Every land region on Earth is already near the Paris warming limit

Pick almost any stretch of land on the planet, from the Russian Arctic to the highlands of Mexico, and the temperature record now reads as if the Paris Agreement’s tougher goal had already been reached there. A study published in Nature Climate Change on Nov. 9 puts every land region it examined at 90 to 94 percent of the warming expected in a world 1.5 °C hotter than the 1850-1900 baseline. The authors say that is close enough to treat the threshold as arrived at the regional scale, years before the global average formally crosses it.

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The paper comes from Tong Li, Francis Zwiers, Xuebin Zhang and Qiaohong Sun, and it appears as world leaders prepare for the UN climate conference in Antalya, Türkiye.

Ninety to ninety-four percent, region by region

The research team is led out of the University of Victoria’s Pacific Climate Impacts Consortium, where Li, Zwiers and Zhang work, with Sun based at Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology. Their paper, “All IPCC AR6 regions are close to their 1.5 °C- and 2 °C-equivalent warming limits,” is described in the university’s EurekAlert release as the most comprehensive assessment to date of regional warming across global land areas since pre-industrial times. By the end of 2025, according to the release, all regions had reached 90 to 94 percent of the warming level a 1.5 °C world would bring.

A fuller account in Gizmodo’s coverage of the paper adds that the same regions sit at 65 to 76 percent of the 2 °C level, and that the team worked across the 46 land regions defined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its sixth assessment cycle. Those regions are the standard map that the panel uses for regional climate-impact figures, so the result can be compared directly with earlier assessments.

Because many parts of the world have sparse or missing thermometer records, the team combined in-region observations, global observations and climate-model simulations of the past. Eos, the magazine of the American Geophysical Union, described the study as the first regional-scale analysis of its kind, and quoted Zhang on the continuing need for long-running observation networks.

Land runs hotter than ocean-influenced regions

The global land average sits at 1.9 °C above pre-industrial levels, according to the release, and that average hides a wide spread. Northern land masses have warmed the most. Northwestern North America is about 3 °C above its pre-industrial level, and Gizmodo reports the Russian Arctic at 3.3 °C, the largest figure in the analysis. Northern Central America, which includes Mexico, stands at 1.7 °C.

Canada is already past 2 °C, the release says, with the country 2.2 °C warmer over the past decade than in 1850-1900. That number comes from the separate Canada’s Changing Climate Report, which used similar methods, rather than from this paper.

The slowest warming shows up where oceans dominate the regional climate. Southern South America, southeast Asia and New Zealand have warmed less than their northern counterparts, since water takes up heat more slowly than land does. Zhang said that communities in many parts of the world are already facing much higher levels of warming than the global figure suggests, a point the release uses to explain why a single global number can mislead regional planners.

Zwiers, Li and Stott on a threshold that arrived early

Li put the finding plainly: current warming is already “indistinguishable from that of a 1.5 C world.” Zwiers framed the policy consequence, saying the risks of 1.5 °C are “no longer a future concern; they are already being experienced.” He added that regional warming has reached levels effectively equivalent to those of a 1.5 C world, and that the numbers should help regional policymakers quantify how much their areas are affected. The release notes that the consortium has already applied this kind of regional analysis to infrastructure design, including buildings and bridges.

Outside scientists read the result as confirmation rather than shock. Richard Allan, a professor of climate science at the University of Reading, told the Science Media Centre it is no surprise that human-caused warming across the continents has reached these levels, and that the findings seem robust. Peter Stott of the Met Office Hadley Centre called the work an important advance, while cautioning that scientific uncertainties remain because the method depends on current climate models.

The 2029 date and the 2 °C line still open

The study expects all regions to reach their 1.5 °C-equivalent warming at about the same time, around 2029. Eos reports that under the high-emissions scenario SSP5-8.5 the global average reaches 1.5 °C in 2029 and 2 °C in 2042, and Eos also notes that Berkeley Earth data put current global average warming near 1.44 °C. The gap between that global number and the regional 90 to 94 percent figures is the paper’s central contrast: the average still sits below the Paris line while every land region sits just beneath it.

Stott, who wrote a related News and Views commentary in the same issue of Nature Climate Change, said keeping warming below 1.5 °C now looks unavoidable, yet crossing the 2 °C threshold in the Paris agreement is still not inevitable. Zwiers likewise said staying under 2 °C remains possible, but only with very rapid emissions cuts. How fast those cuts come before 2029 is the open question the authors leave to negotiators in Antalya.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.