For two days last November, the world marked an ominous first: the global average temperature was more than 2 degrees Celsius warmer than the pre-industrial baseline.
In other words, we blew past the threshold beyond which the truly catastrophic effects of the climate crisis lie — albeit for just a blip. Now comes another stark reminder that the worst effects of climate change are very close to becoming our reality: according to the European climate agency, the record heat of 2023 amounted to a 1.48 degrees Celsius increase over pre-industrial temperature averages, just a hair’s breadth away from the more stringent 1.5 degree (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) threshold that was central to the Paris Climate Accords.
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With these thresholds looming, the stakes are extraordinarily high for Black Americans. Consider, for example, that Black people tend to live in hotter neighborhoods, are less likely to have air conditioning, and are at the highest risk of any racial group of dying from heat stress. If America writ large could be OK, relatively speaking, in a 2 degrees Celsius world, Black America likely would not be. With even the degree of warming that we already have causing floods and extreme heat and other climate-related damage and disasters in Black communities, it’s clear that the lowest possible degree of warming we can achieve is the best one.
The huge caveat here is that a day or even a year of temperatures that are above either 1.5 degrees or 2 degrees Celsius doesn’t mean that we’ve surpassed either of those thresholds — for that to be the case, those temperatures would need to be sustained for a matter or decades. Still, hitting these numbers makes it ever more clear that climate change isn’t an issue of the future, but is urgently present. But with both 1.5 degrees and 2 degrees being broached, it’s worth remembering where the two different numbers came from and what blowing past them for a sustained period of time might mean.
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The notion that global temperature increases should be kept from increasing by more than 2 degrees Celsius has been around since the 1970s, and was adopted by the European Union as a target threshold in the 1990s. By comparison, the 1.5 degree threshold is a far newer and less well-researched number: it was first floated in 2009, ahead of COP 15 in Copenhagen, and it was generally seen as a surprise when the newer and less rigorously studied 1.5 degree benchmark was adopted as the preferable limit on warming when the Paris Climate Accords were established in 2015.
Part of the reason why 1.5 caught on so quickly is that elected officials and climate negotiators from the most vulnerable countries in the world — including low-lying island nations — aggressively and successfully campaigned for it.
With slogans like “1.5 to stay alive,” they succeed in lowering the bar, and teasing the possibility of not only the continued existence of places like the Marshall Islands, but also the survival of at least some coral reefs, compared to none under a 2 degrees scenario. It is, inarguably, a better world — and also one that many climate scientists agree is already lost to us, as many believe there is no way to achieve anything less than 1.5 degrees of warming.
If there’s a vulnerable nation within our nation, it’s Black and brown America. Black Americans don’t have the same worries as, say, the Marshallese, who may lose the bulk of their archipelago to rising seas — but folks are living in the asphalt-laden urban heat islands that are often also prone to flooding.
And even 1.5 degrees is an impossibility, maybe there will be something about nearly blowing past a benchmark (even if it was only for a year) that the entire world agrees that we should not surpass that will generate some necessary change. We’re already falling short of the Paris Agreement, we’re already seeing these doomsday numbers rear up in front of us, and even at this point, the climate is looking disastrous. Even if we can’t achieve 1.5, it’s still 1.5 to stay alive.