Was 1.5C a Climate Propaganda Whoopsie?
17 hours ago Eric Worrall
Essay by Eric Worrall
Professor Mike Hulme: “… There’s going to be a lot of work done to reconstruct a narrative …”
Was the world’s most influential climate target doomed from the start?
As the world passes 1.5 degrees C of warming, a Cambridge scholar argues that putting a deadline on climate action was the wrong way to frame it.
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A pair of new studies in the journal Nature Climate Change looked at historical data and came to the conclusion that the record heat last year — the first year to surpass 1.5 degrees C — wasn’t a temporary fluke, but a sign that the world is now soaring past this influential climate target over the long term. The new year continued that upward trajectory. Even as a natural cooling pattern called La Niña took hold recently, January managed to be hotter than ever, clocking in at a record 1.75 degrees C warmer than the preindustrial average.
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… So is the world now at the edge of disaster?
Mike Hulme, a professor of human geography at the University of Cambridge, asserts that it isn’t. “There’s no ‘cliff edge’ that emerges from any of the scientific analyses that have been done about these thresholds,” he said. “They are, in many senses, just arbitrary numbers plucked because they are either integers or half of an integer.”
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Of course, the thing that’s going to happen is, “Well, if 1.5 is now in the back mirror, what’s in the front mirror now?” There’s going to be a lot of work done to reconstruct a narrative for those people who think that 1.5 was the be-all and the end-all. There’s now going to have to be very significant work in reeducating and reframing what the future actually holds, if 1.5 is no longer the benchmark.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/02/15/was-1-5c-a-climate-propaganda-whoopsie/
