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For the first generation of the 21st century—Generation Alpha—it is an inheritance of profound loss. For their predecessors, climate change was an unfolding planetary emergency. But Generation Alpha—which will comprise an estimated 2 billion people by 2025, making it the largest generation in history—is enduring a climatologically changed, warmer planet.
The year 2024 may be the point that divides the pre- and post-climate change eras. In mid-November, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) stated with certainty that 2024 would be the hottest year since the pre-industrial period (1850-1900), and the first to cross the warming threshold of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. “This marks a new milestone in global temperature,” says Samantha Burgess, deputy director of C3S, which has analysed temperature trends of the first 10 months of 2024.
Under the Paris Agreement, the world pledged to hold the rise in average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels, and to mount efforts to limit warming to 1.5°C. The latter is the threshold beyond which climate change would worsen and its impacts become irreversible. Crossing this threshold in individual months or years does not imply a rise in the planet’s average global temperature. However, repeated crossings bring the planet closer to the critical barrier. Darrell Kaufman, a paleoclimate scientist at Northern Arizona University, US, provides context to the current warming trend in a 2023 article published in The Conversation: “The last glacial episode lasted nearly 100,000 years. There is no evidence that long-term global temperatures reached the pre-industrial baseline anytime during that period. If we look even farther back, to the previous interglacial period, which peaked around 125,000 years ago, we do find evidence of warmer temperatures. The evidence suggests ...
This was first published in the 1-15 December, 2024 print edition of Down To Earth