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Today the world was told that 2024 was the first year that global average temperatures exceeded 1.5C according to the EU’s Copernicus Earth Observation Programme. In fact it’s worse than that. It’s 1.6C.
The increase in global temperatures has blind-sided scientists who are struggling for explanations. Temperatures were expected to cool after the end of the El Niño season in April of 2024. The Met Office’s central estimate for 2024, for example, was 1.46C – i.e. cooler than 2023. That didn’t happen.
Breaching 1.5C for a full calendar year might sound technical, geeky, and not a big deal but that’s what the world’s governments agreed we should aim to keep temperature rises close to, in Paris, in 2015.
To put this seemingly low number into context, every 0.1 C places 100 million people in unliveable temperatures. So the number may seem small, but the implications are enormous.
It also matters not just because impacts increase with temperature, but also because the heating amplifies feedback loops in the climate system, and as we move past 1.5C we increasingly cross tipping points. This means that things will not only get worse, but will get worse faster.
Tipping points are abrupt and/or irreversible changes in natural systems which accelerate the impacts of climate change.
For example, melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets will catastrophically raise sea levels, the death of warm-water corals destroys a natural carbon sink, the melting of permafrost releases powerful greenhouse gasses and the breakdown of Atlantic ocean circulation changes how heat is distributed across the planet.
We are at risk of crossing some of these tipping points already. As the 2023 Global Tipping Point report explains:
These threats could materialise in the coming decades, and at lower levels of global warming than previously thought. They could be catastrophic, including global-scale loss of capacity to grow major staple crops. Triggering one Earth system tipping point could trigger another, causing a domino effect of accelerating and unmanageable damage. Tipping points show that the overall threat posed by the climate and ecological crisis is far more severe than is commonly understood
2023 Global Tipping Point report
A threshold could be passed where feedbacks uncontrollably tip the system into a Hothouse Earth scenario where the climate stabilises in the long-term at 4-5C higher than pre-industrial levels and with sea level rise of 10-60m higher than today.
The scientific mainstream has been systematically underestimating the risks of feedbacks and tipping points in both their models and their assessments.
“Because feedback loops are not yet fully integrated into climate models, current emissions plans might fall short in adequately limiting future warming,” leading climate scientists warned in October.
In order to determine if the long- term average has crossed 1.5C scientists tell us we need another ten years of data. But they are also telling us that we need to act with even greater urgency than before and that that action needs to be transformational.
And you don’t need to be a scientist to see what is happening right on our own doorstep. In just the first ten days of 2025, we’ve seen widespread flooding in Greater Manchester, followed by over 100 flood warnings across the UK.
So How to Respond to This Most Solemn of Moments?
First we need to recognise and process our grief for what we are losing. This will give us the strength we need to act and overcome our anxiety about the future.
While we are too late to stay within 1.5C, it’s not too late to prevent the worst outcomes, and as leading climate scientists reminded us in October, “Avoiding every tenth of a degree of warming is critically important.”
Climate Action Tracker estimates that, since the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015, stronger national climate policies have brought their end of century temperature projected temperature rises down from 3.6C to 2.7C.
This shows that the cumulative effect of stronger policies around the world can shift the dial over where we might end up by 2100. But that ambition has stalled since COVID.