A peer-reviewed study published on March 6, 2026, in Geophysical Research Letters finds that the rate of global warming has nearly doubled over the past decade, reaching approximately 0.35 degrees Celsius per decade. After stripping out the short-term effects of El Niño, volcanic eruptions, and solar variability, the researchers report a statistically significant acceleration in warming since roughly 2015, pointing squarely at human-caused factors as the driver.
What the Study Actually Did
The central method is straightforward in concept but demanding in execution. The researchers subtracted the estimated influence of three well-known natural climate signals from the global temperature record: the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO), aerosols injected by volcanic eruptions, and fluctuations in solar output. These three factors are the largest sources of year-to-year noise in surface temperature data, and they can temporarily push global averages up or down by a few tenths of a degree. By filtering them out, the team isolated the underlying trend using a statistical framework that links temperature anomalies to indices of ENSO, volcanic forcing, and solar irradiance.
In a companion description of their methodology, the authors explain that they regress global temperature against these natural drivers to estimate how much each one typically cools or warms the planet, then subtract those fitted contributions from the observed record, leaving what they call the “forced” component of climate change. According to the published analysis, this approach is designed to remove “ubiquitous fluctuations” around the long-term trajectory without erasing the signal of greenhouse gas–driven warming.
What emerged was striking. Once natural variability was removed, the warming rate over the most recent ten-year window came to roughly 0.35 degrees Celsius per decade, according to a summary from the American Geophysical Union. That figure represents a near-doubling compared to the longer-term average rate of warming observed through the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The acceleration is not a statistical artifact of one unusually hot year or a single strong El Niño event; it persists after those influences are explicitly accounted for in the model.
Cross-Checked Across Three Major Datasets
One of the strongest aspects of this finding is its consistency across independent temperature records. The researchers tested their results against NASA’s GISS Surface Temperature Analysis, or GISTEMP v4, which is publicly available through the GISS temperature archive. They also used the NOAAGlobalTemp dataset maintained by the National Centers for Environmental Information, accessible via NOAA’s global land–ocean product, and the UK Met Office Hadley Centre’s HadCRUT5 record, produced jointly with the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.
Each of these datasets uses different station networks, ocean temperature sources, and methods for handling gaps in observational coverage. HadCRUT5, for instance, includes detailed uncertainty characterization and ensemble realizations designed to account for coverage bias, particularly in the Arctic and other data-sparse regions. NASA’s temperature work draws on a broader climate science portfolio at the Goddard Space Flight Center and its associated Earth science division, which together integrate satellite and in situ measurements.
The fact that the acceleration signal holds across all three surface records reduces the chance that it reflects a quirk of any single measurement approach. When multiple independent reconstructions, built from different raw observations and processing methods, converge on the same answer, the result carries more weight. In this case, each dataset shows a clear increase in the underlying warming rate once natural variability is filtered out.
Why El Niño Cannot Explain the Surge
A common rebuttal to claims of accelerating warming is that recent record-breaking years, especially 2023 and 2024, were amplified by a powerful El Niño cycle. That argument has some surface appeal. El Niño events temporarily redistribute heat from the tropical Pacific into the atmosphere, and NOAA’s ENSO monitoring indices confirm that a strong event was underway during that period. But the entire point of the new study is to test whether natural variability like ENSO can account for the post-2015 warming trend. After removing ENSO’s estimated contribution using their regression-based corrections, the acceleration remained.
The same logic applies to volcanic aerosols and solar cycles. Major eruptions inject particles into the stratosphere that can temporarily cool the planet by reflecting sunlight back to space, while solar output follows an approximately 11-year cycle with modest impacts on global temperature. Neither factor, once statistically removed, explained away the faster warming. The residual trend, the part left over after accounting for all three natural influences, still showed a clear upward shift beginning around 2015, suggesting that the acceleration reflects changes in the human-driven component of climate forcing rather than a temporary blip in natural cycles.
Scientific Debate Over the Filtering Approach
Not everyone in the climate science community treats these results as the final word. As reporting in Nature has noted, there is an active methodological debate about how precisely researchers can separate natural variability from the forced warming signal. The choice of ENSO index, the lag structure used in regression models, and the treatment of volcanic aerosol forcing all involve judgment calls that can shift the magnitude of the estimated acceleration.
Critics do not dispute that the planet is warming or that human activity is the primary cause. The disagreement centers on whether the post-2015 period represents a genuine step-change in the rate of warming or whether the apparent acceleration could partly reflect limitations in the statistical filtering itself. When researchers subtract estimated natural signals from a noisy time series, the precision of those estimates matters. If the El Niño correction is slightly too small, for example, some natural warmth leaks into the residual trend and inflates the apparent acceleration; if it is too large, the method might understate the true rate of human-caused warming.
The study’s authors acknowledge these uncertainties but argue that they have taken reasonable steps to address them. They test their results across multiple temperature datasets and experiment with different ways of estimating the influence of ENSO, volcanoes, and solar variability. The consistency of the acceleration signal across those sensitivity checks is what gives the finding its analytical force, even though the exact numerical value of the recent warming rate still carries a margin of error.
What Could Be Driving the Acceleration
If El Niño, volcanoes, and the sun are not responsible, what is? The study itself focuses on detecting and confirming the acceleration rather than pinpointing a single cause, but several mechanisms are consistent with the observed pattern. Rising greenhouse gas concentrations continue to set new records, increasing the amount of heat trapped in the atmosphere and oceans. At the same time, reductions in sulfate aerosol pollution from shipping and power plants, driven by clean-air regulations in several regions, may have removed a cooling mask that had been partially offsetting greenhouse warming.
Changes in cloud cover and ocean heat uptake patterns could also play a role. If the oceans are temporarily absorbing less heat into deeper layers, more of the energy imbalance would show up as surface warming. Shifts in regional circulation, such as a strengthening of certain ocean currents or altered wind patterns, might redistribute heat in ways that amplify global mean temperature. These hypotheses remain under active investigation, but they align with the basic conclusion of the new analysis: the recent surge in warming is best explained by human-driven changes in the climate system, acting on top of natural variability rather than being dominated by it.
The broader implication is that the world may be moving into a period where past experience underestimates the pace of change. If the higher warming rate persists, temperature thresholds associated with more severe climate impacts could be crossed sooner than many projections assumed. That prospect underscores the importance of rapidly cutting greenhouse gas emissions while also improving monitoring of both natural and human-driven climate forcings. By carefully disentangling the sources of variability in the temperature record, studies like this one provide an early warning that the climate system’s response to human influence may be accelerating, and that policy and adaptation efforts will need to keep up.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
