Gwynne Dyer

“This does not mean the international 1.5 degrees Celsius target has been broken, because that refers to a long-term average over decades.” If those carefully chosen words don’t set your alarm bells ringing, you have not traveled much in the land of lawyers.

This statement was published on Friday in the annual report of Europe’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, the EU’s main climate science center. Yet elsewhere in the same document it admitted that the world’s average temperature did indeed exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius higher than the pre-industrial level in 2024.

And here’s United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, peddling the same story on the same day: “Individual years pushing past the 1.5-degree limit do not mean the long-term goal is shot.”

You’ll find similar mantras on the websites of NASA and NOAA in the U.S., the Hadley Centre in the U.K., the Potsdam Centre for Climate Impact Studies in Germany and the Japan Meteorological Agency. None of them are actually lying, but they are definitely seeking to mislead.

The problem is that our scientists and politicians have been telling us for 10 years that we must never exceed that ‘aspirational’ 1.5 C target or........

© The Korea Times