Analysis: The new UN climate report is boring … except when it’s not

By Andrew Freedman, CNN

(CNN) — For more than 30 years, the United Nations World Meteorological Organization has told us how terrible things are getting with global climate change. Their annual “State of the Climate” report is a compendium of climate change facts and figures collected throughout the previous 365 days. It’s an authoritative look at the state of our global climate and its increasingly precarious condition.

And I, a climate reporter, almost never write a thing about it.

This year’s edition, covering 2025, is out today.

The findings are stark, even frightening. But, like every year, it also feels like a bit of a rehash. “What exactly is new here?” I usually wonder before moving on to the next assignment.

It is not just me who can be dismissive of this particular press rollout. Past coverage of the State of the Climate report and documents like it has shown that you, the reader, have limited interest in stories about another UN climate report containing warnings of impending doom.

The fact that the past 11 years were the hottest on record? Yawn. The announcement that greenhouse gases in the air are at unprecedented levels for all of human history? Wake me when you’ve got something new to report. The oceans are warming at never-before-seen rates? Didn’t we already know that?

The findings should be jarring reminders of planetary vital signs flashing red. But similar observations were made last year … and the year before that.

However, the very fact that these reports feel too routine to cover is a testament to how far climate change has progressed, even just in the past decade. Unfortunately, we’ve built up some immunity to bad news about the climate.

Though the individual data points may have been reported already, this edition contains more detailed and disturbing information about the climate than any before. If it were an audiobook, it would be filled with screaming rather than speaking, with the narrator gripped by the urgency of the information it contains.

That realization led me to take the crazy (for me) step of telling you about this release. Plus, this year’s compendium contains some information that past editions have not featured — new information that helps explain the speed-up in the rate of global warming in recent years.

A section of the report contains details on the Earth’s energy imbalance: how much of the Sun’s energy the atmosphere is letting in versus how much is escaping back out into space. Any extra energy trapped in the atmosphere or oceans acts as a warming agent.

For the Earth’s climate to remain at around the same, stable global average temperature, this equation must balance out.

But in 2025, the report found it was more out of balance than has been observed in the 65-year record of such data. The imbalance has been increasing during the past two decades, before reaching this new high.

“Human activities are increasingly disrupting the natural equilibrium and we will live with these consequences for hundreds and thousands of years,” said WMO secretary-general Celeste Saulo, in a statement.

Interestingly, only a small amount of excess heat goes into warming the atmosphere, the report notes. More than 91% of the surplus heat is getting stored in the oceans, where heat content reached a record high last year. The excess heat is also warming and melting the planet’s ice sheets, raising sea levels worldwide.

The record high levels of greenhouse gases in the air are also why so many extreme events, from heat waves to floods, are now occurring with greater regularity and severity.

At the end of the day, the State of the Climate report may not be “news” per se, but it is important. And it is a report I will be coming back to during the year as a reference point, while being determined not to scoff at next year’s edition when it lands in my inbox.

The-CNN-Wire
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