The world is whiffing on its biggest climate goal

Even as we strive to limit climate change, we need to brace for the warming we can no longer prevent. | Neil Milton/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day.

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For more than a decade, 1.5 degrees Celsius has been the watchword — er, watch temperature? — of climate policy.

If the world could hold warming at that level, it could stave off some of climate change’s worst effects, researchers believed.

Well…there’s bad news on that front.

A major new assessment from the United Nations concludes the world will inevitably pass the 1.5-degree benchmark within the next few years, barring some celestial intervention.

Under current policies, we’re on track to hit 2.6 degrees of warming between now and 2100.

And while that’s not quite a Mad Max scenario, it will very much change how humans live. (More on that in just a minute!) In many ways, the new report formalizes what researchers and policymakers have warned for years .

Last November, UN Secretary-General António Guterres made international headlines when he acknowledged that a “temporary overshoot” of 1.5 degrees was “inevitable.” People understandably fixated on that “inevitable” bit.

But “temporary” matters, too.

As this new assessment repeatedly stresses, the efforts we make now to cut emissions and remove carbon from the atmosphere will still ultimately determine the size and duration of the much-feared “overshoot.” Go a little deeper View Link The realities of a rapidly warming world also point to a second, equally urgent task: Even as we strive to limit climate change, we need to brace for the warming we can no longer prevent.

That approach, known as “climate adaptation,” has not always been popular among advocates or philanthropists.

Adaptation is “a kind of laziness, an arrogant faith in our ability to react in time to save our skins,” Al Gore wrote in his 1992 book Earth in the Balance .

Gore has since changed his tune, however, and so have many others.