Carbon pollution has risen to such extremes that a key threshold in the fight to stop climate change — limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century — will be crossed within the next 15 years. That is one of the key findings from a landmark report approved by delegates from 195 countries and published Monday by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The analysis, which comes amid record-breaking heat and rains that have rocked rich and poor countries alike, draws on more than 14,000 peer-reviewed studies to assess the physical science of climate change. It paints a sober picture of a planet warped beyond recognition by members of a single species in the space of just a few hundred years. “This report is a reality check,” said Valérie Masson-Delmotte, co-chair of the IPCC working group that prepared it.

In 2015, world leaders pledged to limit warming by the end of the century to well below 2 C — ideally 1.5 C — in a global effort to avoid escalating catastrophes. But they are instead pursuing policies that put the planet on track for 3 C, according to German-based research group Climate Action Tracker. While the 1.5 C target will be broached within a couple of decades, temperatures could be brought back below it by the end of the century under the report’s most ambitious scenario for cutting pollution. As well as rapidly decarbonizing the global economy, it would involve sucking enormous amounts of CO2 out of the atmosphere. But the technology to do so is expensive, and there is little evidence to suggest it could work at the scales needed.

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