The Earth Warms While the World Debates

Every autumn, the world's climate negotiators gather. Every autumn, the same conclusion follows. In its Emissions Gap Report 2025, the UN Environment Programme found that even if every nation delivered on its latest climate pledge, the planet would still warm by roughly 2.3 to 2.5°C this century — far beyond the 1.5°C target that governments themselves agreed was the safe limit.

The report's language is unusually blunt. The newest round of national climate plans, UNEP concluded, will have only a "limited effect" and has "barely moved the needle." Global emissions are still rising — reaching 57.7 gigatonnes of CO₂ equivalent in 2024, up 2.3 percent in a single year. Thirty years of negotiation have not reversed the trend. They have only slowed the rate at which it worsens.

A Gap That Will Not Close

To hold warming to 1.5°C, UNEP calculates that the world would need to cut annual emissions by 55 percent below 2019 levels by 2035. Nothing on the negotiating table comes close. Meanwhile, one of the largest emitting nations is withdrawing from the Paris Agreement entirely — a move that, by UNEP's own accounting, erases part of the modest progress the latest pledges were supposed to deliver.

Why Human Effort Falls Short

The obstacle is not a lack of science or technology. The obstacle is that no nation can be compelled to act against its own perceived interests. Climate agreements are voluntary. A country can pledge deep cuts one year and abandon them the next when an election turns or an economy slows. The atmosphere, however, keeps no separate accounts for each nation. Emissions from one country warm the whole planet, yet the cost of cutting them falls on that country alone. This is the trap at the heart of every summit: everyone benefits from action, but no one is bound to take it.

Remarkably, the Bible foretold long ago that human activity would reach a point of "ruining the earth." But the same verse promises that God will step in — not to abandon the planet, but to hold accountable those who have damaged it and to reverse the harm. This is a very different outcome from the slow managed decline that even the most optimistic climate models now describe.

An Earth Made to Last

The Bible's view of the planet is not one of inevitable collapse. From its opening pages it describes an earth designed to endure and to sustain life indefinitely.

The earth was not made to be used up and discarded. The problem has never been the planet's capacity to support life — it is the way that life has been governed. Deforestation, pollution, and the reckless burning of resources are the products of human systems driven by short-term profit and national rivalry. Remove that misrule, and the earth's own resilience can begin to work in humanity's favour again.

A Government With the Authority to Act

The reason climate agreements fail is that they have no enforcement above the level of the sovereign nation. God's Kingdom is precisely the government that human diplomacy lacks — a single, unchallengeable authority over the entire earth, not dependent on the shifting will of individual states. It will not negotiate emission targets. It will remove the greed, rivalry, and mismanagement that make those targets necessary in the first place.

The world's scientists have measured the problem with extraordinary precision. They can tell us how much the planet will warm and how quickly. What they cannot supply is a government willing and able to change course. Human institutions are doing what they can within the limits of national sovereignty. But the Bible points to a rulership that operates without those limits — one that will not merely slow the ruin of the earth, but restore it completely.