Meeting the 1.

5°C Climate Goal Will Save

Millions of People, and It’s Still Feasible
Imagine you started a fire in your neighborhood, down the street from your house. You didn't
mean to—you’re no arsonist—but there it is, blazing before your eyes. Your neighbor’s house is
about to go up in flames. What do you do?

There is only one answer, of course: You try to put it out. You run over with buckets and hoses.
You do everything you can to be useful. As long as there is a chance of saving your neighbor's
home, no matter how small, you keep working. After all, you started it. You should be the very
last person to surrender.

What you don’t do is sit and watch the destruction from the relative safety of your home. You
don't try to convince people that the losses won't be all that bad. And you definitely don't start
shouting at your neighbors to give up—that trying to put out the fire is not realistic.

This is the situation we face as the world gathers in Dubai for COP 28. Our climate is hurtling
toward 1.5 degrees Celsius of heating over preindustrial levels. One recent study estimates that if
emissions continue apace, we have a 50 percent chance of reaching a global annual average of
1.5 degrees C in just six years. But as we approach this grim milestone, we still have choices.
Those of us who live in the “West” or the “Global North” (two geographically dubious terms
that essentially mean wealthy, powerful nations) have the greatest responsibility for igniting the
blaze that now threatens the entire neighborhood. So will we run toward the fire, determined to
help? Or will we set up lawn chairs and watch it burn?

Unfortunately, much of the current discourse around 1.5 degrees C reflects the second choice.
Instead of action, we’re increasingly obsessed with prognostication: Will we, or won’t we, hold
global average temperature rise to 1.5 degrees C? From there, it's a short leap to a narrative of
surrender: if we're going to breach 1.5 C anyway, maybe we should just give up trying. We’re
relating to the climate crisis as if it’s something we’re watching instead of something we’re
doing—and that mindset has enormous consequences.

“People do not realize the implications this has for quite a large majority of the world's
population,” says Adelle Thomas, a senior fellow at the University of the Bahamas and vice
chair of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Working Group II, which focuses on
climate change impacts and adaptation. I met Thomas in 2021, when I was preparing to report at
COP 26, the U.N. climate talks in Glasgow, Scotland. A few months before the conference, we
met online for a quick check-in. As soon as her face flickered into view, I knew something was
wrong.

“How are you doing?” I asked.

“Well, not great,” she said. “It looks like everyone’s just abandoning 1.5 C.” In the wake of
another somber emissions assessment, the message that 1.5 C was out of reach was circulating in
the media and online. “They're saying we should focus on more ‘realistic’ goals, like 2 degrees
C. Or who knows, maybe even higher!” she said, shaking her head. “It's insane.”
Thomas knows just how insane. As one of the lead authors of the 2018 IPCC Special Report on
1.5 degrees C, she helped to catalog the catastrophes that await us if we allow temperatures to
rise 2 degrees C above preindustrial levels. Among many takeaways: hundreds of millions more
people will regularly be exposed to severe heat waves, crucial crops will fail much more
frequently, and the majority of coral reefs will die. We don’t have to wait to get to 1.5 C to
understand the risks; we can simply look around at the floods, fires and famines happening now.
This is life at 1.2 degrees C of warming. Now picture it getting a whole lot worse.

Global heating is like turning the knob on a stove, not flipping a light switch; if we hit 1.6
degrees C, we don't suddenly wake up to an utterly changed world. But the 1.5 C report made
clear that the journey up the thermometer to that point—let alone beyond it—will be chaotic and
destructive, with ever-increasing risks of triggering climate tipping points that could send us into
devastation. No one knows exactly where those tipping points are, and that's why we need to
proceed with caution. We have nothing to gain and everything to lose by finding out.

“‘One-point-five to stay alive’ is reality, it's not a slogan,” Thomas says.

But it's a reality that powerful nations long resisted. Prior to the landmark U.N. climate
conference in Paris in 2015, the big emitters had de facto agreed that 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F)
was an acceptable limit to global temperature rise. For years, people from developing countries
pushed back, saying that although wealthier nations might be able to survive that level of climate
chaos, they could not. Most of these countries had (and have) very low emissions but very high
levels of climate risk. They did little to cause the climate crisis, but they're feeling the impacts
first and worst.

In Paris, people from island states, least-developed countries and other nations coalesced around
a campaign of “1.5 C to stay alive.” Thomas was there. In public protests and backroom
conversations they pushed, pleaded and pressured the major emitters, especially the U.S. and
China, to get 1.5 degrees C into the final text.

The battle ended with a half victory. The stated goal of the Paris Agreement is holding global
temperature rise to “well below 2 degrees C above preindustrial levels” and “pursuing efforts to
limit the temperature increase to 1.5 degrees C.” When that line was read into the record on the
last day of the conference, a huge cheer erupted in the crowd. “Pursuing efforts” wasn't perfect,
but it was something.

Sadly, that statement has not translated into nearly enough action. Some progress has been made
—especially in the build-out of renewables—but emissions and temperatures are still rising.

It’s worth pausing for a moment to appreciate how different the climate conversation would be if
it weren’t for the people who fought relentlessly for 1.5 degrees C. Without their efforts, that
number likely wouldn't have made it into the Paris Agreement, and could have easily faded from
public consciousness. This would have made the world much more dangerous for everyone. By
insisting on protection for people in the most climate-vulnerable nations, the “1.5 C to stay alive”
campaigners were protecting us all. As Tina Stege, climate envoy for the Marshall Islands, said
in a steely voice at the 2021 COP 26 meeting, “One-point-five is nonnegotiable(should not even
be discussed). The safety of my children—and yours—hangs in the balance.”

But instead of being celebrated for focusing the world's attention on 1.5 C, Stege, Thomas and
others are repeatedly being made to defend their position. When I checked in with Thomas a few
months ago, she told me it was “extremely depressing” to see headlines declaring “The 1.5-
Degree Goal Is All But Dead,” (the Atlantic, April 2022) or telling the world to “say goodbye”
to 1.5 C because “it's time for some realism” (the Economist, November 2022). “It's a very
privileged and dismissive message, and incredibly frustrating,” she says. “It's like gaslighting.”

This perspective does intend to communicate the seriousness of our situation, but it also implies
that there are two teams—those who are stuck in a fairy tale that we can hold temperature rise to
1.5 degrees C, and people who are willing to face the hard truth. This is a fundamental
misunderstanding. Thomas and others are not in denial about how small our window of
opportunity for avoiding runaway heating has become. They’re looking at the same data as the
self-appointed realists, but drawing a different conclusion about how to respond: instead of
giving up on 1.5 C, they believe we need to redouble our efforts toward it. This is not because
they’re deluding themselves, but because they know every tenth of a degree of additional
warming sentences more people to death.

From Thomas’s perspective, the people admonishing others to “get real” about 1.5 degrees C are
the ones who are seriously out of touch with climate realities. “I think they are coming from their
particular perspective of privilege, where they are not in the midst of climate impacts and are not
seeing climate change as an existential threat,” she says. Thomas doesn’t need anyone to tell her
how to think about 1.5 C. She needs the world to listen, and to act.

“One-point-five is a truly globally catastrophic threshold. Anybody who says we need to just
give up on it is talking through their hat,” said Saleemul Huq, former director of the International
Center for Climate Change and Development and former professor at the Independent University
Bangladesh. “We just simply cannot give up on it.”

When Huq died suddenly in October from a heart attack, a long-revered voice was lost. He had
attended every COP meeting since they began in 1995, serving as an advisor to the Climate
Vulnerable Forum and other groups. He said when people talk about giving up on 1.5 C, one of
the most important questions to ask is “Who’s giving up?” No one in the groups he was working
with was entertaining that idea. “You do not hear it from the Global South,” he said.

As Thomas also noted, Huq said the narrative of surrender on 1.5 C comes almost exclusively
from people living in wealthy nations, who are not personally feeling threatened by the climate
crisis. “It's not for them to say we have to give up,” Huq said. “Who the hell are they?”

This is a powerful question that everyone with some amount of protection from climate chaos
should ask ourselves. People on the front lines of this crisis have made their position clear: 1.5
degrees C is the maximum level of suffering that their communities can withstand. Who am I to
say otherwise? What right do I have to tell anyone to surrender their hopes for a livable home,
for the preservation of their history, culture and future? What entitles me to decide what level of
destruction is “realistic” for someone else to accept, especially while I enjoy the benefits of
living in a nation that has dumped more carbon pollution into the atmosphere than any other?

For Eric Njuguna, a Kenyan climate activist, talk of abandoning 1.5 C is “a stab in the back….
It’s self-centered, and it’s screwing the lives of many.” Njuguna says that expecting developing
countries to tolerate even more burden is outrageous. “Right now here in Kenya, there is an
ongoing drought that has put millions of people at severe risk of hunger,” he says, “and it’s only
going to get tougher from here. We cannot afford to go above 1.5 degrees C. It's going to be
devastating, especially for African countries.”

The narrative of surrender is “morally irresponsible,” adds Michai Robertson, a lead climate
negotiator for the Alliance of Small Island States. Like Huq, Robertson believes it is essential to
ask who is giving up. Anyone who claims that 1.5 C is dead, he says, has an obligation to ask—
and try to answer—who killed it. “Then we can talk about identifying the perpetrator, finding the
cause, and then figuring out how to fix the problem. There is accountability there.”

For people who are used to looking at climate issues through an exclusively technical lens, talk
of privilege and accountability, perpetrators and responsibility may be startling. But there is
more than one way to think about 1.5 degrees C, because it is more than one thing. Scientifically,
1.5 C is fully in the danger zone. Historically, it’s a hard-won promise. Politically, it’s a rallying
cry. Morally, it’s a deep obligation that major emitters owe to the rest of the world; indeed, it is
the lowest rung on the ladder of climate ethics, the first step on the long journey of taking
responsibility for the damage done.

None of these definitions of 1.5 degrees C are sufficient on their own; we need an integrated
understanding. And then we need to act.

So what should we do? Everything we can, as quickly as we can, for as long as it takes. No
matter where the global thermometer eventually maxes out, the actions we need to take now are
the same: stop emitting planet-warming gasses, preserve and protect whatever we can, and help
each other adapt. The wealthy world needs to follow the lead of people in the most climate-
vulnerable places and adopt a “never surrender” mentality, rallying around aggressive climate
action as if our lives depend on it—because they do.

As we do that work, we can be heartened(be cheered by)by the fact that none of our actions are
wasted, even if we do breach 1.5 C. All kinds of things matter in relation to that threshold—not
just whether we pass it, but the speed of our approach, how long we linger near it, and if we do
go past, how fast and how far. The more we can slow temperature rise, the more time we have to
prepare for impacts, and the better chance we have of lowering the peak. Hitting 1.5 degrees C in
2060 is a much less deadly scenario than hitting it in 2030. The same goes for hovering at or
above 1.5 C versus rocketing up to 2 C or beyond. These differences will be measured in a mind-
boggling number of dollars, species extinctions and human lives.

Coral reefs are just one example. The IPCC estimates that at 2 degrees C, 99 percent of coral
reefs will be lost. But if we can hold warming to 1.5 C, between 10 percent and 30 percent of
reefs may be saved. Neither of those outcomes is happy; the difference is between frightening
levels of destruction and annihilation. But such differences matter, not only for corals, polar
bears and ice sheets, but for human communities everywhere. Every tenth of a degree of heating
we prevent means more lives saved, more destruction avoided, more species that manage to
make it through.

Furthermore, “If you were to exceed 1.5 C degrees warming, the case for ambitious action is
strengthened rather than weakened,” says Jim Skea, current chair of the IPCC. That’s because
1.5 C was never the finish line; it is (hopefully) the turnaround point. Human civilization
depends on a stable climate, and to achieve that we have to stop the heating, and then bend the
temperature curve back down. As environmental scientist Johan Rockström tweeted in 2022: “I
just get tired...Tired of hearing that 1.5°C is a ‘target’ or ‘goal’. IT IS NOT. It is a limit. The only
real goal is zero degrees Celsius.”

This is why declarations that 1.5 C is dead make no sense. Global temperature limits don’t die if
we surpass them. People do.

In 2022 the IPCC stated that it was “almost inevitable that we will temporarily exceed [the 1.5
degrees C] temperature threshold but could return to below it by the end of the century,” with
carbon removal from the atmosphere and other drawdown techniques. In the fall of 2023 the
International Energy Association released its latest Net Zero Roadmap, which framed the future
slightly more optimistically, saying that there is a “narrow but feasible” possibility of holding
warming to 1.5 C. More reports will come, and we should read them, even if (especially if) the
information they deliver is terrifying. But we should use that information as motivation, not as an
excuse to blithely write off the effort to save millions of lives.

This is the power of the “never surrender” paradigm; it can help us find agency within this
overwhelming crisis. When it’s clear that it’s your home, your community, your life on the line,
you act. You don’t ask “What are the chances?” but rather “How can I help?” You don’t just
pursue effort—you find it. And that effort does some good, even if it isn't enough.

As dire as our situation appears to be today, in the future, we’ll look back and see people who
had choices. No one will care about what we thought we could or couldn’t do; all that will matter
is what we actually did. Working relentlessly to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees C—
even if we temporarily surpass it—is choosing to reduce suffering for people and life on the
planet as a whole. It’s hard to imagine any scenario in which that is not the right thing to do.