Copernicus, the European Union's climate change service, now says the world could cross the Paris agreement's long-term warming limit as soon as 2029. When the deal was adopted, the projection was around 2045.
The finding came in a bulletin released at the COP31 climate conference in Antalya, Turkey, alongside a separate analysis from Climate Action Tracker, a nonprofit that studies climate policies. The Paris threshold is 1.5°C (2.7°F) above the preindustrial average. Copernicus said global warming has accelerated significantly since 2015, and that the benchmark could now be passed years earlier than first expected.
Read the comparison with care. One number is an approximate date, the other is an earliest case. "As soon as" marks the early end of a range, so the gap between 2045 and 2029 probably overstates how far the typical expectation has moved, though the direction is clear. The source also does not say how Copernicus defines a crossing. That matters, because the Paris limit is generally understood as a long-term average, not a single hot year.
Climate Action Tracker answered a different question. Instead of asking when the threshold arrives, it found that the planet is still on track to warm nearly 5°F by 2100. The group said that rise would devastate coral reefs, disrupt agriculture and forests, and melt most of the world's ice. Because the two reports measure different things, they should not be netted against each other.
Together they describe a target that is both approaching sooner and being overshot by where current policy points. Whether 2029 holds depends on how long the acceleration continues, and neither report settles that in the material available.