The World Will Miss 1.5C. What Comes Next?

Here’s the bad news: The world is almost certainly going to miss the Paris Agreement’s goal of keeping global temperatures from rising beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels. The needed emissions cuts are too large and the direction of policy too slow to lead to any other outcome. In the next few decades, global warming will slip past the 1.5 degree mark — and temperatures will keep rising.

What does that mean? What comes next? And how should we feel about that? On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse chat with Kate Marvel, an associate research scientist at Columbia University and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. We talk about why every 10th of a degree matters in the fight against climate change, the difference between tipping points and destabilizing feedback loops, and how to think about climate change in a disappointing time. Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.

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Here is an excerpt from our conversation:

Kate Marvel: I was grouchy about the UN 1.5 degree report because I thought it was fan fiction. I was like, “We’re not going to do this, so why are you bothering to write this report?” And I was totally wrong, because that report landed with the public in a way that I'd never seen before. It was really galvanizing. It really got attention. It really got people incredibly engaged in the solutions. And that’s not something that I could have ever predicted.

And so for me, that is the most important legacy of the 1.5 degree target.

Jesse Jenkins: I think our challenge now is to ensure that, as we see reporting about temperatures exceeding 1.5 this year or over the next 10 years, that those that are concerned about climate change don’t take away a sense of defeat or failure that we have now lost and it’s time to give up, but rather a heightened sense of urgency, right? If we are missing this target, then we need to work even harder to hold the line and avoid 1.6 or 1.7 or, you know, to bend the curve as rapidly as possible.

I think there has been a bit of confusion in the public discourse — the way in which the science is translated out to the community. And I see this in particular in a lot of the young people that I teach, that come into my classes at Princeton, or that I engage with on college campuses, who often come out of my class with a very different sense than when they started. That, oh, actually, we do have agency here. There is something we can do, and that we’re not doomed in some permanent sense.

There are permanent tragedies. There’s losses and things that will … We talked about the coral reefs that we may never get back. But you don’t stop, right? That’s not the end of the line.

This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …

Watershed’s climate data engine helps companies measure and reduce their emissions, turning the data they already have into an audit-ready carbon footprint backed by the latest climate science. Get the sustainability data you need in weeks, not months. Learn more at watershed.com.

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Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.