Earth’s New Normal: What Breaking 1.5°C Means for Our Future
Why 2024 Marks the Start of Our Climate Horror Show
2024 marks a grim milestone for humanity. This year, for the first time in recorded history, our planet breached the critical 1.5 degrees Celsius of global warming above pre-industrial levels — a limit we had once seen as a warning threshold, not a foregone conclusion. And it’s happened much sooner than we thought.
Back in 2019, NASA projected that Earth wouldn’t hit this threshold until 2040. Even in 2023, the IPCC estimated the 1.5 degree limit wouldn’t be breached until 2029. Yet here we are, years ahead of schedule, facing a world that is changing faster and more profoundly than science or society anticipated.
Climate models once warned of this day. Those warnings are now reality. The future has arrived, and it is more severe and unrelenting than many imagined. This isn’t just a temporary fluctuation; it’s the onset of a new era — one where humanity’s exponential increase in greenhouse gas emissions has come to define life on Earth. As physicist Al Bartlett famously said, “The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.” As greenhouse gases accumulate, climate change’s acceleration is relentless, pushing natural systems to their breaking points. And…
