5 Charts Show Climate Progress as Paris Agreement Turns 10 Scientific American November 22, 2025 Meghan Bartels edited by Andrea Thompson The 2015 Paris Agreement forged a path for the world to stave off the worst climate change scenarios. Here’s where we stand 10 years later. Ten years ago the world came together to forge a path out of the climate emergency in the form of a global treaty dubbed the Paris Agreement. Under the accord, nations committed to keeping global temperatures to “well below” a two-degree-Celsius increase over preindustrial levels and to striving to limit that increase to 1.5 degrees C. These goals were ambitious and required greenhouse gas emissions to begin declining by 2025. Yet emissions continue to rise. Annual negotiations around seeing the Paris Agreement through have continued over the past two weeks at this year’s United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP30, in Brazil, where participants are acknowledging two simultaneous truths: we have made meaningful strides in protecting our planet, but huge leaps are still needed to avoid the worst outcomes.
Those leaps are daunting, given that President Donald Trump is once again pulling the U.S. out of the accord and that countries such as China and Saudi Arabia are also still trying to keep fossil fuels in the energy mix. China, however, is rapidly overtaking the U.S. as a renewable energy powerhouse, and solar and wind have seen exponential gains globally in recent years. These five charts show why the Paris Agreement is vital—and how the world is doing 10 years into the endeavor. The Paris Agreement is built around temperature increases compared with an unspecified preindustrial baseline, generally taken as the latter half of the 19th cIn 2015 the average global temperature was 1.1 degrees C hotter than it was during the preindustrial period. Today it is around 1.3 degrees C. (In 2024—the hottest year on record—the planet was more than 1.5 degrees C, but the Paris agreement looks at the average over many years. The World Meteorological Organization projects that 2025 will be around 1.4 degrees C above the preindustrial average and either the second or third hottest year on record.)
The increase is grim but not the end of the story—especially if humans can stop climate pollution quickly enough to reverse the warming trend. “Every ton matters; every tenth of a degree we avoid matters; every year matters,” says Costa Samaras, an energy policy expert at Carnegie Mellon University.entury. Every year since 1970—more than half a century—temperatures have been above this average and soaring upward......read on and the graphics are very revealing https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-paris-climate-agreement-is-turning-10-these-5-charts-show-what-progress/