Humanity could be just 3 years away from crossing a dire climate threshold, report warns

Ice calving from the fracture zone of a glacier crashes into the ocean in Greenland. Melting of such glacial ice is leading to the warping of Earth's crust.

Record greenhouse gas emissions could exhaust Earth's "carbon budget" in as little as three years, dooming the planet to breach the symbolic threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.6 degrees Fahrenheit) warming.

Global warming of 2 C (3.6 F) is considered an important threshold — warming beyond this greatly increases the likelihood of devastating and irreversible climate breakdown that include extreme heatwaves, droughts and the melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets.