Hopes of keeping global temperature rise to 1.5C are 'deader than a doornail'

The internationally agreed goal to keep the world's temperature rise below 1.5C is now "deader than a doornail", with 2024 almost certain to be the first individual year above this threshold, climate scientists have gloomily concluded - even as world leaders gather for climate talks on how to remain within this boundary.

- Oliver Milman

Three of the five leading research groups monitoring global temperatures consider 2024 on track to be at least 1.5C (2.7F) hotter than preindustrial times, underlining it as the warmest year on record and beating a mark set just last year. The past 10 consecutive years have already been the hottest 10 years ever recorded. Although a year above 1.5C does not itself spell climate doom or break the 2015 Paris agreement, in which countries agreed to strive to keep the long-term temperature rise below this point, scientists have warned this aspiration has in effect been snuffed out despite the exhortations of lead-ers currently gathered at a UN climate summit in Azerbaijan. "The goal to avoid exceeding 1. 5C is deader than a doornail. It's almost impossible to avoid at this point because we've just waited too long to act," said Zeke Hausfather, a climate research lead at Stripe and a research scientist at Berkeley Earth. "We are speeding past the 1.5C line an accelerating way and that will continue until global emissions stop climbing.," Last year was so surprisingly hot, even in the context of the climate crisis, that it caused "some soulsearching," among climate scientists, Hausfather said. In recent months there has also been per