How hot will it take to spur climate action?

(Bloomberg Opinion) — This is the hottest year in human history. Unprecedented temperatures have triggered devastating wildfires, floods, hurricanes, droughts and heat waves that have killed thousands of people and caused hundreds of billions of dollars in economic damage. At the rate we’re going, this will also be one of the coolest, calmest years we’ve ever experienced.

How hotter and more destructive the atmosphere will become from today depends on the choices humans make. Currently, we still produce too much bad stuff.

The European Union’s Copernicus climate change service said on Monday that 2024 will almost certainly be the hottest year on record, with global average surface temperatures about 1.6 degrees Celsius higher than the pre-industrial average. This would break the record set in 2023.

Notably, this will also be the first year on record that global temperatures are 1.5 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial average. This is the best possible global heating target the world set for itself in the 2015 Paris Agreement. A temperature breach of 1.5 degrees Celsius within a year does not mean the goal will be lost. The Paris Agreement refers to long-term averages, not one-year anomalies.

But let’s be honest: 1.5C is basically doomed. The world has wasted the better part of a decade since the goal was set, during which time it became even more out of reach. Green pledges by countries and businesses are nowhere near enough to achieve this, let alone Paris’s slightly more realistic main target of heating below 2 degrees Celsius. A recent United Nations report warned that given current policies and practices, the world cannot even limit warming to 2.8 degrees Celsius. In just a few years, the window for limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius will close.

So what, you might be thinking. How much worse is 3C than 1.5C? If you’re talking about its impact on an afternoon in the park, it doesn’t really matter. If you’re talking about long-term global average temperatures, every increase would have devastating consequences. One climate scientist compared it to having a fever. Every slight rise in temperature puts more stress on your body, and before long the heat can become life-threatening. The Earth has experienced only 1.3 degrees Celsius of long-term warming so far, which has already increased the risk and destructive power of wildfires, floods, hurricanes, droughts and heat waves.

And global warming will not be uniform. A study published Tuesday in the journal Environmental Research Letters found that some densely populated areas, including sub-Saharan Africa, the Mediterranean and central Europe, will reach 3 degrees Celsius faster than others.

To make matters worse, global warming has accelerated significantly in recent years. Berkeley climate scientist Zeke Hausfather writes that starting in 1970, the Earth has warmed by an average of 0.18 degrees Celsius per decade, but since 2015 that rate has jumped to 0.3 degrees Celsius per decade (acknowledging that geological timescales are small, making this This measurement is somewhat uncertain). After accounting for the many other factors that could be causing this phenomenon, from volcanic eruptions to the end of sulfur dioxide pollution from shipping, the biggest contributor to Earth’s warming remains humans burning fossil fuels and emitting greenhouse gases. In fact, Hausfather noted, the acceleration at this time was expected by many climate models.

Better news, Texas A&M University climate scientist Andrew Dessler recently pointed out, is that stopping greenhouse gas emissions will also stop climate warming. Unfortunately, in some important ways, humanity appears to be further away from reaching this milestone than it was in 2015. The following year, when Donald Trump was first elected, he withdrew the United States from the Paris Agreement and went to great lengths to defeat the clean energy transition.

The transition continued during Trump’s first term, and President Joe Biden has made some progress in accelerating the transition during his four-year term, including rejoining the Paris Agreement. But now Trump is back for another four years. This time, he proposed a blueprint for the “2025 Plan” that requires the government to end support for green energy, increase fossil fuel production, and withdraw from the Paris Agreement again.

Meanwhile, in Europe, right-wing parties won power at the expense of the Greens in summer parliamentary elections, in part due to rhetoric hostile to climate action. The changing political mood is on display at U.N. climate meetings, which have been derailed by fossil fuel interests. The world can barely agree on the need to phase out fossil fuels, let alone come up with a solid plan to do so. The hotter the planet becomes, the more unstable global politics will become, making coordinated climate action more difficult.

In other words, we are losing the courage to act at the worst possible times. This year, global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels and land use hit new highs. UN scientists believe that to keep heating temperatures below 2 degrees Celsius, the world needs to start cutting emissions by 4% a year until 2035. The longer we delay this process, the bigger the task will become. The economic losses and human life costs will increase even more. There is still time to start making the right choices, but time is running out.

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Mark Kongloff is a Bloomberg Opinion Editor and climate change columnist. He previously worked at Fortune.com, The Huffington Post and The Wall Street Journal.

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