The political atmosphere around climate change is rapidly heating up alongside the planet. Expect them both to get hotter still in 2024.
Every tenth of a degree increase in global warming makes the “catastrophic” and “unprecedented” heatwaves, fires, and floods of previous decades now seem like run-of-the-mill, seasonal occurrences. The 1.5-degree Celsius target from the Paris Agreement on climate change looks like toast.
That’s the climate situation. The politics look like this: Low-emitting, low-income countries that are most vulnerable to climate disasters are understandably furious with the high-emitting countries which, ignoring the repeated warnings of their own scientists for the last 30 years, have cooked our atmosphere with carbon pollution.