The BDN Opinion section operates independently and does not set news policies or contribute to reporting or editing articles elsewhere in the newspaper or on bangordailynews.com.
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.
In 2015, in what seemed at the time like a triumph for humanity, the world’s leaders set a stretch goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial averages. Not even nine years later, you could be forgiven for thinking they’ve failed.
The good news is that they haven’t failed just yet. The bad news is that they’re rapidly running out of time.
Thanks mainly to our unquenchable thirst for fossil fuels, global surface temperatures were just a smidgen below 1.5C above pre-industrial averages in 2023, the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Center reported last Tuesday — 1.48C to be exact. The strong El Niño weather pattern currently in the East Pacific is temporarily heating things up a bit, which means the planet will likely be even hotter in 2024. Copernicus suggests we could well see more than 1.5C of warming next year.
You’re probably about as sick of reading last year’s unhappy superlatives as I am of typing them, but one last time:
It was the warmest year since at least 1850 and probably since roughly 125,000 BCE.
Between June and December, each month was the hottest one of its kind on record.
July and August were the hottest months on record, full stop.
Last summer was the hottest season on record.
All of this contributed to heat waves across China, Europe and the U.S., wildfires in Canada and Greece, drought in Africa, flooding in Libya and Vermont, the deaths of Florida corals and more. In the midst of all this, global leaders meeting in Dubai last fall could make only vague promises about quitting the fossil fuels at the root of the problem.
They still clung to the shreds of the warming goals they’d set in Paris in 2015 — 2 degrees Celsuis as the primary target but still hoping for 1.5C if all goes well. And with more concerted effort beginning eight years ago, 1.5C might have been reachable. Now even 2C is starting to look like a stretch. In fact, current policies have us on track for something more like 2.7C of warming.
The stretch-goal concept, sometimes attributed to Jack Welch, the former chief executive officer of General Electric Co., but with roots in former President John F. Kennedy’s moonshot, imagines that setting seemingly impossible goals can drive people or organizations to do great things. The problem with stretch goals is that they often don’t work without a track record of success and a lot of extra capacity lying around. When it comes to fighting global warming, humanity has little of either. We’re still burning more fossil fuel than ever with no sign of breaking the habit in the near future, as my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Javier Blas notes.
“The 1.5°C global warming ceiling has been passed for all practical purposes,” former NASA scientist James Hansen wrote recently. He warns the global temperature anomaly could hit 1.7 degrees C next year.
But Hansen also thinks warming is accelerating, a controversial take that has divided scientists, as my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Lara Williams has written. And two years of 1.5C of warming would not guarantee failure. Given that the Paris goals are based on long-term averages, it will be another decade before we know for sure.
In the meantime, no matter how hopeless it might look, we must keep striving for the stretch goal, because every tenth of a degree of heating we avoid will save countless lives and untold billions of dollars in economic losses. Warming of 1.7C is still better than 2C, which is way, way better than 2.7C, and so on.
We must act with far more urgency, though. According to a study by Imperial College London, the world has less than a decade of emissions left in its “carbon budget” before the chance of holding at 1.5C is lost forever. Not one country is doing enough to avoid this fate, according to the nonprofit-backed Climate Action Tracker. Your typical corporate leader wouldn’t stand for such lackadaisical efforts to meet stretch goals, and neither should we.
