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For more than a decade, 1.5 degrees Celsius has been the watchword — er, watch temperature? — of climate policy. If the world could hold warming at that level, it could stave off some of climate change’s worst effects, researchers believed.
Well…there’s bad news on that front. A major new assessment from the United Nations concludes the world will inevitably pass the 1.5-degree benchmark within the next few years, barring some celestial intervention. Under current policies, we’re on track to hit 2.6 degrees of warming between now and 2100. And while that’s not quite a Mad Max scenario, it will very much change how humans live. (More on that in just a minute!)
In many ways, the new report formalizes what researchers and policymakers have warned for years. Last November, UN Secretary-General António Guterres made international headlines when he acknowledged that a “temporary overshoot” of 1.5 degrees was “inevitable.”
People understandably fixated on that “inevitable” bit. But “temporary” matters, too. As this new assessment repeatedly stresses, the efforts we make now to cut emissions and remove carbon from the atmosphere will still ultimately determine the size and duration of the much-feared “overshoot.”
The realities of a rapidly warming world also point to a second, equally urgent task: Even as we strive to limit climate change, we need to brace for the warming we can no longer prevent.
That approach, known as “climate adaptation,” has not always been popular among advocates or philanthropists. Adaptation is “a kind of laziness, an arrogant faith in our ability to react in time to save our skins,” Al Gore wrote in his 1992 book Earth in the Balance.
Gore has since changed his tune, however, and so have many others. Among the most prominent converts is the billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates, who has gradually made adaptation a larger piece of his climate agenda.
Last October, Gates released a controversial memo arguing that climate policy should measure success by improvements in human welfare “even more than” changes in emissions or temperature. But there’s no reason we can’t advance both goals together.
Many countries and US states already have, in fact. After a 2003 heat wave killed roughly 15,000 people in France, the country created a “robust” national heat plan that included early warnings and checks on vulnerable residents. The system is credited with making subsequent heat waves less deadly (although a historic heat wave earlier this summer still caused 5,700 excess deaths).
Other adaptations will be far more disruptive. Fiji, for instance, has begun relocating coastal villages threatened by rising sea levels. And whatever adjustments society makes, life in a warming world will still be more difficult and more expensive.
Maybe that’s why “climate adaptation” no longer sounds like laziness: There is clearly no easy or low-effort way out of all of this.
➨ Beware the “loneliness economy.” A booming cottage industry of paid apps, meet-ups, and clubs promise they can make you friends…for a fee. But many of these products and services do little more than sell the idea of community.
