This has been the hottest year in recorded human history. Its unprecedented temperatures stoked devastating wildfires, floods, cyclones, droughts and heatwaves that cost thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars in economic damage. At the rate we are going, it would also be one of the coolest, calmest years any of us would ever experience again.
Just how much hotter and more destructive the atmosphere would become depends on the choices humanity makes, starting today. At the moment, we are still making too many bad ones.
The EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service on Monday said this year would almost certainly be the hottest year on record, with global average surface temperatures about 1.6°C above preindustrial averages. That would top the previous record, set all the way back last year.
Significantly, that would also be the first year on record with global temperatures 1.5°C above preindustrial averages. That was the fingers-crossed, best-case global-heating goal the world set for itself in the Paris Agreement of 2015. Breaching 1.5°C for one year does not mean that goal is a lost cause. The Paris Agreement referred to long-term averages, not one-year anomalies.
However, let us be honest: 1.5°C is basically a lost cause. The world has wasted most of the decade since that goal was set, during which it became ever more of a stretch. The greening promises that countries and companies have made are not nearly enough to hit that target, much less Paris’ slightly more realistic primary goal of less than 2°C of heating.
Given current policies and practices, the world is not even on track to limit warming to 2.8°C, a recent UN report warned. In just a few years, the window to hold heating to 1.5°C would slam shut.
So what, you might be thinking. How much worse is 3°C than 1.5°C? If you are talking about its effect on an afternoon in the park, it is not significant. If you are talking about a long-term global average temperature, each tick higher brings devastating consequences. One climate scientist has compared it to having a fever. Every slight rise in temperature puts more strain on your body, and it is not long before the heat becomes life-threatening. The mere 1.3°C of long-term warming the planet has experienced so far has already raised the risks and destructive power of those wildfires, floods, cyclones, droughts and heatwaves.
Warming would not happen uniformly around the world. Some heavily populated areas, including sub-Saharan Africa, the Mediterranean and Central Europe, would reach 3°C far more quickly than others, a study published on Tuesday in the journal Environmental Research Letters found.
Making matters worse, global heating has apparently accelerated in recent years. The planet has warmed by an average of 0.18°C per decade starting in 1970, but since 2015 that rate has jumped to 0.3°C per decade, University of California, Berkeley, climate scientist Zeke Hausfather has written (acknowledging the geologically teensy time scales make such measurement somewhat uncertain). After considering the many other factors possibly causing this, from volcanic eruptions to the end of sulfur dioxide pollution from shipping, the biggest factor heating the planet is still humanity burning fossil fuels and spewing greenhouse gases.
In fact, acceleration at this point is what a lot of climate models expect, Hausfather said.
The better news is that stopping our greenhouse gas emissions would also stop the warming in its tracks, Texas A&M University climate scientist Andrew Dessler said recently. Unfortunately, in some important ways, humanity seems further from reaching that milestone than it was in 2015. The following year brought the first election of former US president Donald Trump, who pulled the US out of that Paris agreement and otherwise did everything in his power to frustrate a clean energy transition.
The transition survived Trump’s first term, and US President Joe Biden made some progress in accelerating it during his four years in office, including rejoining the Paris accords. However, now Trump is coming back for another four years. This time he is armed with the blueprint of Project 2025, which calls for ending government support for green energy, boosting fossil fuel production and leaving the Paris agreement yet again.
Meanwhile, in Europe, right-wing parties gained power in the summer’s parliamentary elections at the cost of green parties, driven partly by rhetoric hostile to climate action. The shifting political mood has been reflected at increasingly unproductive UN climate confabs that have been derailed by fossil fuel interests. The world can barely agree on the necessity of phasing out fossil fuels, much less come up with credible plans for doing so. The hotter the planet gets, the more destabilized global politics would be, making concerted climate action even more difficult.
We are losing our nerve for action at the worst possible moment, in other words. Global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels and land use reached a new high this year. To keep heating below 2°C, the world would need to start chopping emissions by 4 percent every year until 2035, UN scientists have said. The longer we delay that process, the bigger the task would be; the more the cost in economic losses and human lives would grow. There is still time to start making the right choices, but not much.
Mark Gongloff is a Bloomberg Opinion editor and columnist covering climate change. He previously worked for Fortune.com, the Huffington Post and the Wall Street Journal.
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