Is it just me – or do you feel the same? That this year we have crossed a climate Rubicon?
It began in January with catastrophic floods across Southern Africa which claimed hundreds of lives. That same month heatwaves and wildfires ravaged Australia, Chile, and Argentina. In March Southwest USA was hit by an exceptional, early heatwave, followed in April and May by extreme pre monsoon heat in India and Pakistan which killed tens of thousands.
From late May to August, Europe was struck by successive deadly heatwaves, severe drought, and wildfires. At the same time, Canada faced its own major wildfires, while the Caribbean suffered a serious drought.
In May and June Saudi Arabia experienced the ‘hajj heatwave ’, which exposed around 2 million pilgrims to severe temperatures, resulting in over 1,000 deaths.
Adding to these disasters, the cataclysmic rock and glacier collapse in Nepal on 26th August killed over 1,400, with nearly 6,000 still missing.
Beyond the immense human suffering and destruction, what connects all these tragedies, according to World Weather Attribution scientists, is the ‘strong’ or ‘very strong’ link between them and climate change.
This means that climate change made these events much more likely and/or much more severe, while poverty, land use, infrastructure, and preparedness determined just how those hazards translated into disasters: that is, how hard communities were hit and how much damage was done.
What made them even more alarming was the fact that so many occurred concurrently, across different continents and regions.
Now to add fuel to the fires of the year, first, a record-breaking Super El Niño is accelerating in the Pacific and is set to cause extreme weather worldwide. (Indeed, it is already causing terrible floods in Thailand and Myanmar.)
Second, in early September the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) published a red-flag report, Limiting Overshoot whose core message is that crossing 1.5oC, the target of the 2015 Paris COP, is now unavoidable, rather than a risk to be averted.
Only if nations redouble their efforts, it said, to phase out fossil fuels can they limit peak warming to 1.8°C, then use carbon removal to bring temperatures back down to 1.5°C or below this century. (Under current policies, the report projects warming of 2.6°C by 2100.)
Getting there will mean going beyond net zero to net-negative emissions, which requires a major scale-up of carbon removal, such as massive reafforestation, alongside urgent adaptation and resilience-boosting measures.
UNEP says this is the best way to help vulnerable nations cope and return below 1.5°C as soon as possible.
Even without this year’s disasters, it feels to me like a threshold crossed, a critical milestone reached. Yet reactions to the report have been mixed. Some see it as the death of the 1.5oC goal, while UNEP itself and others stress that the pathway back is still open, provided we act quickly and decisively.
What do you think? Possible, probable or neither?
Joe Human
sustainablekeswick@gmail.com
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