Every 10th of a degree counts: are the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement being met?

фото: Chris Gallagher

The numbers are in, and scientists can now say officially 2024 was Earth's warmest year on record. Global temperature numbers last year also stood out for another unwelcome reason, which is that they were the first to rise above 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 Fahrenheit, warmer than the average before the Industrial Revolution. 

This record global temperature was reflected all around the world last year, from India, where it led to prolonged heat waves, to hurricanes in the Gulf Coast, which were supercharged by warm ocean waters, to Los Angeles, where hot and dry conditions set the stage for the destructive fires this week. 

Carbon dioxide emissions need to go to zero, if Earth’s temperatures are to be stabilized. And so, scientists often talk about bending the emissions curve. If societies had started bending this curve in 2005, when the Kyoto Protocol - the predecessor to the Paris Agreement - came into place, they could have done so gradually. 

If countries had started bending the curve in 2015, when the Paris Agreement was adopted, they would’ve had to do it by cutting emissions a little more steeply. So, today, it looks basically impossible. 

The line is so steep that it sort of represents shutting off power plants worldwide, which would obviously have political, social and human costs. 

There is no kind way to put it. The 1.5-degree goal is on life support. It is in intensive care. 

So, where does that leave us?

1.5 is not a number in nature. It’s a number in diplomacy. It's the aspiration that nations set for themselves a decade ago in the 2015 Paris Agreement. Nearly 200 nations agreed on two targets for global warming. They said they would try to pursue efforts to limit it to 1.5 degrees, but failing that they would also try to keep it well below 2 degrees Celsius. 

• A 1.5-degree world is one in which about 14% of the world’s population is expected to experience severe heat waves at least once every five years.  
• A 2-degree world is one in which 37% of the population experiences such heat waves. 

But failing to meet that goal doesn’t mean we’ve failed to halt climate change entirely.

Even at the time of the Paris Agreement, a lot of people thought keeping global warming below 1.5 was already very unrealistic. 

In retrospect, some people do think it had an effect of forcing companies, industries, other kinds of organizations to think more ambitiously about how to decarbonize their own work, how to move society away from reliance on fossil fuels. 

But when it comes to avoiding the worst impacts of climate change, scientists like to emphasize that every 10th of a degree counts. 1.6 degrees of warming is worse than 1.5, but 1.7 degrees is worse than 1.6.

So even if the goal of staying below 1.5 degrees of warming doesn’t seem feasible anymore, scientists say that’s not a reason to stop trying. 

Credits to The New York Times.