“This does not mean the international +1.5C target has been broken, because that refers to a long-term average over decades.” If those carefully chosen words don’t set your alarm bells ringing, you have not traveled much in the land of lawyers.
This statement was published on Friday in the annual report of Europe’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, the EU’s main climate science centre. Yet elsewhere in the same document it admitted that the world’s average temperature did indeed exceed1.5 degrees Celsius higher than the pre-industrial level (+1.5C) in 2024.
And here’s United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, peddling the same story on the same day: “Individual years pushing past the 1.5-degree limit do not mean the long-term goal is shot.”
You’ll find similar mantras on the websites of NASA and NOAA in the US, the Hadley Centre in the UK, the Potsdam Centre for Climate Impact Studies in Germany, and the Japan Meteorological Agency. None of them is actually lying, but they are definitely seeking to mislead.
The problem is that our scientists and politicians have been telling us for ten years that we must never exceed that ‘aspirational’ +1.5C target or very bad things would follow (as indeed they will). Nobody listened, we have now passed that target, and some of that hell is breaking loose. Los Angeles is this week’s example.
So now they need to reassure us that it is still worth trying to hold the warming down (as indeed it is). This requires playing down the importance of passing +1.5C, which is why we have just had a coordinated effort by politicians and scientists telling us we really didn’t go there. How did things get so tangled?
The ‘aspirational’ +1.5C target was adopted by the 2015 climate conference partly because the hard target of ‘never more than +2.0C or the heavens will fall’ was seen as too far away to motivate people properly. The other reason was that a group of scientists centred around the Potsdam Institute had been working on ‘feedbacks’.
They knew that heating the planet with our emissions would have big effects on other parts of the climate system, and set out to discover what those effects were and when they would be triggered.
The feedbacks are the real killers. Our emissions heat the planet, and then wildfires, floods and mudslides, hurricanes and cyclones, rising sea-levels and half a dozen other feedbacks wreak mayhem.
Many of the feedbacks also cause more warming, like the melting snow and ice which expose dark rock and open water, which then absorb sunlight and heat the planet further.
Some of these feedbacks are active already and almost all will be activated between +1.5C and +3.0C. Since we did not cause them directly, we can’t shut them off. Only planetary cooling can do that, and how likely is that?
The scientists also knew that there were almost certainly other feedbacks lurking in wait for us, so staying below +1.5C really did matter. However, it’s gone now, and the bitter truth is that we probably won’t see it again in this century (if ever).
We stumbled across the first big ‘unknown’ feedback in June 2023, when the average global temperature jumped by more than two-tenths of a degree in a single month. It has never fallen back, and it took scientists more than a year even to figure out (tentatively) what is causing it: less low-level marine cloud, which therefore reflects less incoming sunlight.
Average global temperature for 2024 has been +1.55C, and the past three months have been +1.6C, so why are the Great and the Good telling us that we haven’t ‘really’ passed +1.5C? What’s all this nonsense about waiting a couple of decades to be sure?
Requiring a twenty-year run of data when calculating average global temperature made sense when temperatures fluctuated up and down in the familiar old way. It makes no sense to use that method to calculate the headline number for average global temperature, incorporating data from as long ago as 2005, when the only way it has gone each year is up.
So why do they do it? Partly because they have always done it that way, but there is also a belief among both scientists and politicians that the public cannot be trusted with the brutal truth. They might riot in the streets demanding huge immediate emissions cuts – or, (more likely) they might retreat into paranoid fantasies and deny climate change exists.
It’s pointless. Scientists can use the old method among themselves if they wish, but don’t try to foist it on the public. It just undermines trust. Give them straight information in terms they can understand, and let the chips fall where they may.
