Copyright Watts Up With That
From ClimateREALISM By Linnea Lueken A recent article in The Guardian, “Change course now: humanity has missed 1.5C climate target, says UN head,” claims that the planet is in grave danger of passing climate “tipping points,” as it is now inevitable that 1.5°C warming will be breached. Although 1.5℃ of warming may be locked in if not already surpassed, the claim that it signifies a dangerous milestone is false. Not only is the tipping points narrative bunk, but there is no evidence that 1.5°C warming is any particular threat. The purported temperature threshhold was chosen arbitrarily and for political reasons rather than scientific ones. The Guardian’s story focuses on comments made by United Nations Secretary General António Guterres, who in advance of the COP30 climate summit in Brazil, warned that it is “inevitable” that 1.5°C of warming will be breached, and it will result in “devastating consequences” for the planet. The Guardian says Guterres “urged the leaders who will gather in the Brazilian rainforest city of Belém to realize that the longer they delay cutting emissions, the greater the danger of passing catastrophic “tipping points” in the Amazon, the Arctic, and the oceans.” There is no scientific basis for any so-called tipping points, and claiming otherwise is just fearmongering for political gain. Beginning with the Amazon rainforest, the location of the next climate summit in November, Guterres reportedly warned that it could become a “savannah,” or a dry grassland. There is no evidence for this absurd claim. Like Guterres’ previous “boiling oceans” comment, it is purely fanciful hyperbole lacking any basis in fact. Guterres is referencing a period of drought suffered by parts of the Amazon basin in recent years, but that drought has not been historically unusual, and the recent localized areas of drought have not been more severe than previous drought periods. As discussed in the Climate Realism post “Media Outlets Continue Spreading False Amazon “Record Drought” Claims,” the Amazon has experienced periods of heavy rain and extended drought in the past that were worse than those we see now. Historic records do not show any worsening of drought in the Amazon. The threat that impacts tree cover is deforestation and clear cutting, not climate change. The Arctic is also not approaching any dangerous tipping point. Should warming continue, ice extent will likely shrink, but it has not been happening at nearly as fast a rate as alarmists claim. Arctic sea ice extent has been stable since about 2010, indicating a new ice extent regime, and there is no telling how long that will last. If the past is any guide, sea ice might begin expanding again, as it has waxed and waned historically. Finally, the ocean tipping point Guterres is referring to is the claim that coral reefs will die out as a result of ocean pH changes and higher temperatures, but again, science and paleo-history shows that corals are resilient to changes that are much more extreme than the modest warming of recent decades. As discussed repeatedly at Climate Realism, the world’s oceans are not at risk of becoming acidic and coral reefs are expanding their range and setting records for growth. It is true that the “1.5°C threshold” is likely to be passed. But that does not mean anything, certainly nothing catastrophic. The 1.5°C warming limit was already passed in 2024 because of the El Niño conditions—with no cataclysm. This should not be of concern to anyone, because that limit is not a scientifically established value. The Guardian fearmongered about it in the past, which Climate Realism addressed here, and seems to have learned nothing. The 1.5°C number was arbitrary; established by an 11 member German political advisory board containing only one meteorologist. It is not a hard scientific threshold the way the boiling point of water is, though alarmists inappropriately treat it that way. Guterres’ comments are not based on science, data, or even history. He is simply attempting to worry the public, with The Guardian’s complicity, in order to gain political leverage for negotiations at COP 30 even as a growing number of countries are downplaying climate concerns in the realistic assessment that other issues are more pressing and fossil fuels, for now, remain vital to prosperity.
