Burning through the guardrails

Less than one year ago, the world’s top weather experts hosted a forum called “Keeping 1.5 Alive” at the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. You’ve got to imagine it was the comms team and not the scientists that picked the title. The WMO issued its medium-term forecast this week and it shows the Earth will cross that symbolic threshold in two years.

The organization forecasts that temperatures will stay near or above record levels for the rest of this decade. And it estimates a 70 per cent probability that the entire five-year average will exceed 1.5 C above pre-industrial temperatures.

The timeline just keeps getting tighter. Only seven years ago, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projected the world wouldn’t heat beyond 1.5 C until the 2040s. Two years ago, the IPCC authors shifted the projection to the mid-2030s. Now, we’re on the doorstep.

Just 10 years ago, the nations of the world adopted the Paris Agreement, setting guardrails to keep global temperatures “well below 2 C above pre-industrial levels,” and pledging “efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 C.”

They didn’t define the guardrails more precisely in the treaty, but the general presumption is that they refer to a temperature average, measured over many years. 

Then, last year, we burned enough fossil fuels to cook our poor planet above 1.5 C for a calendar year, for the first time. But the policy wonks and other sticklers warned against alarmism. One year is not a long-term average, they cautioned — the Paris target was still alive. 

Even before the Paris Agreement, “1.5 to stay alive” had become a rallying cry from island nations and other especially vulnerable countries. Chants of “keep 1.5 alive” thundered from climate protests. Scientists itemized in painful, painstaking detail how that level of warming would impact natural ecosystems, food, weather, health and habitability.

It was always a stretch goal. The nations of the world have been far quicker to adopt targets than to tackle fossil fuel burning. And the WMO’s new forecast means any faint hope is mathematically implausible. 

“There is no way, barring geoengineering, to prevent global temperatures from going over 1.5 degrees,” says Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at Berkeley Earth. Considering the fact that global temperatures will keep rising in the 2030s and have already been above 1.5 C for most of the past two years, 2027 will probably be the year the long-term temperature average exceeds 1.5 C.

For those of you who are statistically inclined, there was another startling finding from the WMO update. For the first time, supercomputers spat out a probability (an “exceptionally unlikely” one) of an entire year above 2 C in the next five years. “It is shocking that 2 C is plausible,” said Adam Scaife of the UK Met Office. “It has come out as only one per cent (probability) in the next five years, but the probability will increase as the climate warms.”

All these forecasts and figures become a lot less abstract on the ground. Both Manitoba and Saskatchewan declared province-wide states of emergency this week as wildfires rage. Over 17,000 people have fled their homes in Manitoba alone. “That is a sign of a changing climate that we are going to have to adapt to,” warned Premier Wab Kinew. 

Grand Chief Kyra Wilson of the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs said the wildfires highlight the injustice of climate impacts on Indigenous communities. “Our First Nations are strong and resilient, but they should not have to face these growing climate threats alone,” Wilson said.

In Switzerland, this week’s climate evacuations were driven by ice, not fire. The village of Blatten was almost completely buried by nine million tonnes of ice, rock and mud as temperatures thawed out the permafrost and the Birch Glacier collapsed. 

Glaciers in Switzerland have lost about 40 per cent of their volume since 2000 and the loss is accelerating. “The last few years have been particularly bad,” said Daniel Farinotti, a glaciologist at ETH Zurich. “In 2022 and 2023 alone, 10 per cent of Switzerland’s glacial ice was lost due to record-high summer temperatures.”

Melting glaciers can collapse catastrophically — as happened to Blatten — or melt into lakes that later burst through their natural dams. These “glacial lake outburst floods” (GLOFs) are likened to inland tsunamis and have been happening in the Himalayas and Andes without the drone footage and media coverage of Blatten. Fifteen million people are estimated to be at risk from catastrophic GLOFs.

Whether these disasters arrive through fire or ice, the obvious common thread is our overheating planet. But another is the role of forecasters. The residents of Blatten and all their animals were evacuated more than a week before the glacier collapse, thanks to advance warnings from glaciologists. Many thousands of people sheltering in wildfire evacuation centres are distraught and fearful, but they got to safety because they heeded the fire and weather forecasters. It’s one of humanity’s superpowers — this capacity to forecast into the future and act in the present — and it’s one we desperately need, as we burn through the guardrails and the timelines tighten.