and reached two conclusions that sit awkwardly with how the episode is usually retold. The first is that the field never accepted them: “almost everyone in the field was unconvinced by these extrapolations from the initial 2007 AGU meeting presentation onward”, the review says, listing the method’s defects — curve-fits to noisy data extrapolated out of range, wildly different answers depending on whether ice volume or extent was used, and “a lack of any physical modeling for the future state”. Asked at a 2014 Royal Society workshop whether the extrapolation had any physical basis, its author answered no. The second is that the most-quoted version is misattributed. In his 2007 Nobel lecture Al Gore relayed two studies — one giving “less than 22 years”, one by US Navy researchers “as little as 7 years” — and said the ice could be gone, not that it would be; the review calls that “truthful reporting” and the version that has outlived it “a conflation of Al Gore with the scientific community”. Arctic summer ice has not vanished. It is down roughly 40%.

The UN Environment Programme’s annual measurement of the distance between what countries have promised and what the temperature goals require found global greenhouse gas emissions at a record 57.7 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2024, up 2.3% in a year — more than four times the average annual growth of the 2010s. Deforestation was decisive: land-use emissions rose 21%, driven by tropical South America. G20 countries accounted for 77% of the increase and the least-developed countries for 3%. The round of national plans due in 2025, covering the decade to 2035, was judged to have only a “limited effect” on the gap, leaving the world on course for 2.3–2.5°C this century even if every plan is delivered in full. One bright spot: the report finds China’s emissions may have peaked in 2025.

Developed countries provided and mobilised $136.7bn of climate finance for developing countries in 2024 and $132.8bn in 2023, according to the OECD, which has tracked the pledge made at Copenhagen since 2015. That promise — $100bn a year by 2020 — was first met in 2022, at $115.9bn, two years behind schedule, and has been exceeded every year since. The composition is less flattering than the total. Adaptation finance, the part that helps countries survive warming already locked in, fell from a third of the total in 2020 to a quarter in 2023 and 2024; money reaching low-income countries was $9.6bn in 2024, still below its 2022 peak of $11.1bn. A successor goal running to 2035 has since been agreed, with its first assessment due in 2028.

Arctic sea ice had spent 39 days of 2026 at or below record daily lows by late July, following its joint-lowest winter maximum in the satellite era. The measure anchors the present state of a cryosphere thread whose decades of 'ice-free Arctic' forecasts — some badly overshot — are a target of this topic's historical record. Through July the retreat stayed near the bottom of the record: NOAA ranked Arctic extent sixth lowest for the month and Antarctic extent fifth lowest, giving the smallest combined global sea-ice cover for a July in four years of the 48-year record.

Two independent records agree that July 2026 was as hot as any July measured, and differ only on the ranking. NOAA put it 1.18°C above its twentieth-century average — tied with 2024 as the warmest July in the record — with North America, Africa and Asia each having their warmest July and Northern Hemisphere land setting an all-time July high. The European reanalysis put it at 1.47°C above pre-industrial levels and called it joint-second, behind 2023 and level with 2024. They agree on the ocean: sea surface temperatures were the highest ever recorded for a July, and in NOAA’s accounting this was the first July to pass 1.0°C above average, a departure matched only by months inside previous El Niño events. Western Europe had its hottest June–July on record, with drought deep enough to push the Seine, Rhine and Danube to exceptionally low flows. The past four Julys are the four warmest measured.

Eurostat’s first estimate for 2026 put EU greenhouse gas emissions at 837 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent in the first quarter, 0.3% above the previous quarter while economic output was flat. Against the same quarter of 2025 the picture reverses: emissions down 1.2% while GDP grew 0.8% — the decoupling on which the bloc’s target of a 55% net cut by 2030 depends. Electricity, gas and heat supply drove the quarterly rise, at +4.8%, while households, manufacturing and transport all fell. Twenty member states emitted more than in the previous quarter and seven less. Eurostat counts on a residence basis, which differs from the accounting the EU submits under the Paris Agreement.