2024’s Record-Breaking Heat Brought the World to a Dangerous Threshold. Now What? Trending Global News

At midnight on Dec. 31, Earth ended its hottest year in recorded history, scientists said Friday. The previous hottest year was 2023. And the next one will soon be upon us: By continuing to burn massive amounts of coal, oil and gas, mankind has virtually guaranteed it.

The planet’s record-high average temperatures last year reflected week-long, 104-degree-Fahrenheit spring heat waves that closed schools in Bangladesh and India. This mirrors the effects of bathtub-warm ocean waters that fueled hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico and cyclones in the Philippines. And it reflected the scorching summer and fall conditions that led Los Angeles to its most devastating wildfire in its history this week.

“We are facing a very new climate and new challenges, challenges for which our society is not prepared,” said Carlo Buontempo, director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service, the EU’s monitoring agency.

But even amid this progress toward warmer years and ever-increasing threats to homes, communities, and the environment, 2024 looms in another unwelcome way. According to Copernicus, this was the first year that global temperatures were on average 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, higher than that experienced on the planet at the beginning of the Industrial Age.

For the past decade, the world has been trying to avoid crossing this dangerous border. Nations enshrined the goal in the 2015 Paris Agreement to fight climate change. “Keep 1.5 alive” was the mantra at the UN summit.

Yet here we are. Global temperatures will fluctuate to some degree, as they always do, which is why scientists often look at warming averaged over a longer period of time, not just over a year.

But even by that standard, staying below 1.5 degrees looks increasingly unattainable, according to researchers who studied the numbers. Globally, despite hundreds of billions of dollars of investment in clean-energy technologies, carbon dioxide emissions set a record in 2024 and show no signs of declining.

a recent study The findings, published in the journal Nature, say humanity can now expect warming of about 1.6 degrees. To achieve this, nations will need to begin cutting emissions at a pace that will stress political, social and economic feasibility.

But what if we had started earlier?

“It was guaranteed that we would reach a point where the gap between reality and the required trajectory for 1.5 degrees was so large that it was ridiculous,” said David Victor, a professor of public policy at the University of California, San Diego. “

The question now is what should replace 1.5 for nations’ climate aspirations.

“These top-level goals are, at best, like a compass,” said Dr. Victor. “They are a reminder that if we don’t do more, we are set for significant climate impacts.”

The 1.5-degree limit was never the difference between safety and ruin, hope and despair. These were numbers negotiated by governments trying to answer a big question: What is the highest global temperature rise – and the associated level of threats, whether heat waves or wildfires or melting glaciers – that our societies must avoid? should try?

The outcome, as codified in the Paris Agreement, was that nations would aspire to keep warming “well below” 2 degrees Celsius, while “continuing efforts” to limit it to 1.5 degrees.

Even at the time, some experts considered the latter goal unrealistic, because it required such deep and rapid emissions reductions. Nevertheless, the United States, the European Union, and other governments adopted it as a guide for climate policy.

Christophe Bertram, associate research professor at the University of Maryland’s Center for Global Sustainability, said the urgency of the 1.5 target is forcing all types of companies — automakers, cement makers, electric utilities — to start thinking seriously about how to achieve it. What would be the point of reducing it to zero? Their emissions by mid-century. “I think this has led to some serious action,” Dr. Bertram said.

But the lofty aspiration of the 1.5 target also exposed deep fault lines among nations.

China and India never supported this goal, as it required them to curb their use of coal, gas, and oil at a rate they said would hinder their development. Rich countries that were struggling to cut their own emissions began stop funding For fossil-fuel projects in developing countries that were economically beneficial. Some low-income countries felt this was extremely unfair ask them to sacrifice The view for climate was that it was wealthy nations – and not them – that produced most of the greenhouse gases that are now warming the world.

“The 1.5 degree target has created a lot of tension between rich and poor countries,” said Vijaya Ramachandran, director of energy and development at the Breakthrough Institute, an environmental research organization.

Costa Samaras, an environmental-engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon University, compared warming targets to health officials’ guidelines on cholesterol. “We don’t set health goals based on what’s realistic or what’s possible,” Dr. Samaras said. “We say, ‘This is what’s good for you. This way you won’t get sick.'”

“If we were going to say, ‘Okay, 1.5 is out of the question, let’s keep it at 1.75,’ that would reassure people that 1.5 wasn’t that important,” said Dr. Samaras, who Helped shape US climate policy from 2021 to 2024 at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. “it is very important.”

Scientists convened by the United Nations have concluded that limiting warming to 1.5 degrees rather than 2 would prevent millions of people from being exposed to life-threatening heat waves, water shortages and coastal flooding . This could mean the difference between a world that has coral reefs and Arctic sea ice in the summer, and one that does not.

Every small increase of additional warming, whether it’s 1.6 degrees versus 1.5, or 1.7 versus 1.6, increases the risk. “Even if the world exceeds 1.5 degrees, and the probability of that happening increases every day, we must keep pushing to get emissions to zero as quickly as possible,” said Inger Andersen, executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme.

Officially, the sun hasn’t set on the 1.5 goal yet. The Paris Agreement remains in force, even though President-elect Donald J. Trump has vowed for the second time to withdraw the United States from it. At the UN climate talks, discussion of 1.5 has been more slow than in previous years. But it hardly went away.

“With appropriate measures, 1.5 Celsius is still achievable,” Cedric Schuster, natural resources and environment minister of the Pacific island nation of Samoa, told the summit in Azerbaijan last year. Countries must rise to the occasion with “new, highly ambitious” policies, he said.

For Dr. Victor of UC San Diego, it’s strange but absolutely predictable that governments keep talking like this about an unattainable goal. “No major political leader who wants to seriously consider climate is going to stick their neck out and say, ‘1.5 degrees is not possible. Let’s talk about more realistic goals,” he said.

Still, the world will eventually that discussion is neededDr. Victor said. And it is not clear how this will happen.

“It could be constructive, where we start asking, ‘How much heat are we really in? And how do we deal with that?'” he said. “Or it could seem very toxic, with a lot of political fingers pointing at it.” Are.”