---
title: "Ten Years After Paris, the Thermometer Reads the Treaty Its Rights"
description: "Emissions are up 9 percent since 2016 and 1.5C is slipping away, though the course has bent from 3.6C toward 2.6C"
author: "Jan Sokol"
published: 2026-11-05T07:41:25Z
modified: 2026-11-05T17:36:59Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/ten-years-after-paris-the-thermometer-reads-the-treaty-its-r-8aed4f
language: en
tags: ["climate", "paris-agreement", "emissions", "temperature", "china", "world", "science"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# Ten Years After Paris, the Thermometer Reads the Treaty Its Rights

*Emissions are up 9 percent since 2016 and 1.5C is slipping away, though the course has bent from 3.6C toward 2.6C*

By Jan Sokol · November 5, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/ten-years-after-paris-the-thermometer-reads-the-treaty-its-r-8aed4f

## In brief

- The Paris Agreement, adopted by 196 parties in 2015, entered into force on November 4, 2016
- 2024 was the first full calendar year above 1.5C of warming; 2023-2025 were the hottest three years on record
- Projected 2100 warming has fallen from about 3.6C to 2.6C, but progress has stalled since 2021
- Global emissions are 9 percent higher than in 2016; China, the US and India produce over half the annual total
- The US left the agreement again in January 2026; 194 parties remain, including the EU

On December 12, 2015, in a hall outside Paris, 196 parties adopted a legally binding treaty and gave the planet a number: hold warming well below 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, and pursue efforts to keep it to 1.5. The agreement entered into force on November 4, 2016. Ten years have now passed since, and [Al Jazeera’s anniversary accounting](https://aljazeera.com/news/2026/11/5/ten-years-of-the-paris-agreement-has-the-world-kept-its-climate-promises) reads like a doctor’s chart on a patient who follows some of the advice: the policies are stronger, the clean energy has multiplied, and the fever keeps rising.

Read the thermometer first, since it cannot sign anything and therefore cannot lie. In 2024 the planet averaged more than 1.5C of warming across a full calendar year for the first time. The three years from 2023 to 2025 were the hottest on record and the first three-year stretch to average above 1.5C. The long-term average now stands near 1.4C, and scientists expect it to cross 1.5C around the end of this decade. In October, the UN Environment Programme said the chance of holding the line without overshooting it has been lost. “Every additional fraction of a degree and additional year of warming above 1.5C increases climate impacts and risks, such as the deadly floods, heatwaves and wildfires that have plagued many nations this year,” said UNEP’s executive director, Inger Andersen.

![A red thermometer with a globe-shaped bulb wears a cream scarf against a yellow background, suggesting global warming.](https://rews.cc/img/23349acf112578ad233d8a769e1bb347c9330f76.webp)

## The arithmetic of good intentions

And yet, before Paris, existing policies pointed the world toward about 3.6C of warming by 2100. That projection, by the Climate Action Tracker’s reckoning, has fallen to about 2.6C. A degree is not a statistic; in the ledgers of drought and flood it is a fortune. But progress has stalled since 2021, and 2.6C is still nearly double what the treaty promised to pursue. The agreement never armed itself with enforcement: it asks each government to set its own targets, the nationally determined contributions, refreshed every five years and weighed collectively in a Global Stocktake, leaning on transparency and peer pressure the way the old empires leaned on prestige. Prestige, like pressure, bends no one’s smokestacks. The world was told this autumn that retreating to a softer target would demand [hundreds of billions of tons of carbon removal](https://rews.cc/a/unep-concedes-1-5-c-is-gone-the-fallback-is-a-1-8-c-peak-plu-02935f) that the world cannot yet do.

## Who burns, who signs

China, the United States and India produce more than half of the world’s annual emissions. China alone emits more than the US, India, Russia and Japan combined, and its emissions have kept rising alongside India’s and Indonesia’s as fast-growing economies burn more coal for surging power demand; Indonesia has entered the top ten, displacing Canada. Germany, Japan and the US have cut their output, mostly by swapping coal for renewables and gas, but the growth elsewhere has swallowed the cuts. Global emissions are 9 percent higher than in 2016. Investment in clean energy now runs at almost double investment in fossil fuels, and still the curve climbs, a fact worth sitting with: we are buying the cure faster than ever, and the disease, for now, outruns the shopping.

![A tilted balance scale weighs renewable energy atop stacked coins against a factory emitting thick black smoke, with the factory side hanging lower.](https://rews.cc/img/995c61879fad951eeadbb408229345bbdb1c5684.webp)

Then there is the matter of the signatures. The United States, the second-largest emitter and the largest in history, has joined the Paris Agreement and left it twice. President Donald Trump ordered both withdrawals; the first took effect in November 2020, President Joe Biden rejoined in February 2021, and this January the US left again, twelve months after Trump ordered the second exit. Today 194 parties, 193 countries and the European Union, remain inside the treaty. The tenant who moves out of a burning house does not thereby leave the fire; he only stops paying for the hoses. One might say the treaty was built for a world in which shame disciplines the powerful. That world, if it ever existed, had a different climate in every sense.

So the ledger of the decade closes in two columns that refuse to be added together. In one: temperatures at record heights three years running, a 1.5C budget declared all but spent, emissions 9 percent above where they stood when the ink dried. In the other: a projected century of 2.6C instead of 3.6C, clean-energy money doubling fossil money, and a framework that survived the twice-repeated departure of its richest signatory. The diplomats will tell you which column matters. The thermometer casts no vote.