The three main greenhouse gases reached unprecedented concentrations globally in 2025, continuing an upward trend that will lead to more global warming, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) warns.

The WMO Global Atmosphere Watch programme has published its on the amount of greenhouse gases that have accumulated in the atmosphere, ahead of the UN’s COP31 climate conference, which will be held in Turkey in November.

It reports that the global average surface concentration of carbon dioxide reached a record 426.8 parts per million (ppm) in 2025, which is 53 per cent higher than pre-industrial levels.

The increase from 2024 to 2025 was slightly higher than the average annual growth rate over the past decade, but the increase wasn’t as steep as the previous year.

The levels of methane and nitrous oxide also reached record highs of 1948 parts per billion (ppb) and 339.1 ppb respectively in 2025, an increase of 167 per cent and 26 per cent on pre-industrial levels.

“Greenhouse gases are trapping an unprecedented amount of heat in the atmosphere, providing energy for more extreme weather and associated risks to our economies and societies,” WMO Deputy Secretary-General Ko Barrett said in a statement.

This follows the UN recently confirming that the global target to limit warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels is due to be exceeded in the next few years, with emissions on track to cause 2.8°C of warming by the end of the century.

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The WMO report also warns that more attention should be given to the steadily rising levels of two other gases in the atmosphere, molecular hydrogen and sulphur hexafluoride, as more countries decarbonise their energy systems.

Although hydrogen isn’t a greenhouse gas, it has a strong indirect effect on global warming and is being used for energy storage. Its concentration increased by 5.3 per cent between 2010 and 2024.

Sulphur hexafluoride, used primarily as a spark suppressant in electricity distribution, has the highest 100-year global warming potential overall – approximately 24,000 times that of CO2. According to the WMO, levels have been increasing steadily over the past three decades in proportion to growing global electrification.

After months of vacillation, the UK government has finally announced that drilling will go ahead at the Jackdaw gas field in the North Sea. Prime Minister Andy Burnham has described the move as “a pragmatic approach”, saying “we’ll still require oil and gas as part of our energy needs for decades to come”.

The thing is, the climate of our rapidly heating planet doesn’t recognise pragmatism. The only thing it acknowledges and responds to is how much carbon dioxide is added to the atmosphere, and it doesn’t care where it comes from.

reveals that the rate of global heating doubled over the period 2011 to 2025, compared with 1971 to 2025, so that the planet’s temperature is now rising at a rate of 0.4°C a decade. The corollary of this is that the 1.5°C limit is set to be permanently breached as soon as 2028 – a full decade sooner than previous projections. Furthermore, the speed of heating means that even the projected rise of 2.8°C by 2100 is now unrealistic, and points towards a much hotter world arriving far more quickly.

Nonetheless, a report published today by the UN Environmental Programme claims that, while the 1.5°C threshold is now dead in the water, it may still be possible to limit the global average temperature rise to just a few tenths of a degree above this.

, to have a “good” chance of staying this side of 1.7°C to 1.8°C, greenhouse gas emissions would need to fall 18 per cent by the end of this decade, 45 per cent by 2035 and a whisker under 70 per cent by 2040. That “good” is doing some seriously heavy lifting, but what’s more, the idea that emissions, in the real world, will drop by more than two-thirds in less than 15 years is pure fantasy. Especially at a time when fossil fuel corporations are planning for expansion, aided and abetted by the governments of the UK, the US and others.

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Instead, as pointed out by director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, the implementation of current national commitments would mean global emissions reaching close to 50 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (a measure of the global warming potential of all greenhouse gases) by 2035. And that’s assuming that such commitments are adhered to, which is by no means certain as governments, including that of the UK, row back on green measures.

Today’s decision to go ahead with Jackdaw, and to allow drilling in adjacent areas, is entirely the wrong one. A separate decision about the far more carbon-intensive Rosebank oil field is expected by the end of the year. Going ahead with either project guarantees that the UK is now complicit in pushing up global greenhouse gas emissions, and reducing the chances of limiting the global average temperature rise to something more manageable.

At the same time, the decision marks a conscious commitment to retain fossil fuel infrastructure and lock in hydrocarbons to the country’s energy mix for decades to come. Not only will this endanger national carbon reduction goals, but it will hand other nations an excuse to green-light their own new fossil fuel projects.

Every tonne of CO2 we don’t emit makes our future that little bit less grim, and every tonne we pump out takes fully 400,000 years to remove from the atmosphere completely.

There is nothing pragmatic, then, about opening the North Sea to more drilling. The decision will do little to create jobs and make energy cheaper, but the resulting higher temperatures will ensure that the country is rewarded in the form of more drought, floods and wildfires.

Bill McGuire is professor emeritus of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London.

Leading oil and gas companies own less than 1.5 per cent of the world’s renewable power capacity – raising questions about how committed they are to the green energy transition, despite their public claims.

and at the Autonomous University of Barcelona looked at ownership records of more than 53,000 wind, solar, hydroelectric and geothermal projects worldwide, as tracked by Global Energy Monitor, a non-governmental organisation. They then cross-checked these to see what proportion of them were owned by the world’s 250 biggest oil and gas companies, which are collectively responsible for 88 per cent of global hydrocarbon output.

Many fossil fuel firms have pledged to invest in renewable energy sources as the world attempts to transition away from oil and gas, but the researchers found that the top firms own just 1.42 per cent of the total operating renewable capacity globally. More than half of that – some 54 per cent – was owned via acquisitions, rather than companies developing their own projects. By calculating the total energy output of the 250 firms, the pair found that renewable power accounts for just 0.13 per cent of the energy produced by these companies.

“The results were surprising, even for me,” says Llavero Pasquina. “I knew they were playing a very little role in the energy transition. I knew it was only for show. It was only for dressing their narrative. But I didn’t expect this low number.”

Llavero Pasquina and Bontempi are both part of a group called , which aims to produce research to “study and contribute to the global environmental justice movement”. Llavero Pasquina says his campaigning position strengthens his research. “You have the biggest interest in being as rigorous as possible, because you have to convince and you have to show what’s true.”

The fact that big energy firms, which have made their name and fortunes through oil and gas exploitation, aren’t massive players in renewables is unsurprising, says at Sciences Po in Paris. “At the end of the day, [the energy transition] has to be something disruptive, and it’s not going to be in the hands of those companies.”

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However, Bros does believe the big energy firms are unduly promoting their work on the energy transition. “They are portraying themselves [as] doing something, but I think if they were to do something, it would be more the carbon capture and sequestration,” he says, which involves capturing carbon as it is emitted, for instance when burning fossil fuels. “They are not doing much because I think it’s completely outside their domain of expertise.”

Offshore Energies UK, an industry body that represents the UK’s offshore energy industry, including oil, gas, wind, carbon capture and hydrogen, declined to comment directly on the study’s findings. However, it pointed to a previous statement from its chief executive, David Whitehouse. “Far from being in conflict, oil and gas, wind, and emerging low-carbon technologies are part of one integrated system. It is the skills of our people, the same people who built the North Sea that will deliver this transition,” .

A satellite known as MethaneSAT, anticipated to transform our view of methane emissions, has lost power less than a year and a half after it was launched.

MethaneSAT is “likely not recoverable”, according to a from the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), the non-profit organisation that launched and operated the satellite. Its loss is a major blow to efforts to track and stop methane emissions, which are responsible for about a third of the human-caused rise in global temperature to date.

When MethaneSAT launched in March 2024, it joined a growing constellation of satellites designed to detect invisible methane emissions from key sources like oil and gas wells, livestock, landfills and wetlands. While some satellites zoomed in on individual sources and others could look across whole regions, MethaneSAT was uniquely suited to detect methane at the middle scale, making it ideal for spotting emissions from oil and gas production.

This view was intended to estimate methane emissions from regions known for fossil fuel production, like the Permian Basin in the south-western US. It would also help efforts to identify and cap the largest sources of the potent greenhouse gas.

“It’s a significant loss,” says at GHGSat, a Canadian company that had planned to use MethaneSAT’s data to make decisions about where to point its own satellites. “MethaneSAT was uniquely positioned. It was in a special in-between zone.”

The satellite, which cost nearly $100 million to build and launch, started collecting data in June of last year and released its of methane from oil and gas basins in November 2024. Researchers were working on ways to automate data processing so the satellite, which still orbits the planet 15 times per day, could deliver information on emissions in near real time.

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“We had just started a cadence of releasing data every two weeks,” says at the Environmental Defense Fund. “The satellite had been producing excellent information.”

According to the EDF’s statement, mission operations lost contact with the satellite on 20 June. “After pursuing all options to restore communications, we learned this morning that the satellite has lost power,” it said.

The MethaneSAT team is still investigating exactly what went wrong. It will continue to share the data the satellite was able to collect before losing power, as well as the algorithms developed to analyse it.

“We are looking at all sorts of options,” says Coifman. Launching another satellite is not off the table, he says.