Breaking 1.5°C

This is not fine.

This is Not Fine by KC Green / The Nib

Year One.

World sees first 12 months above 1.5C warming level: "Earth has endured 12 months of temperatures 1.5C hotter than the pre-industrial era for the first time on record".

This doesn't mean we broke the Paris Agreement (yet), which aims at keeping us below a 1.5° limit over two to three decades. But it means we have our first year of those decades, in which we decisively went over the agreed upon limit. And together with the acceleration of climate change, this is beyond worrying.

Maybe i should remind you that it was just 10 years ago that we broke the 1°C above industrial levels, with first days breaking the 1.5°C soon after. 3 Months ago James Hansen, who was the first to warn US congress of climate change in the 80s, again warned that global heating is accelerating, and this benchmark in 2023 surely fits that picture.

2023 was a year of climate extremes and January 2024 already was warmest on record in Spain with El Niño only starting to unfold. Probably we will break the 1.5°C limit this year again, and step by step, we'll get used to it, but we shouldn't.

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AMOC "is on tipping course"

A new paper found that the Atlantic Ocean circulation is nearing ‘devastating’ tipping point and has

broken new ground by looking for warning signs in the salinity levels at the southern extent of the Atlantic Ocean between Cape Town and Buenos Aires. Simulating changes over a period of 2,000 years on computer models of the global climate, it found a slow decline can lead to a sudden collapse over less than 100 years, with calamitous consequences.

[The Paper] also mapped some of the consequences of Amoc collapse. Sea levels in the Atlantic would rise by a metre in some regions, inundating many coastal cities. The wet and dry seasons in the Amazon would flip, potentially pushing the already weakened rainforest past its own tipping point. Temperatures around the world would fluctuate far more erratically. The southern hemisphere would become warmer. Europe would cool dramatically and have less rainfall. While this might sound appealing compared with the current heating trend, the changes would hit 10 times faster than now, making adaptation almost impossible.

The paper also states that the estimate of a previous paper in which researchers estimated reaching the tipping point between 2025 and 2095 with a probability of 95% "could be accurate", and that "northern Europe from Britain to Scandinavia would suffer devastating impacts, such as a cooling of winter temperatures by between 10 °C and 30 °C occurring within a century".

Now you should also know that climate researchers are traditionally conservative in their estimates, and you get the whole picture.

German climate scientist Stefan Rahmstorf has an accessible (english language) post about the paper , and the WaPo explains Why this is one of the planetary shifts scientists are most worried about.

This is bad.

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Shout it from the roofs: The Public wants Climate Action

A new paper found globally representative evidence on the actual and perceived support for climate action. They "conducted a representative survey across 125 countries, interviewing nearly 130,000 individuals" and found that "69% of the global population expresses a willingness to contribute 1% of their personal income, 86% endorse pro-climate social norms and 89% demand intensified political action".

Critically, they also found that "the world is in a state of pluralistic ignorance, wherein individuals around the globe systematically underestimate the willingness of their fellow citizens to act".

The researchers coined the term "perception gap" for this, which means that "raising awareness about the broad global support for climate action becomes critically important in promoting a unified response to climate change".

All of these three reasons, the broken 1.5°C limit, the rapidly approaching tipping points and the support of a public that underestimate their fellow citizens attitude towards climate change, show that this is the time to demand climate action.

More so because, as i've argued in my recent piece Paint it black, climate activists are actually upholding the law, all while being criminalized.

In a historic legal decision, “the Dutch Supreme Court, the highest court in the Netherlands, upheld the previous decisions in the Urgenda Climate Case, finding that the Dutch government has obligations to urgently and significantly reduce emissions in line with its human rights obligations.”

I don’t know if they were first with such a decision, but they surely were not the last.

In April 2021, the german supreme court, in a similar decision, pointed at a principle of generational justice: One generation should not be allowed to suck up all CO₂-Budget and shift a radical burden of carbon-reduction on following generations, simply because that’s an unjust limitation of freedom guaranteed by the law. For the german supreme court, not fighting climate change is illegal.

Similar lawsuits are ongoing in states like the Belgium, Sweden, India, New Zealand, Norway, South Africa or the Swiss. Six kids are suing no less than 32 european countries to dramatically increase their climate change efforts. In August, a US-court ”found that young people have a constitutional right to a healthful environment and that the state must consider potential climate damage when approving projects”.

This list will continue to grow and I look at radical climate protest in the context of lawsuits like these. If ”young people have a constitutional right to a healthful environment” in the US and when not fighting climate change is illegal for the german government, and similar decisions being reported in other countries too, then radical climate protest means upholding and defending the law. For these protests, these kids get screamed at, spat on, get called out as ”terrorists”, they get beat up and ran over.

And if you think I’m blue-eyed here: 60 professors of international law just signed an open letter (link in german) saying that these protests are legitimized — which means they are morally right in context of the law — and that governments must obey the constitution.

This is why we have to support climate activism, now, and publicly say so. Loud.

With german climate activists Last Generation entering EU-Elections, this might be one way to do that, and I think i’ll vote for them. As loud as i can.

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