Oh Well!! UN 1.5C Goal "Deader Than A Doornail" - Climatologist Zeke Hausfather On Record-Crushing Temps In 2024 [View all]

Although a single year above 1.5C does not itself spell climate doom or break the 2015 Paris agreement, in which countries agreed to strive to keep the long-term temperature rise below this point, scientists have warned this aspiration has in effect been snuffed out despite the exhortations of leaders currently gathered at a United Nations climate summit in Azerbaijan. “The goal to avoid exceeding 1.5C is deader than a doornail. It’s almost impossible to avoid at this point because we’ve just waited too long to act,” said Zeke Hausfather, climate research lead at Stripe and a research scientist at Berkeley Earth. “We are speeding past the 1.5C line an accelerating way and that will continue until global emissions stop climbing.”

Last year was so surprisingly hot, even in the context of the climate crisis, that it caused “some soul-searching” among climate scientists, Hausfather said. In recent months there has also been persistent heat despite the fading of El Niño, a periodic climate event that exacerbated temperatures already elevated by the burning of fossil fuels. “It’s going to be the hottest year by an unexpectedly large margin. If it continues to be this warm it’s a worrying sign,” he said. “Going past 1.5C this year is very symbolic, and it’s a sign that we are getting ever closer to going past that target.”

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Yet the 1.5C target now appears to be simply a rhetorical, rather than scientifically achievable, one, bar massive amounts of future carbon removal from as-yet unproven technologies. “I never thought 1.5C was a conceivable goal. I thought it was a pointless thing,” said Gavin Schmidt, a climate scientist at Nasa. “I’m totally unsurprised, like almost all climate scientists, that we are shooting past it at a rapid clip. “But it was extremely galvanizing, so I was wrong about that. Maybe it is useful; maybe people do need impossible targets. You shouldn’t ask scientists how to galvanize the world because clearly we don’t have a fucking clue. People haven’t got a magic set of words to keep us to 1.5C, but we have got to keep trying.

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The world’s decision-makers who are collectively failing to stem dangerous global heating will soon be joined by Donald Trump, who is expected to tear down climate policies and thereby, the Cat report estimates, add at least a further 0.04C to the world temperature. Despite this bleak outlook, some do point out that the picture still looks far rosier than it did before the Paris deal, when a catastrophic temperature rise of 4C or more was foreseeable. Cheap and abundant clean energy is growing at a rapid pace, with peak oil demand expected by the end of this decade.

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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/nov/18/climate-crisis-world-temperature-target