This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Global warming is expected to cross the 1.5°C temperature threshold—the lower limit of the Paris Agreement temperature goal—within a handful of years. This temperature increase shows no signs of slowing, and on our current trajectory, Canada is likely to experience temperatures 5°C above preindustrial levels by the end of the century.
These are the headline messages of two major climate reports released earlier this month: the United Nations Environment Programme's Limiting Overshoot report is a stark reminder that global climate mitigation efforts have been insufficient to avoid exceeding this critical climate target. Canada's Changing Climate Report 2026 shows in detail what the consequences of this global failure could mean for Canadians. None of this is good news, nor is it surprising.
In 2015, the same year the Paris Agreement was signed, I joined colleagues in Montreal and around the world to launch the Climate Clock project, which for the past decade has counted down the time remaining until temperatures reach 1.5°C above preindustrial levels. I hoped at the time that global mitigation efforts would succeed in reducing emissions and adding time to the clock. This has not happened fast enough, and the clock now shows less than four years remaining until the 1.5°C threshold is crossed.
The consequences of this continued warming are also not surprising to those of us who participated in writing Canada's Changing Climate Report. In the report, we presented evidence of increases in heat and precipitation extremes, fire season length, glacial retreat, permafrost loss and rising sea levels. We showed that these changes are projected to continue to intensify in the coming decades in response to ongoing global greenhouse gas emissions and resulting global warming.
The important message of both reports is not that the world has failed (which it has) nor that the consequences of this failure are dire (which they are). The critical message is that the climate crisis will get even worse if we continue with the halfhearted mitigation efforts of the past decade. Every additional increase in global temperatures will cause more intense and damaging climate extremes.
If we continue on our current trajectory, we will reach global warming of 1.5°C around 2030, then 1.6°C four years later and 1.7°C four years after that. By midcentury, we will have crossed 2°C and be well on our way to 3°C at the end of the century. Recall that in Canada, temperatures have increased about twice as fast as the global average.
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