Science
10 Years After the Paris Climate Agreement, Here’s Where We Are
Almost exactly 10 years ago, a remarkable thing happened in a conference hall on the outskirts of Paris: After years of bitter negotiations, the leaders of nearly every country agreed to try to slow down global warming in an effort to head off its most devastating effects.
The core idea was that countries would set their own targets to reduce their climate pollution in ways that made sense for them. Rich, industrialized nations were expected to go fastest and to help lower-income countries pay for the changes they needed to cope with climate hazards.
So, has anything changed over those 10 years? Actually, yes. Quite a bit, for the better and the worse. For one thing, every country remains committed to the Paris Agreement, except one. That’s the United States.
We wanted to help you cut through the noise and show you 10 big things that have happened in the last 10 years.
1. Emissions have come down, but there’s still far to go.
Call this good-ish news. Lower emissions mean the arc of temperature increase has curved downward over the past 10 years. If countries stick to current policies, the global average temperature is projected to rise by 2.5 to 2.9 degrees Celsius by the end of the century. That’s a significant improvement from where we were 10 years ago: In 2015, scientific models said we were on track to increase the global average temperature by up to 3.8 degrees Celsius.
Global greenhouse gas emissions and expected warming
But none of the world’s biggest emitters — China, the U.S., the European Union, India — have met their Paris promises. And every degree of warming matters. A one-degree increase in average temperature, for instance, raises malaria risk for children in sub-Saharan Africa by 77 percent.
2. The last 10 years were the hottest on record.
We started burning coal, oil and gas on a large scale roughly 150 years ago. As a result, global temperatures have been rising ever since, and the last 10 years have been the hottest 10 on record.
Global temperatures compared with late-19th-century average
The most scorching was 2024. That year, extreme heat killed election workers in India and pilgrims on the hajj in Saudi Arabia. This year, it forced the temporary closure of the top of the Eiffel Tower at the peak of tourist season and shuttered schools in parts of the United States.
3. Solar is spreading faster than we thought it would.
Solar power has been the largest source of new electricity generation for the last three years. Most of this new solar infrastructure is coming up inside China, and Chinese companies are making so much surplus solar equipment — cells, modules and everything that goes into them — that prices have plummeted.
Forecasts keep underestimating solar growth
Today, solar panels hang from apartment balconies in Germany and cover vast areas of desert in Saudi Arabia. Solar and onshore wind projects offer the cheapest source of new electricity generation. Little wonder, then, that in India’s electricity sector, more than half of the generation capacity now comes from solar, wind and hydropower.
4. Electric vehicles are now normal.
The way the world moves has changed. At the time of the Paris Agreement, Tesla had just unveiled its luxury electric SUV. Fast forward to last year: Worldwide, one in five cars sold was electric.
In the United States, 265,000 children ride electric buses to school. In Kenya, electric motorcycle taxis ferry commuters to work. Chinese carmakers are assembling E.V.s abroad, including in Brazil, Indonesia and, soon, in Saudi Arabia, a petrostate.
World
United States
Electrifying transportation is important because it’s one of the biggest sources of emissions globally. Currently, electric vehicles are displacing 2 million barrels of oil demand per day, roughly equal to Germany’s total daily demand, according to BloombergNEF.
5. Rich countries have put relatively little money on the table.
One of the key tenets of the Paris Agreement was an acknowledgement that countries had different responsibilities. Wealthy industrialized countries were supposed to pony up money to help poorer countries do two things: transition to renewable energy and adapt to the problems brought on by a hotter climate.
Last year, countries agreed that a total of $1.3 trillion would be needed every year by 2035 to help developing countries manage climate harms, including $300 billion a year in public monies from rich countries. That’s far more than what rich countries have thus far made available. Where that money will come from is still uncertain.
Public climate finance from developed countries would need to increase substantially
Meanwhile, some of the poorest countries are getting clobbered by extreme weather. They’re falling deeper into debt as they try to recover.
6. Coal is in a weird place.
The growth of coal is slowing worldwide. That matters because coal, which powered the modern industrial economy, is the dirtiest fossil fuel.
Coal is waning in wealthy countries, including the United States, despite President Trump’s efforts to expand its use. Britain, the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, closed its last coal plant in 2024. That year, more than half of Britain’s electricity came from renewables. But coal is still growing in China, which, despite its pledge to clean up its economy, has gone on to build more coal plants than any other country, ever.
In America, coal demand fell faster than expected… …while in China, it grew faster than expected
7. Natural gas, a planet-warming fossil fuel, is ascendant thanks to America.
Over the decade since the Paris Agreement was signed, the United States has rapidly become the world’s leading producer and exporter of gas.
Liquid natural gas opened up an export boom
Mr. Trump, in his second term, has supersized that ambition. He appointed Chris Wright, a former fracking executive, as the U.S. energy secretary, and he has used the sale of American gas as a diplomatic and trade cudgel. That matters because, while gas is cleaner than coal as a source of electricity, it stands to lock the world into gas use for decades to come.
8. Forests are losing their climate superpower.
Fires are increasingly driving forest loss worldwide. That’s because rising temperatures and more intense droughts are making forests burn more easily and also because people are setting fire to forests to clear land for agriculture.
The world’s forests are absorbing less carbon dioxide
That’s limiting the ability of many forests to store planet-warming carbon dioxide. In fact, it’s pushing parts of the Amazon rainforest, often called the lungs of the planet, to a startling tipping point. Parts of the Amazon are releasing more carbon than trees and soil are absorbing. One recent study found the same pattern in the rainforests of Australia.
9. Corals are bleaching more often.
Since 2015, two separate global bleaching events have stretched over six years. They’re happening much more often than before, and affecting more reefs, because the oceans are heating up fast.
Percent of the world’s coral reefs affected by each bleaching event
Corals are important because they support so many other creatures, including fish that millions of people rely on for nutrition and income. About a quarter of all marine species depend on reefs at some point in their life cycle.
Many reefs have been ravaged, but some coral species are turning out to be more resilient to marine heat waves than we had thought. That’s good-ish news, too.
10. U.S. electricity demand is soaring, in part because of A.I.
Power demand had always been expected to increase worldwide. More than a billion people still need access to electricity, and billions of others around the globe are buying air-conditioners and plugging in electric vehicles. But a big surprise came from the United States.
American electricity demand was pretty flat in the 2010s but is now rising significantly and is projected to climb for at least another decade. One reason: energy-hungry A.I. That raises a critical question for Big Tech: Will its A.I. ambitions heat up the planet faster?
After two decades of slower demand growth, energy needs are rising.
What does all this mean for the world’s 8 billion people?
The physical damage inflicted by global warming costs the global economy around $1.4 trillion a year, according to BloombergNEF.
It means we are being forced to adapt to new conditions on a climate-altered planet. Many already are, especially the most vulnerable among us. In India, a women’s union has created a tiny new insurance plan to help workers cope when it gets dangerously hot. In China, a landscape architect has persuaded cities to create porous surfaces to let floodwaters seep in. In the United States, school playgrounds are adding shade to protect kids on exceptionally hot days. In California, an app developer created a tool to help his neighbors track the path of wildfires. In Malawi and Uganda, people are experimenting with growing different crops.
A big problem is, there’s very little money to help them, and even that has declined in the last couple of years.
President Trump has signed off on a plan to fire Dr. Marty Makary, commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, after a series of clashes over vaping, oversight of the abortion pill and a series of new drug application denials that rattled biotech companies, according to a person briefed on the matter, who was not authorized to discuss it publicly.
Dr. Makary had a high profile for an F.D.A. commissioner, appearing frequently on television and podcasts to sell the work he was doing at the agency on improving the food supply, speeding up some drug approvals and trying to restore agency morale after thousands of staff members left.
He tried to walk the tightrope between the business-friendly Make America Great Again movement, pledging to get rid of regulations that slow down innovation and to attract more drug trials to the United States. He was an ally of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Make American Healthy Again supporters, voicing the skepticism of the pharmaceutical industry and authorizing natural food dyes.
Ultimately, Dr. Makary’s efforts were not enough to overcome the grievances of a growing band of enemies focused on selling tobacco, opposing abortion and seeing biotech therapies authorized.
Mr. Trump’s decision to dismiss him was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.
The decision could still change, given Mr. Trump’s propensity to change his mind Dr. Makary has also proven persuasive with Mr. Trump in beating back previous efforts to oust him.
Leaving the White House Friday evening, Mr. Trump dismissed the idea that Dr. Makary would be fired.
“I’ve been reading about it, but I know nothing about it,” he said.
The White House has pressured Dr. Makary for months to authorize flavored e-cigarettes, according to a person close to the conversations. The approvals were a top wish of major tobacco companies that have been top donors to Mr. Trump. In March, the F.D.A. issued a memo saying that it would only authorize e-cigarettes in flavors such as mint, tea and spices. The memo said the fruit and candy flavors would be unlikely to pass muster, given their appeal to young people.
Pressure continued, though, and on Tuesday the F.D.A. authorized blueberry and mango flavored e-cigarettes by Glas, a small company based in Los Angeles.
Abortion foes including Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America have continued to turn up the heat on Dr. Makary, reiterating their call for his firing on Thursday. The group’s leaders and others view Dr. Makary as dragging his feet on a safety review of the abortion pill mifepristone, which they viewed as a way to highlight what they believe are dangers of the drug. Former Vice President Mike Pence, who also opposes abortion rights, amplified criticism of Dr. Makary on social media as well.
The administration has been under pressure from conservatives to tighten regulations on the prescribing and dispensing of mifepristone. The Supreme Court is reviewing a federal appeals court ruling that temporarily blocked abortion providers from prescribing the drug through telemedicine and sending it to patients by mail.
Biotech companies and their investors have also raised alarms with the White House about agency decisions to reject a series of treatments for rare diseases. The F.D.A. typically turns down about 20 percent of the applications it receives for drug approvals from companies.
Dr. Makary has been aggressive in defending the decisions, which he said came from career scientists who found the medications ineffective.
Dr. Makary also had to contend with a health secretary who seemed to view the F.D.A. as an avenue for getting his favored products authorized, exemplified by Mr. Kennedy’s social media post saying that the agency would end its “war on” stem cell treatments, peptides and raw milk. Mr. Kennedy pushed the F.D.A. to reverse a 2023 ban and allow the use of a number of peptides, unproven compounds purported to offer anti-aging or muscle-recovery benefits.
Before leading the F.D.A., Dr. Makary was a cancer surgeon and health policy researcher at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He was also the author of several books about the health care system.
Some of Dr. Makary’s more popular moves included encouraging broader use of hormone replacement products for women and lifting the F.D.A.’s warnings on them. He helped speed some promising drugs to market, including a pancreatic cancer therapy and the pill form of the popular GLP-1 weight loss drugs.
Some California residents were among the 147 passengers and staff aboard a luxury cruise ship stricken by a suspected outbreak of hantavirus that has left three people dead and several others severely ill, officials confirmed Thursday.
California public health officials say they are monitoring the situation after being notified by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that some state residents were passengers on the MV Hondius. The precise status of those individuals, however, remains murky.
Hantavirus is a rare but deadly disease that attacks the lungs and is typically contracted by humans through inhalation of particles contaminated with the urine, feces or saliva of a wild rodent.
However, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization, confirmed Thursday that the Andes virus — a form of hantavirus that can spread from person to person — was involved in the outbreak.
Here’s what we know:
The MV Hondius cruise ship anchored at a port in Praia, Cape Verde, on Wednesday.
(Misper Apawu / Associated Press)
As its name suggests, the Andes virus is typically found in South America. The Dutch-flagged MV Hondius was on a 46-day journey that traveled from Antarctica with stops in Argentina.
In the case of human-to-human transmission, a person would first be infected by a wild rodent’s contaminated particles and then pass the infection to someone else, said Dr. Gaby Frank, director of the Johns Hopkins Special Pathogens Center.
“In previous outbreaks of Andes virus, transmission between people has been associated with close and prolonged contact, particularly among household members, intimate partners and people providing medical care,” Ghebreyesus said. “That appears to be the case in the current situation.”
None of the remaining passengers or crew members on the ship are symptomatic, he said.
The ship was not permitted to allow passengers to disembark at its original destination, Cape Verde, and is sailing for Spain’s Canary Islands.
“I want to be unequivocal here: This is not SARS-CoV-2. This is not the start of a COVID pandemic. This is an outbreak that we see on a ship. There’s a confined area,” Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, who leads the WHO’s epidemic and pandemic management, said at a briefing. “This is not the same situation we were in six years ago. It doesn’t spread the same way like coronaviruses do.”
California passengers on the cruise
On April 1, 114 guests boarded the cruise ship in Ushuaia, Argentina. Twenty-three days later, 30 passengers — including six people from the United States — disembarked on a stop in St. Helena, a remote island about 1,100 miles off the coast of Africa, according to the cruise operator Oceanwide Expeditions.
Public health agencies in California, Georgia and Arizona were notified by the CDC that some of their residents were among the passengers on the cruise. It’s unclear whether these individuals disembarked on April 24, however.
The CDC is assisting local health authorities with monitoring California residents who were aboard the cruise, according to a statement by the California Department of Public Health on Friday.
As of Friday, one passenger has returned to their California residence and is in contact with local public health officials, and at least one other remains aboard the ship, according to the state agency.
“We understand that news of an unusual outbreak can be concerning,” said Dr. Erica Pan, director of the California Department of Public Health. “Unlike influenza and COVID-19, years of experience in South America have shown that this Andes hantavirus rarely spreads between people.”
Officials said the current public health protocol is to do daily symptom monitoring and reporting.
“As there are no known cases of Andes hantavirus infection from people without symptoms, and any spread has usually been limited to people with prolonged close contact with an ill person with this virus, the risk to the general public in California is extremely low,” the agency said in a statement.
In a statement earlier this week, the CDC also said that the risk to the American public “is extremely low” at this time.
“We urge all Americans aboard the ship to follow the guidance of health officials as we work to bring you home safely,” the agency said.
The others who exited the ship on April 24 were individuals from Canada, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Switzerland, Sweden, Singapore, St. Kitts and Nevis, Turkey and the United Kingdom.
Of the remaining passengers still aboard the ship headed for Spain’s Canary Islands, California Department of Public Health said none were ill as of Friday.
How many people have been infected?
The number of lab-confirmed hantavirus cases has risen to five, according to the WHO. There are three additional suspected cases.
A timeline of reported cases of hantavirus aboard the cruise ship can be found here.
The WHO is monitoring reports of other people with symptoms “who may have had contact with one of the passengers. In each case, we are in close contact with the relevant authorities,” Tedros said.
The first passenger to have been infected, a Dutchman, became sick aboard the cruise ship on April 6 and died on April 11.
No samples were taken, because his symptoms were similar to other respiratory diseases. His widow left the ship with his body on April 24 during the scheduled stop at St. Helena.
“She deteriorated during a flight to Johannesburg on the 25th of April and died the next day,” Tedros said.
Before boarding the cruise ship, the Dutch couple had traveled through Argentina, Chile and Uruguay on a bird-watching trip, “which included visits to sites where the species of rat that is known to carry Andes virus was present,” Tedros said.
After leaving the ship, the woman was briefly aboard a KLM aircraft in Johannesburg bound for Amsterdam but was barred from the flight due to her medical condition, the airline said in a statement.
Dutch news outlets reported that a flight attendant on a KLM airplane — who briefly had contact with the widow — started feeling sick and had mild symptoms and was in isolation at a hospital in Amsterdam.
The flight attendant has since tested negative for the Andes virus, Dr. Jeremy Faust, an emergency medicine physician, wrote on his Substack blog, Inside Medicine, citing a text message sent to him by Tedros.
“It is still possible that the flight attendant contracted the Andes virus. However, given our understanding of the virus, this information means that the flight attendant’s symptoms are not caused by the Andes hantavirus, but by some other medical illness,” Faust wrote.
More cases may be reported, because the incubation period — the time it takes between exposure to the virus and the onset of illness — for the Andes strain of the hantavirus is up to six weeks.
What we know about hantavirus
There are roughly 50 identified species of hantavirus. The virus that’s found in the Americas tends to cause a cardiopulmonary syndrome, a condition that affects the heart and the lungs, according to Frank.
There have been 890 laboratory-confirmed cases of hantavirus disease reported in the U.S. since surveillance began in 1993, according to the most recent data from the CDC.
From 1980 to 2025, 99 California residents have been diagnosed with a hantavirus infection, according to the California Department of Public Health.
CDC officials said 38% of people who develop respiratory symptoms may die from the disease.
Still, the data suggest that contracting hantavirus is rare, said Dr. Afif El-Hasan, member of the American Lung Assn.’s national board of directors.
There is no vaccine or specific antiviral medicine for hantavirius.
Intensive-care treatment may include intubation and oxygen therapy, fluid replacement and use of medications to lower blood pressure, according to the American Lung Assn.
The signs of hantavirus
Early symptoms of hantavirus are similar to the flu and include fatigue, fever and muscle aches, according to the CDC. Symptoms start to develop within one to eight weeks after contact with an infected rodent.
Half of those who contract the virus also experience headaches, dizziness, chills, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea and abdominal pain.
Four to 10 days after the initial phase of the illness, another round of symptoms can develop, which include coughing, shortness of breath and possible tightness in the chest as the lungs fill with fluid.
Even though contracting hantavirus in the U.S. continues to be a rare event, El-Hasan said, people should take these initial symptoms seriously and promptly seek medical care.
How to protect yourself
Hantavirus cases can occur year-round, but the peak seasons in the United States are the spring and summer, which coincide with the reproductive seasons for deer mice.
To lessen your risk of infection, keep wild rodents out of your home and other enclosed spaces by sealing any holes and placing snap traps.
If you find evidence of mice, wear personal protective equipment and disinfect the area. When you’re done, put everything, including cleaning materials, in a bag and toss it in your trash bin.
Medical workers in protective suits. Contact tracing. P.C.R. tests and World Health Organization briefings.
Just when much of the public had presumed to have left those ominous images and turns of phrase intertwined with the Covid-19 pandemic in the rearview mirror, a deadly hantavirus outbreak aboard a Dutch cruise ship has dredged up familiar anxieties.
Health experts, aware of the scars Covid left on people, including those who are still dealing with it, have sought to dispel comparisons between hantavirus and coronavirus. They said this week that the viruses spread quite differently and were not close in magnitude.
Still, those reassurances have not quelled the public’s anxiety or its appetite for medical advice from some of the same doctors who commanded attention on television as Covid-19 marched across the globe.
“I have Covid P.T.S.D.,” Dr. Celine R. Gounder, editor at large for public health at KFF Health News and an infectious disease expert, said in an interview on Thursday. “There are parts of New York City I cannot walk by without seeing the refrigerated mortuary trucks. I had to get rid of certain things I was using during the pandemic, clothing or otherwise, because it was triggering. So I completely get where people are coming from.”
“That said,” Dr. Gounder was swift to emphasize, “not all infectious diseases are created equal.”
In Spain, the president of the Canary Islands lodged a protest against allowing the cruise ship to dock there, while a flurry of threads have begun to appear on social media sites pondering whether it was safe to travel at all.
The mention of masks particularly reverberated on the far right politically, where some have begun using the outbreak to warn against the prospect of new restrictions or government mandates.
Three passengers who were traveling on the Dutch cruise ship MV Hondius died during the hantavirus outbreak, which has sickened at least five other people aboard the vessel with symptoms of the rare disease. On Sunday, the ship is expected to approach the island of Tenerife, where passengers will be brought by boats for evacuation flights to their home countries.
Most strains of the virus, which is primarily carried by rodents, cannot be spread from person to person. But the one identified in the ship outbreak, the Andes strain, can move between people, according to medical experts, who underscored that it requires repeated close contact.
“This is not coronavirus,” Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, the W.H.O.’s head of epidemic and pandemic preparedness, said at a news conference in Geneva on Thursday. “This is a very different virus.”
Dr. Van Kerkhove said she could understand the intense demand for answers about the cluster of infections.
“I want to be unequivocal here: This is not SARS-CoV-2,” she said, referring to the virus that causes Covid. “This is not the start of a Covid pandemic.”
Around the world, health authorities monitored suspected cases of hantavirus infection. A number of these potential patients tested negative. But the concerns were a reminder of how every allergy season sneeze or wheeze could prompt existential dread in the early months of the Covid pandemic.
In an appearance on the “Today” show on Thursday, Dr. Ashish Jha, who oversaw the Biden administration’s pandemic response as it wound down, said he was confident that public health authorities could contain the spread of the hantavirus if they followed longstanding contact tracing protocols.
“We’ve got to track down everybody who left the cruise ship and figure out where they are, make sure that we’re monitoring them,” he said. “If they develop any symptoms, then they’ve got to get isolated.”
Such attempts at reassurance may be interpreted differently by some critics of the Trump and Biden administration’s responses to the Covid pandemic.
The far-right commentator Glenn Beck on Thursday signaled the need to resist a return to Covid-era measures on his show.
“They’ll do exactly the same thing they did last time, and then our kids won’t go to school, and we’ll have masks,” Mr. Beck said.
Plenty of others on social media sought to introduce levity in the moment, harking back to quirky rituals and skills they honed during the pandemic.
“Practicing my dancing for when the hantavirus becomes the new covid,” one young woman wrote in a post.
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