The Earth is out of balance.

That’s the message from a United Nations report released late Sunday that looked at how much energy from the sun is absorbed by the Earth or reflected back into space.

Researchers found the gap between the two is the biggest since measurements began in 1960, meaning more of the sun’s heat energy is now staying on Earth. And that energy imbalance is heating up the oceans, atmosphere, and frozen regions of the world, according to the World Meteorological Organization’s State of the Global Climate report.

Ashkay Deoras, a research scientist at Britain’s National Center for Atmospheric Science at the University of Reading, likened the planet to a heated room with the windows closed.

“If you open the window, naturally, you will allow the hot air to escape,” said Dr. Deoras, who was not associated with the report. “But now what is happening is that, because of all these greenhouse gases, they are just trapping more and more heat. The planet is just not getting a chance to cool down.”

In previous reports, the U.N.-based meteorological organization documented changes in each element of the Earth’s system, such as surface temperatures, ocean heat, melting glaciers and sea level rise. This year, the authors, who include climate scientists and meteorologists, examined shifts on a wider scale.

Scientists studying data collected over more than three decades found accelerating losses. Their research offers clues about the causes.

Birds in the United States are not only declining, but they are declining faster, especially in areas with intensive agriculture, according to new research. Overall drops in bird population, measured from 1987 to 2021, were sharpest in warm and warming areas, suggesting that climate change may play a role.

The study, published on Thursday in the journal Science, shows only correlation with intensive agriculture and temperature, not causation. It does not factor in other circumstances that may be affecting birds along migratory routes or while they are overwintering. But it adds to an ever more robust body of evidence that birds — one of the best measured families of animals on Earth, and a sentinel for the health of other species — are not OK.

Whatever the specific drivers, the accelerating losses make sense given society’s focus on economic growth, which often comes at a cost to the natural world, said Peter P. Marra, an ornithologist and dean at Georgetown University who specializes in bird populations and was not involved with the new research.

“The American dream turns into the American nightmare as we start to look at what we’re doing to biodiversity and systems that we depend on as humans,” he said.

The Earth could be doomed to breach the symbolic 1.5C warming limit in as little as three years at current levels of carbon dioxide emissions.

That's the stark warning from more than 60 of the world's leading climate scientists in the most up-to-date assessment of the state of global warming.

Nearly 200 countries agreed to try to limit global temperature rises to 1.5C above levels of the late 1800s in a landmark agreement in 2015, with the aim of avoiding some of the worst impacts of climate change.

But countries have continued to burn record amounts of coal, oil and gas and chop down carbon-rich forests - leaving that international goal in peril.

Climate change has already worsened many weather extremes - such as the UK's 40C heat in July 2022 - and has rapidly raised global sea levels, threatening coastal communities.

"Things are all moving in the wrong direction," said lead author Prof Piers Forster, director of the Priestley Centre for Climate Futures at the University of Leeds.

"We're seeing some unprecedented changes and we're also seeing the heating of the Earth and sea-level rise accelerating as well."

These changes "have been predicted for some time and we can directly place them back to the very high level of emissions", he added.

The world’s ice sheets just got a dire prognosis, and coastlines are going to pay the price

Glaciers in Antarctica on February 7, 2022. A new study suggests even if the world meets its climate targets it may not be enough to save the planet's ice sheets. 

The world’s ice sheets are on course for runaway melting, leading to multiple feet of sea level rise and “catastrophic” migration away from coastlines, even if the world pulls off the miraculous and keeps global warming to within 1.5 degrees Celsius, according to new research.

A group of international scientists set out to establish what a “safe limit” of warming would be for the survival of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. They pored over studies that took data from satellites, climate models and evidence from the past, from things like ice cores, deep-sea sediments and even octopus DNA.