In the Name of Allah — the Most Beneficent, the Most Merciful.
The climate is the weather remembered over decades. A hot day is weather. A decade in which the hot days come earlier, stay longer and break records that stood for a century is climate. And the climate of the Earth is changing, in a direction and at a speed that the instruments have now measured for more than a hundred years. This post does what the first four posts in this series did for earthquakes, for astronomy, for the oceans and for the living soil: first the phenomenon as science understands it, then the argument for how it relates to the Qur'anic narrative.
1. The air we live in
The atmosphere is a thin skin. If the Earth were an apple, the air would be thinner than the apple's skin — about a hundred kilometres of gas wrapped around a planet 12,742 kilometres across, and most of its mass sits in the lowest ten kilometres, the layer we live and breathe in. It is mostly nitrogen (about 78 percent) and oxygen (about 21 percent). The gases that decide the climate are the trace ones, the remaining one percent: water vapour, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, ozone. They are called greenhouse gases because of what they do, and the name is a fair description of the physics.
Sunlight passes through them easily. The Earth absorbs that light and warms, and like every warm body it gives off heat of its own, as infrared radiation. The greenhouse gases absorb some of that outgoing heat and re-emit it in all directions, including back down toward the ground. Without them the Earth's average temperature would be about minus 18 degrees Celsius, a frozen world. With them it is about 15 degrees. The greenhouse effect is not a theory about the future. It is the reason the planet is habitable at all, and it was worked out in the nineteenth century — by Joseph Fourier in the 1820s, by John Tyndall in 1859, who measured which gases absorb heat, and by Svante Arrhenius in 1896, who calculated that doubling carbon dioxide would warm the Earth by several degrees.
The question is not whether the greenhouse effect exists. The question is what happens when human beings add to it, and the answer is measured, not guessed.
2. The Keeling Curve: the air, counted year by year
In 1958, a young scientist named Charles David Keeling began measuring carbon dioxide in the air at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, on the side of a volcano, far from factories and forests, where the air is as clean as the atmosphere gets. He measured it every day. The record he started — the Keeling Curve — is now the longest continuous measurement of the atmosphere's chemistry, and it is one of the most important graphs in all of science.
In 1959, the first full year of the record, carbon dioxide averaged about 316 parts per million: 316 molecules of carbon dioxide in every million molecules of air. In 2024 it averaged 424.6 parts per million. That is a rise of more than a third in a single human lifetime, and the rise is speeding up: the jump from 2023 to 2024, about 3.5 parts per million, was the largest single-year increase in the whole record. Before the industrial age, for thousands of years, the level sat near 280 parts per million — a figure known from air bubbles trapped in Antarctic ice, which preserve samples of ancient atmosphere. We have now added half as much again.
The curve also breathes. Every year it rises in the northern winter, when plants are dormant, and falls in the northern summer, when the forests of the northern hemisphere — which holds most of the world's land — draw carbon dioxide out of the air to grow. The sawtooth is the planet inhaling and exhaling. But each year the exhale ends a little higher than the year before. The breathing continues; the level climbs.
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| The Keeling Curve: carbon dioxide at Mauna Loa, from about 316 ppm in 1959 to 424.6 ppm in 2024, against the pre-industrial level of about 280 ppm. Data: NOAA / Scripps Institution of Oceanography. |
Where does the extra carbon dioxide come from? The answer is written in the carbon itself. Carbon from fossil fuels — coal, oil and gas — is old carbon, buried for hundreds of millions of years, and it carries a distinct isotopic fingerprint: it is poor in carbon-13. As the total carbon dioxide in the air has risen, the share of carbon-13 in it has fallen, exactly as it must if the new gas came from burning fossil fuel. The oxygen in the air has fallen at the same time, in the amount combustion consumes. And the rise matches, year by year, the amount of fossil fuel humanity burns. The atmosphere is keeping the accounts, and the accounts balance.
3. The warming, measured six ways
If the heat-trapping gas rises, the temperature should follow, and it has. The year 2024 was the warmest year since records began in the nineteenth century. The World Meteorological Organization, combining six independent datasets — from NASA, NOAA, the European Copernicus service, the UK Met Office, the Japan Meteorological Agency and Berkeley Earth — put 2024 at about 1.55 degrees Celsius above the average of 1850–1900, the period used as a stand-in for pre-industrial conditions, with an uncertainty of about 0.13 degrees. It was the first calendar year to pass 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial. The previous record, 2023, was 1.45 degrees above. The ten warmest years on record have all come since 2010.
That sounds small. A degree and a half is the difference between a comfortable room and a warm one. But it is a global average, over the whole surface of the planet, oceans included, averaged over a whole year. Averages hide the extremes: the land has warmed faster than the oceans, the Arctic faster still — roughly three to four times the global average — and a single degree of global warming means many more days above 40 degrees in the places that were already hot, and heatwaves that used to come once in a generation now coming every few years.
The warming is not measured by thermometers alone. The oceans, which absorb more than 90 percent of the extra heat trapped by greenhouse gases, have warmed steadily: 2024 saw the highest ocean heat content ever recorded. Glaciers are losing mass on every continent. The Greenland ice sheet and the Antarctic ice sheet are both losing ice. Spring snow cover in the northern hemisphere is shrinking. The seasons themselves are shifting: spring arrives earlier, autumn later, in the temperature records of the northern hemisphere.
Nor is it a single dataset or a single country saying so. Six groups, using different instruments, different methods and different corrections, agree on the shape of the rise. Satellites measuring the temperature of the lower atmosphere agree. The retreat of glaciers, the earlier flowering of plants, the poleward movement of fish and birds — the living world is keeping the same record as the thermometers.
4. The sea is rising, and the rise is speeding up
Warm water takes up more space than cold water, and melting land ice adds water to the oceans. Both effects are now measured from space. Since satellites began measuring the height of the sea precisely in 1993, the global average sea level has risen by about 10 centimetres — four inches. The rate has more than doubled in that time, from about 2.1 millimetres a year in 1993 to about 4.3 millimetres a year now. In 2024 alone it rose 0.59 centimetres, faster than expected, mostly because the warming ocean expanded. Since 1900, the total rise is more than 20 centimetres.
Ten centimetres sounds small, until it meets a storm. Sea level is the platform on which every coastal storm stands: a storm surge that once stopped at the sea wall now arrives ten centimetres higher, and in a flat delta ten centimetres of sea level can move the shoreline by tens of metres. The people who feel it first are the ones who live closest to the water — in Bangladesh, in the Nile Delta, in the small island states of the Pacific, and in the Indus Delta of Pakistan, where the sea has already swallowed villages and pushed salt water into farmland and wells.
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| Global mean sea level since 1993: about 10 cm of rise, with the annual rate more than doubling, from about 2.1 mm a year to about 4.3 mm a year. Data: NASA satellite altimetry. |
The ice that feeds the rise is also measured. The Arctic sea ice that covers the top of the world in September, at the end of the summer melt, has shrunk by about 13 percent per decade in the satellite record — a loss of an area larger than many countries. The glaciers of the high mountains are retreating, including the glaciers of the Hindu Kush, Karakoram and Himalaya, the ranges that feed the Indus. Pakistan holds about seven thousand glaciers, more than any country outside the polar regions, and they are the water tower of the country: the Indus and its tributaries begin as snow and ice in those mountains. A glacier in retreat is a reservoir emptying.
5. The weather itself is changing its manners
Climate change does not only raise averages. It changes the behaviour of weather — how rain falls, how heat arrives, how storms behave. Three changes are now visible in the records.
First, rain falls harder when it falls. Warm air holds more water vapour — about 7 percent more for every degree of warming — so when the rain does come, it can come in heavier bursts. The total rain in a year may not change much in a place, but it arrives in fewer, fiercer events, with longer dry spells between them. Flood and drought, once opposite seasons, now arrive in the same year, sometimes in the same season.
Second, heatwaves last longer and reach higher. A heatwave that would once have been a once-in-fifty-years event in a given place now returns every few years in many regions, and the hottest days are hotter than the old records allowed.
Third, the water cycle is speeding up: more evaporation from the land and the sea, more water in the air, more intense rain where the air rises, and drier soils where it sinks. Wet places tend to get wetter and dry places drier, though the pattern is not neat — the monsoon, which waters South Asia, is becoming more variable, with heavier bursts and longer breaks within the season.
Pakistan has felt all three. In the summer of 2022, a heatwave pushed temperatures above 50 degrees Celsius in parts of Sindh, weeks before the monsoon arrived. Then the monsoon came with a force the country had never recorded: Sindh received more than eight times its average August rainfall, Balochistan nearly seven times. The floods that followed affected 33 million people — about one in seven Pakistanis — killed about 1,700, displaced about 8 million, and damaged or destroyed more than two million houses. The United Nations Secretary-General, visiting the flooded country, called it a monsoon on steroids and a climate catastrophe. The flood was a weather event. The heat that dried the soil before it, the warmer air that carried more water, and the warmer sea that fed the monsoon were the climate behind it.
6. Why the past is the proof of the mechanism
Scepticism about climate change usually takes one of two forms: that the warming is natural, or that the link between carbon dioxide and temperature is unproven. The past answers both, because the Earth has run the experiment before, and the rocks kept the results.
In the deep past, when carbon dioxide was high, the Earth was warm; when it was low, the Earth was cold. The ice ages were driven in part by small changes in the Earth's orbit, but the large swings of temperature followed the carbon dioxide: ice cores from Antarctica show temperature and carbon dioxide rising and falling together over 800,000 years, through eight ice ages. The physics is the same physics Tyndall measured in his laboratory in 1859.
And the natural causes that could warm the planet today have been checked one by one. The Sun's output has been measured from space since 1978, and it has not risen — if anything it has fallen slightly, while the temperature climbed. Volcanoes cool the planet for a year or two after a large eruption, then the effect fades. The El Niño pattern in the Pacific warms some years and cools others, but it cannot produce a steady rise over fifty years. The warming of the last fifty years has happened while the Sun was steady, and it has the fingerprint of greenhouse warming: the lower atmosphere warms while the upper atmosphere cools, nights warm faster than days, winters warm faster than summers — exactly the pattern a heat-trapping gas produces, and the opposite of what a brighter Sun would do.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in its Sixth Assessment Report (2021), put it in one sentence: it is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land. “Unequivocal” is not a word scientists use lightly. It is the strongest word in their vocabulary, and it was chosen because the evidence no longer leaves room for the alternatives.
7. What is coming, and what is already decided
The future of the climate is not one number but a range, and the range depends on what humanity does next. The Paris Agreement of 2015 set the aim of holding warming well below 2 degrees above pre-industrial, and pursuing efforts to limit it to 1.5 degrees. The first calendar year above 1.5 degrees, 2024, does not by itself breach that agreement — the target refers to a sustained average over decades, not a single year — but it shows how close the line now is. On current policies, the world is heading for roughly 2.5 to 3 degrees of warming by the end of the century; with the pledges countries have made, if they are kept, the figure is lower, but still above 1.5.
Some of what is coming is already decided, whatever is done now. The sea will keep rising for centuries, because the oceans are slow to warm and the ice sheets are slow to respond: another 10 to 15 centimetres of rise by 2050 is largely locked in. The glaciers that are already retreating will keep retreating for decades. The heat already trapped in the oceans will keep working its way through the system.
But the difference between 1.5 degrees and 3 degrees is not a small difference. It is the difference between coral reefs mostly surviving and mostly dying; between the Arctic keeping some of its summer ice and losing it; between heatwaves that are dangerous and heatwaves that are unsurvivable for people working outdoors; between a monsoon that is heavier and a monsoon that is unrecognisable. Every fraction of a degree matters, because every fraction is paid for in floods, in failed harvests, in heat and in the sea.
For Pakistan, the stakes are concrete. The country contributes less than one percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, and it is among the most exposed to the consequences: the glaciers that feed its rivers, the monsoon that waters its fields, the heat that already pushes the limits of the human body in Sindh and Punjab, the delta where the sea meets the land. The 2022 flood cost the country tens of billions of dollars — the post-disaster assessment put the damage and the economic losses above 30 billion dollars — and it arrived in a country that had done almost nothing to cause the warming behind it.
8. The balance: what the Qur'an calls mizan
The science of the last seven sections can be said in one sentence: the climate is a system in balance, and human beings have pushed it out of balance. The Qur'an has a word for that balance, and it uses it for the whole of creation.
“And the heaven He raised and imposed the balance — that you not transgress within the balance. And establish weight in justice and do not make deficient the balance.” (Qur'an 55:7–9)
The word is mizan: the scales, the balance, the measure. It is used of the weighing of deeds, and here it is used of the heaven itself — the sky, the atmosphere, the order above us — raised and balanced, with a command attached to it: do not transgress within the balance. The balance is not only a fact about the world. It is a trust, and the transgression is a moral act.
The same language of measure runs through the Qur'an's account of the natural world. “Indeed, all things We created with measure.” (Qur'an 54:49) The rain is sent down “in due measure” (Qur'an 23:18; 43:11). The Earth is spread out and set with “a measure” for everything that grows in it (Qur'an 15:19). The winds, the rain, the sun and the moon are all described as running on a course, in measure, by command. The world, in the Qur'anic picture, is not a heap of accidents. It is a measured order — and the measure can be broken by those who live inside it.
9. The Qur'anic narrative: winds, rain, and corruption on land and sea
The Qur'an speaks of the climate — the winds, the rain, the sea, the balance of the world — in passages that return, again and again, to the same sequence: the wind moves, the cloud forms, the rain falls, the dead land lives, and human beings are asked to notice.
“And We have sent the fertilizing winds and sent down water from the sky and given you drink from it. And you are not its retainers.” (Qur'an 15:22) The winds are called lawahiq — fertilizing, impregnating — because they carry the rain and pollinate the plants. The water is given, and the verse ends with a reminder that human beings do not store it: the aquifers, the glaciers, the monsoon itself are not ours to command. We receive them; we do not own them.
“And it is He who sends the winds as good tidings before His mercy, and We send down from the sky pure water, that We may bring to life thereby a dead land.” (Qur'an 25:48–49) The same sequence as the soil post: wind, then water, then a dead land brought to life. And in Surah Ar-Rum: “And among His signs is that He shows you the lightning, arousing fear and hope, and sends down rain from the sky, and revives the earth after its death with it. Indeed, in that are signs for a people who reason.” (Qur'an 30:24) The lightning brings fear and hope together — fear of the storm, hope of the rain — because the same sky that floods also waters.
Then comes the verse that speaks most directly to the subject of this post, and it is the only verse in the Qur'an that names corruption appearing on the land and the sea together:
“Corruption has appeared on the land and the sea because of what the hands of people have earned, so He may let them taste part of what they have done, that perhaps they will return.” (Qur'an 30:41)
Fasad — corruption, decay, disorder — appears on land and sea, and the cause is stated plainly: “because of what the hands of people have earned.” The verse does not name a mechanism, and it should not be read as a prediction of a particular modern science. But its shape is worth noticing. The corruption is on the land and the sea — the two realms the science of this post has measured together: the warming land, the rising and warming sea. It is caused by human hands. And its purpose, in the verse, is not only punishment but tasting — “so He may let them taste part of what they have done, that perhaps they will return.” The tasting is partial, and the return is still open. The verse ends with a door, not a wall.
The same surah that carries that verse also carries its counterweight. A few verses earlier, the winds and the rain and the revival of the earth are listed among the signs “for a people who reason” (30:24). The world is presented as a system of signs, and the signs are also the things human beings can damage. The rain that revives the dead land is the same water cycle that, pushed out of balance, floods a third of a country.
The sea has its own verses in this reading. “And He subjected to you the sea” — and the ships that sail in it, and the winds that move them (Qur'an 45:12; 2:164). The sea is a gift made serviceable: its winds carry ships, its currents carry rain, its surface gives up the water that falls on the land. And the wind itself can be stilled: “If He willed, He could still the wind, and they would remain motionless on its surface.” (Qur'an 42:33) The systems that serve us are not guaranteed. They run by command, and they can be withdrawn — or disrupted, by hands that do not understand what they are breaking.
10. Reading the science against the text
Read the science of sections 1 to 7 against the Qur'anic language of sections 8 and 9, and three correspondences stand out. They are correspondences, in the honest framing of this series — not proofs, and not claims that the Qur'an is a climate textbook. The verse names no molecule, no parts per million, no satellite. What it names is the pattern, and the pattern matches.
First, the Qur'an speaks of the world as a balance, a measured order, and science describes exactly that: a system of feedbacks in which a small push — a few hundred parts per million of a trace gas — moves the whole. The greenhouse effect is a balance: heat in, heat out, held at 15 degrees by gases that make up one percent of the air. Add to them, and the balance shifts. The Qur'anic word mizan is a scale, and a scale is the right image for a system in which a small weight tips everything. The science gives the weight: 424.6 parts per million, up from 280. The Qur'an gives the moral shape: a balance that human beings are told not to transgress.
Second, the Qur'an says corruption appears on land and sea because of what human hands have earned, and the measurements say the same thing in their own language. The land has warmed; the sea has warmed and risen; the cause is the gas human beings have added to the air, identified by its isotopic fingerprint, in the amount the fuel accounts record. The verse does not explain the mechanism, and the science does not explain the moral meaning. But the shape is the same on both sides: human action, land and sea together, damage that can be tasted in the present — in floods, in heat, in the sea coming over the wall.
Third, the Qur'an insists that the tasting is partial and the return is open, and the science agrees in its own terms. Not everything is decided. The sea will rise by 10 to 15 centimetres by 2050 whatever happens, but the difference between 1.5 degrees and 3 degrees is still to be chosen, and it is chosen by what is burned and what is built in the next decade. The verse's “that perhaps they will return” is not a prediction that humanity will return. It is an opening. The science says the same: the door is still open, but it is closing, and each year of delay narrows what can still be saved.
There is a limit to the correspondence, and it should be stated plainly. The Qur'an's fasad is a moral and spiritual corruption as well as a physical one — it includes the corruption of injustice, of greed, of turning away — and no measurement of carbon dioxide can capture that. The verse is not a climate model, and it must not be reduced to one. The claim is narrower and, for that reason, stronger: the physical description on which the sign is built — a balanced world, damaged on land and sea by human hands, tasting the consequences in the present — is recognisable to the science, in the terms the science gives, and the Qur'an's word for that state, corruption, is the word a climate scientist would reach for too, if he were describing what is happening to the land and the sea.
11. The argument: how the two accounts relate
Four points, then, in the shape of the argument this series has been building.
First, the climate is a system of exact measure, and the Qur'an's word for that order is the balance. The numbers in this post are checkable: 424.6 parts per million, 1.55 degrees, 10 centimetres of sea rise, a rate that has more than doubled. The world runs on measure, and the Qur'an presents it as a sign precisely because it does — a world that runs on measure is a world that can be read, and a world that can be read can be warned.
Second, the climate is a place where human action has consequences the text describes truly. No observer of the seventh century could have measured carbon dioxide, or weighed the sea from space, or known that a gas making up four hundredths of one percent of the air decides whether the planet is habitable. And yet the Qur'an describes the world as a balance that human beings can transgress, and corruption appearing on land and sea because of what their hands have earned — a description that matches, in shape and in meaning, what the instruments would later find. The description is not vague poetry that could fit anything; it is specific — balance, land and sea, human hands, tasting the result — and checkable.
Third, the climate is presented as a trust with a condition, and the condition is care. The verse that anchors this post ends with a return; the verses that surround it list the gifts — the winds, the rain, the sea made serviceable — and ask whether we will be grateful. Gratitude, in the Qur'an, is not a feeling. It is a practice: using a gift well, and not ruining it. The atmosphere that keeps the planet at 15 degrees instead of minus 18, the glaciers that store the water of a whole country, the monsoon that waters its fields — these are gifts that took the Earth millions of years to arrange, and a century of burning to disturb. To receive them as gifts and then to damage them is not gratitude. The science of sections 1 to 7 and the theology of sections 8 and 9 point in the same direction here: stewardship is the proper response to subjection, and repair is the proper response to corruption.
Fourth, the climate is a reminder of scale, and of how much depends on what cannot be seen. The gas that decides the climate is invisible, odourless, four hundredths of one percent of the air. The heat that is changing the world is mostly hidden in the oceans, where no one lives. The sea rises by millimetres a year, too slow to see, until the storm arrives and the wall is overtopped. The Qur'an's climate passages do not flatter human perception; they place human beings inside a system whose largest forces are invisible, and ask them to reason about what they cannot see. Science says the same thing in its own language: the most important numbers in the climate are the ones no eye can read, and they are read only by instruments and by attention. Humility before the balance is not a religious extra. It is the correct scientific attitude, too.
12. What the believer takes from the changing climate
The changing climate teaches three things at once. First, humility: the world we live in is held at a habitable temperature by a gas we cannot see, in a balance we did not make and cannot easily restore. Second, responsibility: the balance was pushed out of measure by human hands, and human hands are the only ones that can bring it back — by what is burned, what is built, what is planted, what is protected. Third, hope, of the kind the Qur'an itself offers: the tasting is partial, the return is still open, and the same winds that carry the storm also carry the rain that revives the dead land.
The next time the monsoon rain falls, remember what it is: water carried across the sea by the wind, falling in due measure on the land, the same cycle that flooded a third of Pakistan and the same cycle that waters its wheat. Science measures the cycle; revelation tells us what it means. Both are worth listening to — and both, now, are asking for the same thing: that we do not transgress within the balance.
Sources and notes
- 2024 as the warmest year on record, about 1.55 °C above 1850–1900 (±0.13 °C), first calendar year above 1.5 °C, from six datasets; 2023 at 1.45 °C: World Meteorological Organization, “WMO confirms 2024 as warmest year on record at about 1.55 °C above pre-industrial level”, January 2025; NOAA/NASA 2024 temperature briefing.
- Carbon dioxide at Mauna Loa: 316 ppm in 1959, 424.6 ppm annual mean in 2024, largest single-year rise (+3.5 ppm); pre-industrial about 280 ppm from ice cores: NOAA Global Monitoring Laboratory / Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Keeling Curve record.
- Greenhouse effect basics and history (Fourier, Tyndall 1859, Arrhenius 1896); “unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land”: IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, Working Group I (2021).
- Sea level: about 10 cm rise since 1993, rate more than doubling from about 2.1 to about 4.3 mm a year; 2024 rise 0.59 cm; more than 20 cm since 1900: NASA Sea Level Change Team; NASA, “NASA Analysis Shows Unexpected Amount of Sea Level Rise in 2024” (March 2025).
- Arctic September sea ice declining about 13 percent per decade in the satellite record: NASA Earth Observatory / National Snow and Ice Data Center.
- Pakistan 2022 floods: 33 million people affected, about 1,700 dead, about 8 million displaced, more than 2 million houses damaged or destroyed; Sindh more than eight times and Balochistan nearly seven times average August rainfall; damage and losses above 30 billion dollars: United Nations Secretary-General's remarks, September 2023; UNICEF Pakistan Humanitarian Situation Report 2022; Government of Pakistan / World Bank Post-Disaster Needs Assessment 2022. Temperatures above 50 °C in parts of Sindh in the May 2022 heatwave: Pakistan Meteorological Department reports of the 2022 heatwave.
- Pakistan's glaciers (about seven thousand, the most outside the polar regions) and the Indus as a glacier-fed river: commonly cited figures from the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) Hindu Kush Himalaya assessments.
- Paris Agreement aim (well below 2 °C, pursuing 1.5 °C) and the distinction between a single year above 1.5 °C and a sustained breach: UNFCCC / WMO.
- Qur'an translations are adapted from Sahih International. The Arabic of 55:7–9, 30:41, 30:24, 15:22, 25:48–49, 23:18, 54:49, 45:12, 42:33 and 2:164 is quoted in full or in part as marked.
- The reading of 30:41 and the mizan verses is presented as a correspondence between the Qur'anic text and measured climate change, not as a scientific proof derived from the verses, and not as a claim that the verses predict modern instruments. Fasad in 30:41 is a moral and spiritual term as well as a physical one, and the post does not reduce it to a climate model.
- The video version of the Oceans topic, and the Biology video “The Living Soil”, are on the Islamic Sciences YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@IslamicSciencesTV
