‘2024 Was the First Year Above 1.5C of Global Warming – Here’s How We Should Respond’

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.

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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. 

So yes, we need to come together in our communities to prepare for what’s to come but we can’t give up the fight for urgent, large-scale mitigation. If we do that, we just make the worst case scenarios inevitable.

The narrative that it is too late to make a difference is pushed by fossil fuel interests to stop interference with business as usual. Giving in to this narrative gives the climate criminals a free pass to continue to make as much money as possible while they burn our home to the ground.

Concerned citizens have to keep going but we also need to raise our game strategically. It’s clear that the time for incrementalism has passed. Only rapid action to phase out fossil fuel use can impact the trajectory we are on.

After the floods in Spain The Observer’s Global Environment Editor concluded: “We need to quickly kill the fossil fuel industry before it kills us.”

At XR UK, we have been exploring “off-switches” for the fossil fuel industry. What levers could legislators use to not just bring an overdue end to new fossil fuel developments around the globe, but also wind existing production down in time to slow temperature rises?

Over the years our supporters have carefully broken the windows of banks to bring attention to how they are continuing to fund new fossil fuel projects despite their incompatibility with the Paris Agreement. And we targeted the insurers and lawyers who are still providing the underwriting and legal advice to projects that are rendering life on earth inhabitable.

Our message to the government: the banks, insurance industry and the legal profession should all be regulated, or even given a new legal structure, so that they protect life.

Concerned citizens in the UK have a unique opportunity to take strategically effective action as the country plays an outsize role internationally through the City of London, and as the place where many institutions of finance, insurance and the legal professions make their homes.

A new new year provides us all with an opportunity to reflect on our historical moment. XR was founded so that anyone can act in our name as long as they abide by our principles and values. Can we individually and collectively rise to what the moment is asking of us?