Last month the Copernicus Climate Change Service, an organization run by the European Union to monitor global heating, revealed that Earth was on track to surpass the 1.5º C threshold. This manifested throughout 2024 in so-called “weird weather,” from unusually extreme hurricanes and floods to intense heat waves, parching droughts and unprecedented wildfires. It’s little wonder this year was the hottest in recorded history, breaking the record shattered in 2023.
A recent study even found that 2024 experienced 41 days of extra dangerous heat because of human-caused climate change. To make matters worse, recent data suggests that climate change is accelerating even faster than scientists predicted, meaning we’re rapidly entering uncharted territory. International conferences to address environmental issues like climate change (such as COP29) consistently ended in disappointment.
Why are continuing to go backward on this issue? It’s certainly not from a lack of awareness or passion for the environment. Many people understand the stakes: climate change threatens to kill billions of humans and wipe out millions of species, pushing the definition of “habitability” to the brink. Top climate scientists say there’s still reason to hope and time to act, explaining why humanity has failed to meet its climate goals — and what we can do from here.
“The obstacle isn’t technology,” University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Dr. Michael E. Mann told Salon. “We have the technological knowhow and infrastructure to decarbonize our economy on the needed timescale. What we’re currently lacking — globally, and certainly now in the U.S. under the control of Trump and Republicans — is the political will.”
Mann said humanity needs to rapidly decarbonize our economy. The overwhelming scientific evidence demonstrates humanity’s overuse of fossil fuels is the primary cause of climate change, as doing so releases greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
“We need governmental incentives that will massively incentivize renewable energy and phase out fossil fuel energy as soon as possible,” Mann said. “It won’t happen, however, if young people in particular don’t turn out to vote for climate-forward policymakers.” He added that many did not turn out in sufficiently large numbers during the 2024 election, “and too many fell victims to dishonest tactics of the Republicans and even voted for them out of ignorance of their true agenda. As a result, we elected the most pro-fossil fuel, climate-adverse government in modern history.” Going forward, Mann hopes people who prioritize climate change turn out to vote in larger numbers.
Dr. Kevin Trenberth, a distinguished scholar at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, explicitly argued for three specific policy measures: “Cut emissions and use of fossil fuels; promote renewables; prepare for the consequences,” Trenberth said. He also noted that growing trees, carbon capture and storage and direct air capture of carbon dioxide emissions tend not to work.
In general, it appears like humanity has failed to make limiting greenhouse gas emissions a priority, according to Tom Knutson, a senior scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, said that it appears humanity as a species has not “decided that strongly limiting future emissions of greenhouse gases is a top priority goal that should be pursued and treated as a critical ‘pass or fail goal.’”
Knutson, who has contributed to the scientific efforts behind reports for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change or the U.S. Fifth National Climate Assessment, views his job as providing relevant scientific information rather than offering policy prescriptions. Regardless of the specific measures that people choose to democratically decarbonize our society, it will be essential that they establish realistic goals and reliably follow through in implementing them.
“Broadly speaking, humanity can decide, based on the above scenario information (with uncertainties) provided by IPCC and other scientific sources, what future emission pathway to set as a goal,” Knutson said. “Then society and policymakers can enact policies in an effort to reach the emission goal that is set. If they decide collectively that scenario X is the goal, and they fail to enact or implement the policies to achieve scenario X, or the policies are not followed as desired by the policymakers, then that would constitute a failure in my view.”
As humanity swims against the tide of rising temperatures, they will also need to solve lingering mysteries regarding these scientific facts. At the time of this writing, Knutson and his colleagues are researching issues such as why current climate models are not able to reproduce the observed pattern of sea surface temperature trends (1980 to 2022) in the tropical Pacific and southern Pacific Ocean. Other scientists are examining why climate change has been accelerating even faster than previous models anticipated. Because climate science includes many variables that humans do not know, experts cannot precisely anticipate or explain every phenomenon that ensues as people continue global heating through greenhouse gas emissions.
Yet Knutson does have his own hypothesis about why climate change seems to be getting worse at an ever more rapid rate.
“I would speculate that natural variability may be creating temporary trends (either ‘hiatus’ periods of little warming or temporary ‘spurts’ of accelerated warming) lasting up to a few decades,” Knutson said. “Maybe that is part of the explanation for the recent changes.”
Citing his 2016 paper for Nature Communications on possible future trajectories for global mean temperature, Knutson said that this “suggests to perhaps just be patient for now to see if the recent acceleration we have seen is just a temporary effect of internal variability or temporary forcing change, or if it really does represent an accelerated long-term warming rate, relative to the trend we've been on since about 1970.” He added that these are his personal views and do not necessarily represent those of NOAA or the U.S. government.
Mann emphasized that the most recent peer-reviewed scientific research does not find any acceleration of warming itself.
“Some impacts of climate change are proceeding faster than expected,” Mann said. “Examples are ice sheet melt and sea level rise, and the rise in extreme weather events. The longer-term warming itself is steady and is proceeding as predicted by the models.”
Perhaps the bottom line in all of this is that human beings must stop relying on fossil fuels. Dr. Friederike Otto, the lead of World Weather Attribution and an Imperial College climate scientist, put it bluntly when announcing the extra 41-days of extreme heat that occurred in 2024.
"Climate change did play a role, and often a major role in most of the events we studied, making heat, droughts, tropical cyclones and heavy rainfall more likely and more intense across the world, destroying lives and livelihoods of millions and often uncounted numbers of people," Otto said during a media briefing. "As long as the world keeps burning fossil fuels, this will only get worse."
