Warming Is Speeding Up as Key Ecosystems Near the Edge

Warming Is Speeding Up across the planet's climate system, and some of Earth's most important ecosystems are being pushed close to points of no return. That was the warning from Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, speaking at the Reuters Sustainability Europe conference in London on Tuesday.

Global warming driven by fossil fuel emissions is accelerating, Rockström said, with damage to coral reefs and the Amazon rainforest close to becoming irreversible. Parts of the Atlantic Ocean circulation system — including the current that carries warm water from the Caribbean and moderates the climate of Western Europe — are nearing collapse, according to Reuters.

The remarks landed about three weeks before the UN climate talks scheduled for early November, adding a stark scientific voice to a negotiating season already facing headwinds. The latest science now shows the world on course to breach a degree and a half of warming within the next few years, Rockström said, a threshold that would make extreme weather more frequent and more intense.

The numbers behind the warning

The acceleration Rockström described has been building for decades. The rate of warming has roughly doubled since the late twentieth century, reaching about a third of a degree per decade in recent years, as reported by Eos on this month's planetary assessment. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is now higher than at any point in the last two million years.

That study, published in the journal BioScience, tracked sixteen planetary vital signs and found seven at record extremes. In May, atmospheric carbon dioxide breached 428 parts per million — roughly half again the pre-industrial level. Energy-related emissions topped 41 gigatons for the first time in 2025, while ocean heat content and global sea level both pressed to new highs. The findings echoed an earlier GenZ NewZ report on the same assessment, which detailed record glacier thinning and a scorching July.

Rockström's intervention sharpened the picture beyond the report's charts. Coral reefs have become the first major Earth system to pass a climate tipping point, according to TIME's coverage of the findings. The Amazon, meanwhile, is losing resilience as deforestation and drought reinforce each other. Rockström called it "incredibly disturbing" to watch lobbying aimed at easing rules on phasing out internal combustion engine vehicles, arguing that subsidies for petrol and diesel are undermining consumer demand for electric cars.

Why the timing matters

The speech arrived as the politics around the climate agenda look unusually strained. Saudi Arabia, Russia and China are among the countries pushing to delay a vital global climate report, with claims that developed countries skewed an IPCC review, as Clean Energy Wire noted. Within Europe, a group of conservatives is rallying to delay the bloc's climate levy on fuels, arguing that an energy crisis has already pushed prices too high. Italy, meanwhile, has met only fifteen percent of its energy transition targets for 2030, according to the ECCO think tank's annual monitoring.

For businesses and ordinary people, Rockström said the implication is preparation. Companies looking to build resilience should treat climate and nature as a single integrated agenda rather than separate issues, he said. While decarbonisation remains the priority, firms should also invest in preserving nature — particularly projects that maintain or rebuild biodiversity and freshwater reserves.

There is also a counterweight to the bleakness, and the scientists behind this month's findings acknowledged it. The accelerating expansion of renewable energy and advances in battery storage are encouraging, said co-lead author William Ripple, an ecologist at Oregon State University, even if they are only part of the transformation needed. Private money is starting to move toward nature too: Google, through the Symbiosis Coalition, has agreed a long-term arrangement with Working Trees to remove 270,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide through a silvopasture project in Brazil, planting trees on working pastureland across the Amazon and Cerrado.

What happens next will be shaped in large part by November's talks, where governments must show whether the message that Warming Is Speeding Up translates into policy. Clean-energy investment keeps climbing, with projects like Amazon's plan to fund nuclear reactors on a former coal site signaling where some of the biggest capital is flowing. But as Rockström's remarks made clear, the physical systems underpinning the economy — reefs, forests, ocean currents — are not waiting for the politics to catch up.