All but extinguished
The New Scientist says we’re cooked.
Hopes of keeping global warming below 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels have been all but extinguished after new data confirmed 2024 was the first calendar year to see average temperatures breach that critical threshold.
Last year was the hottest ever recorded in human history, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) declared on 10 January, in the latest stark warning that humanity is pushing Earth’s climate into uncharted territory.
Ok but on the upside we have lots more people and buildings and cars and planes.
Scientists agree that the surge in temperature was caused mostly by the continuation of human-caused climate change and an El Niño weather pattern, which tends to push up global temperatures. But the scale and persistence of the heat has shocked many experts, who expected temperatures to subside once El Niño ended in May 2024. Instead, they remained at record levels throughout the rest of the year.
And as for Los Angeles County…
The world’s oceans have been most affected, with sea surface temperatures staying at record levels for most of 2024, playing havoc with marine ecosystems. The year also brought no shortage of extreme weather on land, with fierce heatwaves, sharp declines in polar ice, deadly flooding and uncontrollable wildfires. “This was a year when the impacts of climate change are right across the planet,” says David King, former chief scientific adviser to the UK government and founder of the Climate Crisis Advisory Group.
Technically, the Paris Agreement target of limiting warming to below 1.5°C is calculated using a 20-year average, so a single year above the threshold doesn’t signal a formal breach of the target. But given the pace of warming in recent years, many scientists say the long-term Paris goal is now out of reach.
“The abrupt new records set in 2023 and 2024 join other evidence that recent global warming appears to be moving faster than expected,” said Robert Rohde at Berkeley Earth in a statement. “Whether increased global warming is a temporary change or part of a new long-term trend remains to be seen. Already though the Paris Agreement target of staying below 1.5°C is unobtainable, and the long-term average will pass this milestone within the next five to 10 years.”
Elon Musk goes everywhere via private jet.
I’ve been saying that for quite a while, though with quite a bit of caution until the data was solid. The thing is, we were almost certain to pass the tipping point without noticing it for a few years. I likened it to the coyote chasing the woodpecker and running off the cliff; he didn’t fall until he looked down. He wasn’t aware until too late.
We needed to start doing something in the sixties; that wasn’t likely, but by the eighties, we should have been able to. Unfortunately, Ronald Reagan had no intention of doing anything that would have a (real or perceived) negative impact on business, and of course, he didn’t live long enough to cook with us.
Writing in another context, J. B. Priestley wrote in the 1950s :”It is possible, as some thinkers hold, that our civilisation is bent on self-destruction, hurriedly planning its own doomsday.”
Perhaps things like nuclear brinksmanship and climate disaster are part of a self-destructive desire on a planetary scale. Little was done to ward off the threat of climate disaster, which was always assumed to “be in the future”. Now we are living through the middle of the climate disaster and we are still doing little; indeed, we are supporting politicians like Donald Trump and Viktor Orbán who actively undermine the pitiful environmental legislation.
I should clarify: When I wrote “We” I meant the human race, not B&W readers.
I knew that. We are [ALL] living through the middle of the climate disaster – so the rest follows.
I feel like the phrase “Godzilla threshold” should enter the vernacular more widely.
Here’s Gwynne Dyer’s take:
https://gwynnedyer.com/2025/climate-feedbacks-not-in-front-of-the-children/
Good stuff, thanks. I’ll have to read more of him.
Thank you, YNNB, for linking to Gwynne Dyer’s piece. He is a good man. It makes me feel ashamed of myself for not thinking through things properly before responding to to Coel’s (forgive me for bringing him up without addressing him directly – but it is now in the internet’s long past) original comment on climate change and the wild-fires and to his response to my question about what he would suggest should be done to counter it. He has a gift for superficial but confident plausibility that seems on the face of it to be compelling, but the more one thinks about it, the less compelling it becomes. I wonder if there are some internet resources one may go to in order to pick up ready-manufactured arguments that look, on the face of them, to be reasonable and so may be deployed against those you consider your ideological foes.
Last year’s summer in Japan was the longest & hottest on record, and certainly the most unpleasant I have ever known (and summers in Japan are invariably unpleasant).
I’m sure there are. There are certainly books out there. Rarely a year went by while I was teaching Environmental Science that some think tank didn’t send me a book explaining what was wrong with the global warming models, why it was just a cycle, how we were actually entering a cooling phase, and so on. Free books…normally I love it, but these? I didn’t want to donate them to the library where people could read them. I didn’t want to read them. I didn’t want to make a bonfire because of emissions. So they gathered dust on my shelves, taking up space that could be devoted to other books, until one day I finally pitched them in the trash, thereby wasting valuable resources…since we had no recycling contract for the school, I didn’t bother with the recycling bins. They just got dumped in the trash anyway.