IT is a journalistic principle that the answer to a headline written in the form of a question is almost always “no,” but in this case, the answer, sadly, may very well be “yes.” That is the impression, at least, left by a new report released last week by the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), which concluded that the world now has no chance of keeping global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels, and that this “climate overshoot” threshold will be reached within the next few years.
Originally planned for publication in June, the UNEP report, titled “Limiting Overshoot,” was released on Sept. 2, and it presents a grim picture. It suggests that the 1.5 C limit will be passed before 2030, and that the best-case scenario, which will only be achievable through massive, coordinated climate mitigation efforts across the globe, will see global average temperatures rise to about 1.8 C above pre-industrial levels. All of the other scenarios analyzed by the report put the temperature rise well over 2 C.
The reason the 1.5 C “red line” has been emphasized is that beyond that temperature increase, severe impacts from global warming will be felt in different parts of the world. Altered weather patterns will lead to droughts and heat waves in some places, more severe storms in others, ocean acidification and coral die-off that will profoundly affect food supplies and sea level rise. That temperature level also increases the risk of some climate “tipping points” being reached to near-certainty, such as massive melting of polar ice and continental glaciers.
In reality, the planet has already crossed the 1.5 C threshold, and that probably happened in 2024. The report simply predicts it happening “within the next couple of years” because climate science tends to measure such things as an average over a longer period of 10 to 20 years or more. And of course, there is also a bit of a political aspect to it; admitting that the target set by the 2015 Paris Agreement is beyond reach risks the world reacting with apathy rather than action to limit man-made climate change as much as possible. Finding a way to craft a “don’t give up” message was likely the reason the UNEP report was delayed by a couple of months.
In fact, a “call to apathy, rather than a call to arms” is exactly how the UNEP report was characterized by the international NGO Climate Analytics, which is led by a former lead author of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) annual climate assessments. “Although UNEP does a good job of describing the hole we’ve dug ourselves into, it does a poor job of showing us that there is a way out, and ultimately the report’s neglect of some fundamentally important mitigation analysis risks turning it into a call to apathy rather than a call to arms,” the group said.
While the report does set forth a plan that it dubs the “overshoot, peak and decline” pathway, Climate Analytics criticized it for only making a passing reference to the need to phase out the use of fossil fuels, and its avoidance of calling out governments for missing their targets for greenhouse gas emissions reductions under the 2015 Paris Agreement. Climate Analytics also took issue with the UNEP report’s emphasis on what the report calls “transformational adaptation” — in other words, focusing on helping people learn to live with climate change more than trying to prevent climate change from upending their way of life — and its failure to address the need for compensation for climate-induced losses and damage to affected populations.
The formula presented by the UNEP report for addressing the climate situation in such a way as to limit it to “a very bad situation that we can adapt to now and will gradually improve in the future,” instead of “an extinction-level catastrophe” is meant to be encouraging, but it is anything but. The prescription is an immediate elimination of fossil fuels within the next few years, and massive investment in carbon-removal technology, whether that is man-made technology or reforestation on a vast scale. Doing these would ensure that the temperature rise would hit a peak, and then decline, possibly enough to fall back below the dreaded 1.5 C level by the end of the century.
It can be done, and it must be done. Unfortunately, the experience of the world’s failure to meet even more modest climate action objectives over the past decade does not give us much hope that it will be done.