After nine days of grand pronouncements, pledges and plans, scientists delivered a rude awakening to a COP26 summit that has been called “the last, best hope” for climate action: Earth is on track to warm about 2.5 degrees Celsius (4.5 degrees Fahrenheit), eclipsing the world’s shared climate goal by a full degree.

In a preliminary analysis released Tuesday, United Nations researchers found a massive gap between countries’ long-term promises to zero out carbon emissions and the official, short-term plans known as “nationally determined contributions,” or NDCs.

What countries are planning to do between now and 2030 makes many net zero pledges impossible, the researchers say. And despite a flurry of new commitments to zero out emissions, the projected level of warming by the end of the century is only about 0.1 degrees lower than before COP26 started.

Earth has already warmed at least 1.1 degrees Celsius since the Industrial Revolution. If humanity continues on its current trajectory, global sea levels will rise at least 2 feet, according to research from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Almost half of the world will face regular, life-threatening heat waves. Humanity risks exceeding climate tipping points, triggering ice-sheet lost, permafrost thaw and ecosystem collapse from which there is no return.

Unless pledges are boosted in the immediate future, humanity will lose its chance to limit warming to the 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) — a target that scientists and vulnerable communities increasingly say the world cannot afford to miss.

The findings come during the highly technical second week of the Glasgow summit, when diplomats huddle in windowless meeting rooms, attempting to hammer out the rules for assessing and enforcing the world’s climate goals.

But the latest projections underscore a growing frustration with the U.N. meeting: The lofty rhetoric of world leaders last week has not been followed up with concrete action.

“Net zero is a door opener to false solutions,” said Tom B.K. Goldtooth, a Diné and Dakota activist and director of the Indigenous Environmental Network. “It just doesn’t add up.”

Absent real policy change and a substantial shift away from burning fossil fuels, the distant goal of hitting net zero looks to many like kicking the can down the road.

“We shouldn’t be blinded by long-term promises,” said Joeri Rogelj, director of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment at Imperial College London and a lead author of the updated Emissions Gap report.

“If you want to achieve net zero goals in the long term, your near-term pledges have to put you on track to deliver them,” he added. “Otherwise, there is low confidence they will ever be achieved.”

The idea of hitting “net zero” — a point at which humanity’s emissions are completely canceled out by carbon sinks — gained fire in the run-up to this year’s conference. A week before the start of COP26, some four dozen members, including the United States and European Union, had committed to reaching net zero sometime around the middle of the century.

Recent days brought a flurry of new announcements: China aims to zero out emissions by 2060. India by 2070.

If nations can be taken at their word, this looks like progress, if not perfection. Meeting net zero goals would lead to temperature rise of about 2.1 degrees Celsius (3.8 degrees Fahrenheit), according to the emissions gap update. That would bring the world much closer to the Paris agreement goal of keeping warming below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit).

And many pledges from developing nations are conditional upon support from wealthier countries. Considering only the “unconditional” plans submitted to the U.N., projected warming remains stubbornly at 2.7 degrees Celsius (4.9 degrees Fahrenheit).

“When we look at what has come in, the additional pledges, frankly it’s the elephant giving birth to a mouse,” said U.N. Environment Program executive director Inger Andersen. “We are not doing enough. We are not where we need to be. And we need to step up with much more action, much more urgency and much more ambition.”