Climate scientists warn world will breach critical 1.5°c warming limit, triggering irreversible planetary tipping points

The world is poised to exceed the critical 1.5°C global warming threshold established by the Paris Climate Agreement, with devastating consequences that may be impossible to reverse. For the first time, a three-year period ending in 2025 has breached this limit, with 2024 hitting 1.55 degrees above pre-industrial levels. Climate scientists warn this overshoot could trigger cascading environmental collapses—from Amazon rainforest dieback to the melting of Greenland’s ice sheet.

“Climate policy has failed. The 2015 landmark Paris agreement is dead,” declares atmospheric chemist Robert Watson, former chair of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The consequences are already visible: record-breaking heatwaves, unprecedented wildfires, and extreme weather events that have cost the global economy over $2 trillion in the past decade while affecting one-fifth of the world’s population.

Scientists fear the climate system is approaching multiple “tipping points”—thresholds beyond which changes become irreversible. Ocean circulation systems like the Atlantic Current face potential collapse, tropical coral reefs may already be doomed, and natural carbon sinks that have long absorbed CO2 emissions are weakening dramatically. The 2024 jump in atmospheric CO2 concentrations was the largest ever recorded.

While technologies exist to remove carbon from the atmosphere, they remain prohibitively expensive and unproven at scale. Some researchers advocate for emergency geoengineering solutions, such as injecting particles into the atmosphere to reflect sunlight, though critics warn this could fundamentally alter global weather patterns while leaving greenhouse gas levels dangerously high.