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By David Spratt & Ian Dunlop
27 February 2024
If there was shock and awe last week when the Copernicus Climate Change Service announced that global average warming over the last twelve months — February 2023 to January 2024 — had exceeded 1.5 degrees Celsius (°C), it was likely because too many people had succumbed to the predominant but delusional policy-making narrative that holding warming to 1.5–2°C was still on the cards.
What does this symbolically important moment mean for the poor understanding of climate-risk analysis by Australian governments? To begin, the idea that emissions could continue till 2050 and still achieve the 1.5–2°C goal was always a con; now it is fully exposed.
One year of 1.5°C does not constitute a trend, which technically can only be seen in retrospect over 20 to 30 years of data. But with another hot year likely in 2024, the rate of warming accelerating, and a current peak in the Earth’s Energy Imbalance — which is an indicator of future warming — it is hard to disagree with the assessment of former NASA climate science chief James Hansen that the world has now reached the 1.5°C mark for all practical purposes.
When the 2015 global climate conference resulted in the Paris Agreement’s commitment to hold climate warming to the 1.5–2°C band, those numbers quickly became normalised as the sine qua non of climate policymaking. But that was a grand illusion on two counts:
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