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Jun 25, 2023

Bloomberg Evening Briefing: Accelerating Global Warming Narrows Choices

Get caught up. Firefighters and volunteers work to extinguish a burning building during a wildfire in Saronida, south of Athens, Greece, on July 17. Accelerating global warming is narrowing humanity’s

Get caught up.

Firefighters and volunteers work to extinguish a burning building during a wildfire in Saronida, south of Athens, Greece, on July 17. Accelerating global warming is narrowing humanity’s choices to successfully slow the worst of the climate crisis.

Humans are losing the race against heat. First came the hottest June in recorded history. Now it’s the hottest-ever July. This year is already highly likely to replace 2016 atop the heat ranking. Scientists suspect the last several years have been warmer than any point in the 125,000 that came before. This acceleration of heat is the result of burning enough fossil fuels to raise global average temperatures about 1.2C since the Industrial Revolution. The bottom line is that heat is intensifying faster than attempts to counteract it, and it’s beginning to look like the time humanity has to change its ways is a lot shorter than previously thought.

According to the current projections from researchers at Climate Action Tracker, all the existing emissions-cutting policies by governments around the world would result in the global average temperature increasing about 2.7C by 2100. A separate team at the United Nations compiled an end-of-century estimate of 2.8C. The problem is clear: Existing weather is visibly outrunning our combined efforts to stem global warming. “Climate policy is not keeping pace,” says Ann Mettler, vice president for Europe at Breakthrough Energy, a consortium of nonprofits and venture capital funds. Shifting to clean energy, she says, “whatever that cost, would pale in comparison to what these extreme weather events cost.” But there’s still hope: Here’s how experts at eliminating carbon pollution think we can catch up.