THE PLANET IS HEATING.
WE ARE NOT.
2024 was the first full calendar year above 1.5°C (Copernicus / NASA GISS). CO₂ broke through 425 ppm (Mauna Loa). Greenland and Antarctica are shedding hundreds of gigatonnes a year (NASA GRACE-FO). The Living Planet Index records a 73% average decline in monitored vertebrate populations since 1970 (WWF/ZSL 2024). Current national pledges still imply roughly 2.7°C of warming by 2100 (Climate Action Tracker; UNEP Emissions Gap 2024).
Six figures behind the composite.
One 0-100 score.
Heuristic seed snapshot. Climate stress sits in the upper end of the 'Severe' band: 2024 became the first full calendar year above 1.5°C, CO₂ broke through 425 ppm, ice loss accelerates, and current NDCs imply roughly 2.7°C warming. The headline number does not capture how unevenly the consequences fall.
Over time.
145 years of temperature, painted one stripe at a time.
After Ed Hawkins's iconic "show your stripes" design. Each vertical bar is one calendar year coloured by its global surface-temperature anomaly versus the 1850–1900 baseline. The blue end is roughly half a degree cooler than that baseline; the deep red end is +1.8°C and beyond. Hover any year for the exact reading.
Temperature, CO₂, and Arctic sea ice.
- Temperature anomaly (°C vs 1850-1900)HadCRUT5. 2024 above +1.5°C.
- Atmospheric CO₂ (ppm)Mauna Loa. 280 → 425.
- Arctic September sea-ice minimum (Mkm²)NSIDC. ~-13% per decade.
Where the temperature curve goes from here.
Solid line is HadCRUT5 history. Dashed lines are IPCC AR6 WG1 projections under five SSPs. Chips isolate scenarios.
What the score is measuring.
Several traditions reading the same data.
Who is responsible for the climate crisis, and what do they owe?
Anthropogenic emissions, dominated by historical fossil-fuel combustion in industrialised nations, are unequivocally responsible. The remaining carbon budget for 1.5°C is essentially exhausted; rapid, deep, sustained mitigation is required across every sector.
“It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land. Widespread and rapid changes have occurred.”
Roughly 80% of cumulative emissions come from countries housing 20% of the population, while consequences fall hardest on the rest. The relevant question is not just emissions reduction but reparations, loss-and-damage finance, and technology transfer on terms set by the affected.
“We are paying for a crisis we did not cause, in a currency we do not have.”
Indigenous peoples steward an estimated 80% of remaining biodiversity on 22% of the land surface. The framing of 'climate change' as primarily an emissions accounting problem misses the relational rupture between humans and non-humans that produced it.
“The land is not a resource. We belong to it, not the other way around.”
Fossil fuels are responsible for present prosperity and remain the only at-scale source for many uses. The transition will take decades and abandoning hydrocarbons faster than alternatives can scale risks an energy-poverty crisis that itself produces mass suffering. Continued investment in oil and gas is presented as a bridge.
Decoupling GDP from emissions has not happened at the speed required, and is unlikely to. The solution requires reducing the throughput of materials and energy in wealthy economies, not just decarbonising it; growth itself is the variable to relax.
“There is no green growth at the scale required. The arithmetic does not work.”
Across multiple traditions, the Earth is held in trust (khalifa in Islam; the Genesis-2 dominion-as-stewardship reading in Christianity). The crisis is therefore framed as both ecological and theological: a failure of moral relationship with creation that requires repentance and restorative practice.
“The Earth is a mosque, and every part of it must be kept clean.”
What path forward is realistic, and on whose terms?
Renewables, storage, advanced nuclear, direct-air-capture, and electrified transport are descending learning curves fast enough that aggressive scaling can decarbonise most of the global economy by 2050 without economic collapse. Policy and capital are the rate-limiting steps, not technology.
For the most exposed countries, 1.5°C is already lost. The honest priority is loss-and-damage funding, climate-resilient infrastructure, managed retreat from rising seas, and supported migration; mitigation is necessary but cannot be paid for at the expense of adaptation.
The most effective single intervention is securing Indigenous land rights, then re-learning relational practices: seasonal burning, polyculture, salmon stewardship, rotational use. The 'tech vs nature' framing is itself a Western imposition.
If political coordination keeps failing, solar-radiation modification and large-scale CO₂ removal may become unavoidable as last-resort interventions. The risks are real but must be weighed against the risks of doing nothing. Research and governance need to be ready before the temptation to deploy unilaterally arrives.
What each integer step looks like.
Between Paris floor and Paris ceiling. Every tenth of a degree adds tens of millions exposed.
We have already crossed the line we agreed not to.
First full calendar year above 1.5°C as a 12-month average. Roughly half the global population now lives in regions experiencing 'unprecedented' temperature combinations. Coral mass bleaching has become annual.
The lower 'safe' threshold. Now treated as a floor, not a ceiling.
70–90% of tropical coral reefs gone. Roughly 14% of the global population exposed to severe heatwaves at least once every five years. Arctic ice-free summers begin in the 2030s.
More than 99% of tropical reefs gone. WAIS commitment likely locked in.
Mediterranean and Mexican Gulf agriculture under chronic water stress. Sea-level rise of ~0.5 m by 2100. The West Antarctic ice sheet is widely judged to cross its irreversibility threshold.
Climate Action Tracker reads current national policies as broadly consistent with this.
Parts of South Asia and the Persian Gulf exceed human-survivability wet-bulb thresholds during heatwaves. Amazon dieback well underway in the southeast. AMOC at substantial weakening risk. Hundreds of millions internally displaced.
A planet substantially incompatible with the agriculture that fed us.
Major grain belts (US, South Asia, China, Europe) hit simultaneously by heat-driven yield collapse. Sea-level rise of 0.8–1.0 m by 2100. Ocean acidification breaches the calcification threshold for most shellfish.
Roughly 1 in 3 people live in conditions outside humanity's evolutionary climate niche.
Lenton et al. (PNAS) project ~3 billion people pushed outside the climate envelope our species has inhabited for the last 6,000 years. Multi-meter sea-level rise on multi-century commitment. Most coastal megacities require either retreat or seawalls beyond any deployed today.
Seven boundaries we can't un-cross.
Tipping points don't queue politely. They trigger each other.
Documented cascade links between the seven tipping elements. Solid lines are primary first-order links established in the literature; dashed lines are well-attested second-order feedbacks. Click any node to highlight everything it triggers downstream; click again or hit RESET to return.
The link runs both ways.
How a warmer Earth pulls the political trigger.
Climate is rarely a sole cause of war, but it is reliably a multiplier. The cases below were either documented in retrospect by peer-reviewed studies, or are flagged as elevated risk by major institutions for the decade ahead.
- Syria2006-2011MECHANISM · Multi-year drought + agricultural collapse + rural displacement
Worst drought on record in the Fertile Crescent displaced ~1.5M Syrians from countryside into already-fragile cities. Compounded with state failure to trigger the 2011 uprising.
SOURCE · Kelley et al. 2015 PNAS; Gleick 2014 Weather Climate & Society - Lake Chad basin1960s to presentMECHANISM · Lake-surface contraction + livelihood loss + insurgent recruitment
Lake Chad has shrunk by roughly 90% since the 1960s. Loss of fisheries and pastoralist livelihoods has been a documented recruiting condition for Boko Haram and ISWAP.
SOURCE · UN Environment 2018; Adelphi 2019 Shoring up Stability - Darfur2003-presentMECHANISM · Rainfall variability + pastoralist-farmer competition + ethnic mobilisation
Ban Ki-moon called Darfur 'the world's first climate-change war' in 2007: drought intensified competition over land and water between Arab pastoralists and African farmers, then ethnicised by political actors.
SOURCE · UNEP 2007 Post-Conflict Environmental Assessment - Sahel (G5)2010-presentMECHANISM · Warming at ~1.5× global rate + agro-pastoral collapse + jihadist expansion
The Sahel is warming faster than almost anywhere on Earth. Climate stress sits underneath every component of the security crisis from Mali to Niger and Burkina Faso.
SOURCE · International Crisis Group; Adelphi 2022 - South SudanOngoingMECHANISM · Extreme flooding + pastoralist displacement + cattle-raiding intensification
Years of catastrophic flooding have displaced millions and intensified Dinka–Nuer–Murle armed cattle competition. Climate compounds rather than initiates, but the compound effect is decisive.
SOURCE · OCHA; ACAPS country crisis assessments - Indus / Brahmaputra basins2025-2050 projectionMECHANISM · Glacier loss + river-flow variability + transboundary water tension
Himalayan glacier loss will redistribute water across India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, China. Existing transboundary treaties were not built for this; nuclear-armed neighbours are downstream.
SOURCE · ICIMOD HKH Assessment 2023; World Bank Water Atlas 2024
How war pulls the climate trigger right back.
The carbon ledger of armed conflict is structurally under-counted. Five mechanisms move emissions in ways that don't appear in any country's NDC.
- Direct combat emissions
Bombs, jet fuel, naval-diesel, armoured-vehicle fuel, generator backup, base operations.
175 Mt CO2-eq in the first two years of Russia-Ukraine, comparable to the annual emissions of the Netherlands.
SOURCE · Initiative on GHG Accounting of War (de Klerk) 2024 - Forest and peatland destruction
Carbon sinks burned by shelling, deliberate fires, or chemical defoliation; reservoirs lost for decades.
Vietnam Agent Orange + napalm campaigns; Ukraine forest fires inside contaminated frontline zones in 2022-25.
SOURCE · Costs of War; Conflict and Environment Observatory - Reconstruction embodied emissions
Concrete, steel, and transport for post-war rebuilding are among the carbon-densest economic activities humanity does.
Gaza reconstruction emissions alone are estimated to exceed 60 Mt CO2-eq, more than the annual emissions of New Zealand.
SOURCE · Otu-Larbi & Crawford 2024 - Climate-policy displacement
Wartime mobilisation re-routes political attention, budgets, and supply chains away from decarbonisation; militaries are exempted from emissions accounting under most agreements.
European gas reliance restructured by Ukraine war; military emissions remain outside Paris Agreement national totals.
SOURCE · Parkinson 2022; Stockholm Environment Institute - Refugee infrastructure carbon
Forced displacement is itself a high-carbon activity (transport, temporary settlements, energy-intensive humanitarian logistics).
World Bank: 216 million people projected to be internal climate migrants by 2050 across six regions.
SOURCE · World Bank Groundswell 2 (2021)
Internal climate migrants projected by 2050
Across six regions modelled. Doesn't include cross-border movement, which is studied less rigorously and almost certainly larger. Already the IDMC reports >32 M new climate-related displacements per year.
Sources, weights, and code are open.
Where every number comes from
The composite index is computed from the signals listed on this page, each backed by one or more named sources. Where the source publishes a public dataset or feed it is linked below; where a signal involves qualitative judgement, the LLM-assisted pass is explicitly marked on the signal card.
- ·Carbon Brief
- ·Climate Action Tracker
- ·Copernicus Climate Change Service
- ·Earth Commission tipping-points review
- ·Global Forest Watch
- ·IPCC AR6 Synthesis
- ·IUCN Red List
- ·Living Planet Index
- ·NASA GRACE-FO mission
- ·NOAA Global Monitoring Lab
- ·OECD climate finance reports
- ·UN Emissions Gap Report
- ·UNFCCC
- ·World Weather Attribution
Everything is versioned
- → Every hourly snapshot is committed to git with a message naming the signals that moved.
- → A daily snapshot is archived to
data/history-current/for the calibration log. - → Raw scraped article lists are written to
data/raw/so a score is reproducible from its input bundle. - → Signal definitions, weights, and seeded scores all live in plain JSON or TypeScript; anyone can open a PR challenging a value and explain why.
How this pillar is scored.
Methodology & limits
Ten signals, each scored 0-10, weighted to a single number. The score says where Earth-system pressure sits relative to the limits of a habitable planet. It does not predict the timing of any specific tipping event; the science can't either.
Annual datasets (NDCs, the Living Planet Index) only really move once a year. News-driven signals (heat-record attribution, climate-finance pledges) move on a shorter clock. The refresh pipeline takes both.
Tipping-point proximity is one signal rather than seven, on purpose. The underlying science has different horizons and confidence per element; aggregating them is the only way to get something that reads consistently next to the other signals. Per-element citations are linked from the panel.