While LA Burns, the Planet Passed the 1.5C Heating Limit for the First Time in 2024
It's official: last year was the warmest year ever measured. If this sounds familiar to you, let me assure you that I'm not recycling old newsletters; it's just that 2023 was also the warmest year ever measured. It's worse: the last ten years have been the warmest ten years on record.
In 2024, the annual temperature was above the 1.5 Celsius warming limit for the first time compared to pre-industrial conditions. You'll remember that 1.5C is the internationally agreed-upon level of maximum warming; within a decade of the Paris Agreement, where we framed this ambition, we have collectively burned a hole into that promise.
And to complete our collective failure to save our planet, the incoming president of the most greenhouse-gas-pollutive country in human history has promised to—again—withdraw from this agreement.
Officially, you need data over an extended period since one year's extremes don't count as structural climate change. So, although we passed the threshold for a year, you may need to wait just a few years more for a newsletter in your mailbox stating that the world's governments collectively failed to deliver what they promised to the eight billion of us who have nowhere else to go and are in the hands of our leaders who still haven't put the global thermostat down.
Worse, greenhouse gas emissions have increased in the past year, setting another record high. That's the wrong direction on the graph; we can keep warming at 1.5C if emissions fall by 43 percent in the next six years. We know how to stop climate change, we have the technology, we can finance it for roughly the percentage of GDP that countries are now willing to use to raise their defense budgets, and we don't do it.
It's not that nature is not warning us. After decades of subtle signs, our planet decided a few years ago to give us samples all over the world of what a mild level of climate change means. I don't like to use many numbers in one line, but to explain why I use the word mild: we're now at about 1,3C climate change, which is not even half of the expected climate change at present trajectory in 75 years by now: 2,7C. Your young children and grandchildren will live in that hell. We're only in the early phase of climate change; it will get worse, far worse, while we know it doesn't have to be that way.
Last year, just before the record-breaking global warming of 2023 was officially confirmed, the world's nations agreed in Dubai to 'transition away' from fossil fuels. Instead, emissions increased by another 0.8 percent.
I just watched a short BBC video of a woman living in Kodari, a small settlement on the border between Nepal and China. She describes how the land on the steep hillside is sliding down significantly more than before. Like in so many other parts of the world, the area suffers from stronger, more unpredictable rains, causing more floods and landslides for Nepal's mountain-dwelling population. Then she points to a spot deep below, where you can see the ruins of some 30 houses. It's all that is left from another village, another nameless victim of a climate crisis that is still not dealt with as the crisis it is.
I continue my morning scroll on social media; pictures of the devastation in LA and its suburbs pass over my screen. An area twice the size of Manhattan has been burned to the ground, and this real-life apocalypse in Hollywood's world of make-believe is far from over.
According to estimates by AccuWeather, the blazes have caused 135-150 billion dollars in damage; imagine how much energy transition could have been funded with such an amount of money. The victims of climate change are usually in villages like Kodari, which I could only mention in today's newsletter because of an exceptional report published in Western media.
Now that nobody, not even the rich and famous in one of the world's media hubs, can no longer escape climate change, it is a good moment to start meaningful climate action at the appropriate scale and speed that this existential crisis demands.
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I write because good planets are hard to find:
More reading:
Finding Hope in 2025
I remember my last visit to this island's west coast beach in the last days of 2024; the horizon was wrapped in a mist of uncertainty. Days later, I returned from a New Year's Eve celebration in Brussels when the eternal beach's beauty pulled me back to the same familiar spot I shared with you before, where I had s…
Notes:
https://climate.copernicus.eu/global-climate-highlights-2024
"Now that nobody, not even the rich and famous in one of the world's media hubs, can no longer escape climate change, it is a good moment to start meaningful climate action at the appropriate scale and speed that this existential crisis demands."
We have suspected when the powerful and wealthy are directly affected by climate change, we may see action taken. Now we wait and see.
Thank you for this detailed and updated information, Alex👌
Forecasts for the near future make tremble.
But I quote in particular two excerpts from your article:
« We know how to stop climate change, we have the technology... »
« Now... is the right time to launch meaningful climate action at the appropriate scale and speed that this existential crisis requires. »
I see a strong signal through a new and broader mobilization, including all those people who have just experienced a personal ecological drama and who have direct access to the medias !