The 1.5°C climate target is dead. It's time to think and act differently

A Moroccan shepherd checks his mobile phone sitting on cracked earth at the dried-up Al Massira dam 140 kilometres south of Casablanca. This year will almost certainly be the hottest on record. AFP / FileShow less

Forty-six per cent of people in Saudi Arabia surveyed by Lloyds Register Foundation were not concerned about climate change, the highest figure in the world. Other regional countries were almost as unworried.

The target of restricting the average global temperature increase to no more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels is dead – taking the Middle East, and the world, into uncharted climes. It’s time to think and act differently.

The UAE is taking the challenge seriously. April’s floods were a warning of the damage and disruption that we will suffer on a hotter planet. After the country hosted the annual UN climate conference last year, President Sheikh Mohamed attended the Cop29 talks which opened last week in Baku. The UAE’s latest Nationally Determined Contribution, the regularly updated plan for tackling climate change, was released just ahead of the Cop29 opening, proposing a much more aggressive path of emissions reductions to 2035 than last year’s.

Yet, international action remains far too slow, despite the annual exhortations from the UN secretary general and a host of other global leaders. This isn’t the fault of the negotiators, scientists and campaigners gathering in Azerbaijan. But a cumbersome multilateral process can move only at a lumbering pace, when the race to net-zero carbon bogs down in physical and political realities.

This year will almost certainly be the hottest on record, and break the 1.5°C limit, that was agreed in Paris in 2015. A one-year breach isn’t fatal to the goal in itself. This year was unusually hot because of the El Nino effect in the Pacific. But within a few years, regardless of annual fluctuations, continuing greenhouse gas emissions will take us irreversibly beyond 1.5°C.

Protesters call for climate action in London on Saturday as delegates from around the world meet for Cop29 in Baku, Azerbaijan. Reuters

Despite some hopes that 2024 would begin a decline in global emissions, the Global Carbon Project finds that world carbon dioxide emissions surged 2.4 per cent this year.

As the Chinese economy slows and its build-up of low-carbon technologies expands, worldwide emissions will hopefully finally start dropping next year. But the fall will be slow, at best a few per cent annually. To keep the global temperature rise below 1.5°C, emissions would have to plummet virtually to zero by 2035. That isn’t going to happen.

The climate movement is still emulating the unfairly maligned King Canute of England, who despite his majesty was unable to turn back the encroaching tides.

Climate orthodoxy still maintains that rapid deployment of renewable energy, batteries, electric vehicles and energy efficiency will be enough to get to net-zero in time, and that other approaches aren’t needed. While these technologies have improved enormously in cost and performance, and solar in particular is being built at breakneck pace, they aren’t enough on their own.

They don’t address the difficulties of matching electricity needs to supply over long periods, the near-impossibility in developed countries of building transmission grids fast enough, in Africa of financing large-scale renewables at all. And they wave away the difficulty of all the sectors that can’t switch to renewable electricity quickly, or at all – heavy industry, shipping and air transport, and agriculture.

They keep squandering time and political capital in petty campaigns against realistic, important parts of the climate solution, such as nuclear power, carbon capture and storage, and replacing coal consumption with natural gas in the short- and medium-term.

And they don’t realise that the political climate has changed faster than the natural one. Donald Trump’s election in the US is the gloomiest omen for climate action. Political divisions have deepened in Europe between a left that at least takes the climate challenge seriously, but is rigidly ideological about solutions, and a right that prioritises energy costs and legacy industries.

China, India and the other big Asian countries are progressing strongly in low-carbon energy, but at their own pace, protecting business and ordinary citizens’ near-term welfare over net-zero aims. Trade wars and tariffs will make international co-operation much harder, and block off routes to the fastest and cheapest decarbonisation.

Western climate orthodoxy gives little thought as to how to build durable, successful coalitions on climate progress with Asian giants or major oil and gas producers. French President Emmanuel Macron has skipped Cop29 over a political dispute, while others who have positioned themselves as climate leaders – German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, and US President Joe Biden – are absent.

But hope for a stable, tolerable global climate over the rest of this century and beyond isn’t lost. Once we honestly acknowledge that the goal of 1.5°C is behind us, we can think honestly about what to do next.

And this has three parts. First, the good parts of the approach of the last thirty-odd years should continue.

Renewable energy, batteries, electric vehicles and other low-carbon technologies are making tremendous progress. As recently as 2015, we seemed on-course for a cataclysmic 5°C of warming. Now, current policies should yield from 2.4°C to 3°C, still very bad but better. Speeding up progress in the more difficult areas or those disfavoured by climate orthodoxy, such as electricity transmission, carbon capture, hydrogen, synthetic fuels and nuclear power, can cut warming further.

Second, we need a more intensive effort on removing carbon dioxide directly from the air, with a mix of methods: technological (machines with giant fans and solvents), biological (planting trees, mangroves, capturing carbon in soils and speeding ocean photosynthesis), geochemical (tweaking reactions in the ocean), and mineralogical (speeding up the natural weathering of suitable rocks, such as those in the UAE's Northern Emirates and Oman).

That could allow us to manage the risky situation of “overshoot” – where temperatures rise above 1.5°C briefly before coming down again.

Third is a way to cool the Earth – most likely, by releasing reflective particles that stay in the upper atmosphere for months to years. Make Sunsets, a US start-up, already does this on a small scale using balloons. This “geoengineering” attracts strong opposition from most climate scientists, who see it as risky, unproven, with dangerous side effects, and easing the pressure to cut emissions.

But we already have dangerous climatic side effects. We already are not cutting emissions anywhere near quickly enough. If, say, a limit of 2°C of warming is achievable but bad, 1.9°C would be better and 1.8°C better still. Every fraction of a degree reduces environmental damage, human suffering – and the risk of crossing catastrophic “tipping points” in the Earth’s climate, such as the collapse of the North Atlantic Ocean circulation.

Going past 1.5°C is a disaster but it is also a liberation. Making a new realistic plan doesn’t take the pressure off to do the right things. Quite the opposite: it gives hope and prevents fatalism. We should all worry about climate change – but we should also know that we still have a chance.