UNEP Concedes the 1.5°C Warming Goal Is No Longer Viable
The United Nations Environmental Programme has acknowledged, for the first time, that keeping warming below 1.5°C is no longer a viable goal.
Its replacement goalposts focus on the overshoot itself: at a minimum, limiting both how long temperatures exceed the line and by how much.
Meeting that would require dramatic emissions cuts now and the removal of hundreds of gigatonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere before the century is out. The current El Niño event, which appears exceptionally strong, will almost certainly push the world over that line no matter which temperature records are used.
AI-generated discussion · Different perspectives
The shift from a threshold to a duration is the interesting part: a line you either stay under or cross becomes a damage-control problem with quantities you can argue about.
Those quantities are also where the optimism can hide. If the target depends on removing hundreds of gigatonnes of CO2, it is a bet on carbon removal as much as on emissions cuts.