Earth’s Climate Is Out of Whack

Mar 30, 2026

The world is in a state of climate emergency, according to Secretary General Antonio Guterres, the head of the United Nations (UN), speaking on Sunday, March 22, following the release of the latest “State of the Global Climate” report from the World Meteorological Organization. The report reflects the best available global science with contributions from scientists and institutions across 190 countries. The report shows Earth’s climate is out of balance, meaning our planet is trapping heat faster than it can shed.

For clarification purposes, climate is different from the weather. Weather is what is happening right now. Climate is the average of these weather patterns over a long period of time—typically 30 years or more. For example, a desert climate or a tropical climate. An analogy might be, weather is to climate as mood is to personality.

This year’s report includes a new way to measure climate change—the rate at which energy from the sun enters and leaves the planet. That is energy coming in and energy going out.

The significance of record-high concentrations of greenhouse gases, heat-trapping gases, in the atmosphere, and their effects are visible everywhere. For example, an 11-year series of hottest-ever years; and the way heat is accumulating deep in the oceans.

In a stable climate, incoming energy and outgoing energy are about the same. But activities such as burning fossil fuels (oil, gas, and coal), growing food and making steel, cement and plastic have upset that balance by pushing levels of heat-trapping carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide in the atmosphere to the highest level in at least 800,000 years. That’s trapping more of the sun’s energy in the Earth’s climate system than ever previously recorded.

The new metric shows a more complete picture of how the climate system is responding to human emissions, integrating all the heat accumulating in the oceans and atmosphere, on land and melting ice, explained oceanographer Karina von Schuckmann, a senior science advisor with Mercator Ocean International. Earth’s energy imbalance also helps show how different parts of the climate system are connected and identifies the central role of the oceans in absorbing most of the trapped heat. It gives a more accurate picture of climate change and how it works than just showing temperature change relative to 1850. Greenhouse gases change how much energy escapes and how the system responds. This is what drives climate change.

The air temperature people experience, for example, is only about one to two percent of all the energy trapped in the Earth’s systems by greenhouse gases. Whereas about 90% heats the oceans, about five percent melts ice and heats land.

The U.N. Secretary General added that the consequences of our heating planet “are written into the daily lives of families struggling as droughts and storms drive up food prices, in workers pushed to the brink by extreme heat, in farmers watching crops wither, and in communities and homes swept away by floods.”

Capitalism has led humanity down a path that is destroying the environment that living organisms require to survive, and it has no solutions. Only an organized working class can take charge and solve this crisis.