In news that might prompt you to turn down your thermostat out of sheer guilt, scientists have now estimated that by 2027 the global average temperature could cross the infamous 1.5°C threshold, a sort of planetary speed limit set by the Paris Agreement that we’ve been edging toward like a teen borrowing the family car for the first time.
This critical climate benchmark, which scientists agree would trigger more frequent and severe weather events, essentially acts as the Earth’s polite but increasingly stern way of telling us to curb our carbon enthusiasm. In a paper published Monday, researchers forecasted that there is now a two-thirds chance the 1.5°C mark will be exceeded for at least one year between 2023 and 2027. And no, they don’t mean in some distant theoretical way. They mean this could happen any Tuesday now.
Of course, the agreement signed in 2015 by nearly 200 countries called for keeping warming below 2°C, with a noble hope to limit it to 1.5°C. The latter was the gold standard, the straight-A student goal. Unfortunately, our report card is starting to look more like a last-minute group project gone terribly wrong.
Much of the warming is attributed to greenhouse gases, which continue to be released into the atmosphere with all the restraint of children in a candy store. Add to that the arrival of El Niño, the climate system’s periodic decision to turn the thermostat up a notch, and the result is a warming cocktail no one ordered but everyone has to sip.
The World Meteorological Organization delicately noted this is, of course, not a permanent violation. A single hot year above 1.5°C is not the same as long-term warming beyond that line. It’s more like accidentally stepping over a do-not-cross line and pretending you didn’t notice.
“This will be the first time in human history that we are so close—temporarily, at least—to breaching the lower limit of the Paris Agreement,” said Dr. Leon Hermanson, a climate scientist at the UK Met Office and one of the lead authors of the forecast, as if we needed further encouragement to invest in wide-brimmed hats and anxiety coping mechanisms.
The implications of pushing past this warming level include a grab bag of joy such as more droughts, heatwaves, and heavy rain events, unlike anything your grandparents were complaining about back in the day. For some regions, these effects are already becoming less hypothetical and more alarmingly practical.
While crossing the 1.5°C threshold temporarily may not be the technical breaking point of the Paris Agreement, it is certainly the climate equivalent of seeing red flashing lights in your rearview mirror. It should signal that we have taken what was a gentle suggestion to slow down and turned it into background noise while applying more gas.
The good news, if you are the sort of person who looks for silver linings in cumulonimbus clouds, is that we still have time to alter course. The bad news is we are terrible at altering course, especially when fossil fuel profits are still wearing the crown in the court of public policy.
Still, scientists remain stubbornly optimistic, presumably because the only alternative is rewatching doomsday documentaries on repeat and calling it peer-reviewed research.
At this rate, Earth might start charging rent for the sauna experience.