What is it about?
The Earth is currently gaining more energy from the Sun than it is losing back to space. This imbalance‐called the Earth's Energy Imbalance (EEI) In this study, we combine global surface temperature data with measurements of this heat imbalance at the top of the atmosphere to estimate how fast the planet will keep warming through the rest of the century. For this purpose, we use a robust statistical method and test it in different ways to make sure the results are reliable. Our findings suggest that the Earth will keep gaining heat for at least the next couple of decades. Even in a scenario where greenhouse gas emissions are kept low, it's very unlikely that this warming trend will start to reverse before the early 2040s. This is more than 10 years later than earlier estimates suggested, which matters for planning how to reduce emissions and adapt to climate impacts. The study also notes that more research is needed to better understand why the Earth's heat imbalance is increasing faster than expected
Featured Image
Photo by NASA on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Earth Energy Imbalance (EEI) has been included as a new indicator of climate change in the latest issue of the WMO report on the state of the global climate (WMO, 2026), with year 2025 showing the highest record since satellite observations began in the 1960's. This growing imbalance indicates that the total amount of heat stored on Earth is not just increasing but accelerating, as also supported by the increasing ocean heat content. Implications for climate projections are currently not clear given multiple source of uncertainties in both aerosol forcings and climate responses. Yet, if the current EEI is really larger than simulated, it means that the global ocean is absorbing more heat than expected, that more future warming is already locked in, and that the remaining carbon budget compatible with the Paris Agreement is smaller than anticipated.
Perspectives
Our results are broadly consistent with previous related studies which have assessed the recent increase in EEI primarily as a forced response (Li et al., 2024; Raghuraman et al., 2021, 2023; Samset et al., 2025). The application of another Bayesian method has led to the same conclusion that this forced response is underestimated by most CMIP6 models (Li et al., 2024). This underestimation may however not be persistent if the observed trend is explained by improved air quality over East Asia (Samset et al., 2025) rather than by a lack of sensitivity to the greenhouse gas radiative forcing. Such a partitioning is still debated (Mauritsen et al., 2025; Minière et al., 2025) and deserves further investigation to better understand the apparent model failure to capture the recent increase in the observed Earth heating rate.
Hervé Douville
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Constraints on Climate Change Stabilization Based on Observations of Earth's Energy Imbalance, Geophysical Research Letters, May 2026, American Geophysical Union (AGU),
DOI: 10.1029/2025gl121056.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
