The Earth could be doomed to breach the symbolic 1.5C warming limit in as little as three years at current levels of carbon dioxide emissions.

That's the stark warning from more than 60 of the world's leading climate scientists in the most up-to-date assessment of the state of global warming.

Nearly 200 countries agreed to try to limit global temperature rises to 1.5C above levels of the late 1800s in a landmark agreement in 2015, with the aim of avoiding some of the worst impacts of climate change.

But countries have continued to burn record amounts of coal, oil and gas and chop down carbon-rich forests - leaving that international goal in peril.

Climate change has already worsened many weather extremes - such as the UK's 40C heat in July 2022 - and has rapidly raised global sea levels, threatening coastal communities.

"Things are all moving in the wrong direction," said lead author Prof Piers Forster, director of the Priestley Centre for Climate Futures at the University of Leeds.

"We're seeing some unprecedented changes and we're also seeing the heating of the Earth and sea-level rise accelerating as well."

These changes "have been predicted for some time and we can directly place them back to the very high level of emissions", he added.

How Trump's 'drill, baby, drill' pledge is affecting other countries

The UN climate summit in the United Arab Emirates in 2023 ended with a call to "transition away from fossil fuels". It was applauded as a historic milestone in global climate action.

Countries agreed to try to hold global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Is that still possible?

An iceberg floats off the coast of Illulisat, Greenland. Ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are melting rapidly, and the risks of drastic melting increase as the Earth heats up. The melting of Greenland's ice sheet is the second-largest contributor to global sea-level rise. (The largest contributor is water expanding as it warms.)

The primary focus of international climate negotiations this week in Baku, Azerbaijan, is how to pay for the costs of cutting global climate pollution and adapt to the impacts of climate change.

Today, In 2023, Humanity is facing a catastrophic human-induced climate crisis which seriously threatens our very survival. 

Fundamentally, Humanity is faced with this climate crisis for a few principal reasons, which are important to understand in order to advocate the best solutions.

1. Pollution (including that of overpopulated species, which can be seen from the point of view of Earth as a form of toxic pollution) does not recognize national boundaries and borders while Earth is subdivided politically into self-regulating nation-states, which regulate, or fail to regulate, pollution and population for their own people and territories.