When the first well-founded estimates of the mean annual temperature became known in October, scientific misery had crept out of cover again: Warming stopped or, alternatively, no temperature record for five years in a row, such and similar claims circulated in social media bubbles.

The supposed downward trend since 2016 is reminiscent of the speculations about the so-called climate change pause - the "hiatus" - more than twenty years ago, when man-made climate change was temporarily stopped and climate research was declared refuted.

Joachim Müller-Jung

Editor in the features section, responsible for the “Nature and Science” section.

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Today, as then, such statistics are a pseudoscientific sleight of hand: Choose the appropriate time period and, if necessary, hide anomalies such as the global climate phenomenon El Niño, which can distort the climate trend in the short term. What is undisputed, however, is that 2021, together with the six years before, will most likely be one of the warmest seven years since weather records began. The long-term heating of the planet is not taking a break this year either.

A plus of 1.1 degrees in the global mean compared to the pre-industrial era - almost twice as much in Germany - that is ominously close to the mark that scientists and politicians marked as vehemently as never before as the “planetary upper limit” this year : 1.5 degrees.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) already made it clear in its first partial report for the sixth climate status report before this year's COP26 climate summit in Glasgow that more warming than that leads deep into a world of climate-related, primarily home-made disasters.

The seas are rising faster and faster

For the first time, the IPCC has described accelerated climate change as “clearly man-made”. As for the consequences, there has already been more than enough to suffer this year, with the impacts getting closer and closer for many. Mega heat, conflagrations, floods. In Europe, the summer was the hottest in more than five hundred years, the months with extreme heat have now increased eightfold, and the World Meteorological Authority has declared sea level rise to be worrying in its status report. From an average of 2.1 millimeters level increase per year in the decade from 1993 to 4.4 millimeters on average from 2013 to 2021.

Similar to the “emission curve”, it is an unbroken, steeply rising straight line. The seas are rising faster and faster as more and more ice is melting in the mountains and on the ice sheets of some polar regions, particularly Greenland and West Antarctica.

Many figures and analyzes this year were packed into such complex statistics that their explosiveness could be overlooked; And yet: never before has it been made so clear to people as this year that even moderate global warming means a huge loss of stability. Almost 14,000 scientists from 150 countries declared a “climate emergency” in August and called for “a fundamental change”. The prospect of such a social and political change - the term “great transformation” is now making a career - threatens to fizzle out. In 2020, in the wake of the pandemic, the climate-damaging carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels fell significantly for the first time since the financial crisis - by 5.4 percent globally. Hope germinatedCorona will force the desire for more crisis resistance and accelerate the restructuring of the energy systems in particular. But this year, it seems clear by now, emissions are likely to return to pre-pandemic levels.

Flattening the curve, this action credo, which has long since passed away in the pandemic, has given way to economic reality.

Should road and air traffic return to their previous level, there is a risk of emissions rising again as early as next year.

Laughing gas and methane releases, the two most important greenhouse gases besides carbon dioxide, have reached new highs.