Two Years Above 1.5°C

I have put off and put off writing a climate news catch-up sort of letter because it just keeps pouring in and it's news we predicted at the start of this whole endeavor. I think we've reached an unignorable volume of news, though, and I think it's worth it to talk about climate change again even if we've kind of already had the "if you were looking for a sign, this is it" talk. At the end of the day I suppose I find it strange to ignore because in may ways it is the apotheosis of what this newsletter is all about: the way the whole thing ends. There's draconian laws and fascist despots and militarized police but there are two inescapable realities I base this newsletter on:

1. You cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet. (The collapse of civilization.)
2. Said attempted infinite growth has irrevocably set the planet on a course for the destruction of most ecosystems as we know and rely on them. (The collapse of everything else.)

The former will probably occur before the completion of the latter (it almost certainly will happen in that order) but the latter assures the former and puts down any hope of its return in a human timescale.

I know that a lot of folks subscribed in the wake of Trump's re-election. I get that. But as you've already heard me berate the Libs for their part in our situation–and mostly for the ongoing genocide in Gaza–we have many more worries than just the Big Him. I implore you to take the state of the climate seriously before its worse impacts land on your head. With that preamble, let's get into the recent news and what it means for us to have spent another year above 1.5°C*.

*For the newbs, 1.5°C means a world average temperature above the pre-industrial average measured from 1850-1900. Despite the changes of the last two years, it remains the stated goal of the Paris Accord to prevent us from surpassing 1.5°C.

How We Got Here

It feels like much more than just a pinch over a year ago, such that I don't feel like I remember it all quite right, but 2023 was shockingly, dramatically hot. It may not have felt that way where you live, but for the world, 2023 was a (likely temporary) wakeup call. 2023 was marked by a powerful El Niño, which roasted the planet for about nine months, resulting in, just for instance, the deaths of some 11,000 people in the US alone. For those just joining us, El Niño is the name given to the emergence of an enormous reservoir of warm water in the Equatorial Pacific that occurs when trade winds falter or change direction. This warmth is always present, but not always on the surface of the ocean. El Niño is part of a phenomenon of weather that occurs in the El Niño state, a "neutral" state, and La Niña, which is El Niño's inverse and tends to cool the planet.

Part of the reason, perhaps, why I find 2023 and 2024 to blur in my memory is because 2024 did not cool down as was expected. When I wrote the first letter about our time at 1.5°C, it was anticipated that we would cool down in short order, as the El Niño which had set us on the path north of 1.5 was predicted to give way to a swift La Niña. This never actually occurred. Without La Niña's cooling effects, 2024 turned out to be hotter still than 2023–which is truly disconcerting given that we didn't have an El Niño to boost the heat. We're sitting at about 1.6°C right now, around .1° higher than 2023's record.

What Two Years Above 1.5°C Means

1.5°C above the pre-industrial average is the threshold at which numerous climate tipping points begin to fall. As stated in the above-linked newsletter and WaPo article, we don't just touch 1.5°C and initiate the apocalypse. We have to wade into this region of temperature for some time–supposedly–though no one quite knows for how long. Crossing that line though, whenever that happens, is a really big deal, and I would posit that two years on that brink means we've all but officially done so.

Tipping points, like the drying out of the Amazon, decreasing ice in the Arctic and Antarctic, and the end of the AMOC, are all in a feedback loop. Each of these (and there are others), are on their way to tipping if they haven't already done so without our express knowledge, and each of these is fairly apocalyptic–effectively ensuring that they all fall, and that 1.5°C feels like a happy memory as we rocket toward some far-warmer future. But I actually want to leave the big apocalypses behind and discuss some of the ground-level shit we've been dealing with and will deal with. Discussing these tipping points as though they matter to you in the day to day is a bit like talking about the minutia of a meteor that's headed to Earth–odds are pretty good it's not going to hit you directly, but depending on where you are, you might get unalived anyway.

So, while year two above 1.5C means we're all but sure to head over the climate cliff, the Arctic tundra becoming a net source of CO2 and methane doesn't mean anything to you directly. What it does mean is a lot more of the stuff we're already dealing with. 2024, not thankfully but conveniently for me, has been a very good example of the kind of boom and bust weather we can come to expect in our future.

To Whit:

European flooding in 2024 was so extensive that there is a whole-ass Wikipedia page about it. Spain in particular grabbed headlines, with its drought-to-flood weather and eye-grabbing pictures of city streets so heavily flooded cars were stacked and clogged like driftwood.

In the United States, we had a heavy year of tornadic activity, which approached the record for highest number of tornadoes if not actually beating it (the books are a bit unclear on this–the record is within a couple of tornadoes away from broken it seems?). In addition, 2024 marked the year we began talking about the fact that Tornado Alley appears to be shifting eastward, and that our usual tornado season now seems to have opted for a laissez-faire, year-round sort of deal.

Western media has done a pretty great job of ignoring disasters outside of the western world, as we are wont to do. But not surprisingly the global south has continued to bear the brunt of the crisis that they mostly didn't create. You might have seen an occasional picture of fires in Chile, for instance, which have now been considered the country's worst disaster since the 8.8 magnitude earthquake that struck off the coast in 2010. A megadrought has been hurting Chile for years, and over 100°F temperatures in February lit the tinder, killing 137 people, engulfing 6,800 hectares and over 4 billion dollars.

I'm not going to continue the litany of disasters for the sake of listing them, but I do want to touch on one more outside of the West. In just the course of five days, 1,301 people died on their Hajj to Mecca, when the region was hit by temperatures in excess of 120°F–which I really think is a number you should sit with and contemplate for a moment. 120°F isn't a hot day. It's not a very hot day. It is a day that is largely incompatible with human life–one can survive it, but you're simply not meant, biologically, for that temperature. And you may live to see that temperature where you are, depending.

This Year

It would be a bad bet to predict 2025 will be hotter still than 2024. La Niña is poised to cool things down, but then I thought it would come in 2024 and it didn't. Even still, it has been predicted that 2025 will be the third hottest year on record, behind 2023 and 2024. That may drop us below 1.5, but it's hardly out of the danger zone.

It's been posited that 2024 was hot in the absence of an El Niño because of a decrease in low-level cloud cover, but one would assume that would continue in the absence of a larger shift in weather. Nevertheless, it's safe to expect that we see fewer record-breaking world-temperatures–but don't let that lull you into thinking we're temporarily out of danger. It is still plenty hot on Planet Earth, and that heat means that even without records we are likely to see more fires, more floods, more droughts, more severe weather events like tornadoes and hurricanes.

This is where I say, again, that we're standing on the precipice. Collapse is coming. There are signs everywhere. While bastions of the world will continue on–and likely even your neck of the woods–this forestalled collapse is likely to come in the form of severe repression in order to maintain the status quo. That status quo is not going to last forever, and you are going to be left in the lurch when resources have to go elsewhere (to the wealthy), to maintain a smaller island of that stability when the larger is no longer possible. Admit this to yourself if you haven't, and start taking action.