4 days ago
Climate change is here, but don't give up. We can still avoid the worst of it.
2024 was the hottest in at least 125,000 years and the past 10 years have been the 10 hottest in nearly 200 years of record-keeping, the World Meteorological Organization reports. 2024 also has the dubious distinction of being the first calendar year in modern record-keeping in which global average surface temperatures exceed the Paris Agreement's aspirational 1.5°C guardrail to prevent disastrous global warming effects.
Why does this matter? Holding long-term warming to the 1.5-degree target compared to the preindustrial era is crucial for lowering the risk of triggering climate change tipping points, beyond which potentially catastrophic impacts have a higher likelihood of occurring, studies show. Holding warming to that target is viewed as necessary for small island states and other extremely vulnerable nations to avoid being wiped out by sea level rise, drought and other threats.
Seven years ago, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted that the world wouldn't warm 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels until 2040. Then two years ago, the group predicted the world would pass that threshold between 2030 and 2035.
Now, new data from the WMO released this month indicates that Earth will cross this point in just two years. The accelerated timeline means that irreversible tipping points in the climate system — like the melting of Arctic ice sheets or the wide-scale collapse of coral reefs — are closer at hand than scientists previously believed.
Greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of fossil fuels are the chief culprit, dangerously heating up the planet, imperiling biodiversity, increasing sea level rise and drought and making extreme weather events more common and more destructive. And the oil industry has known this for decades.
The American Petroleum Institute commissioned a study by the Stanford Research Institute in 1968 which found: 'Significant temperature changes are almost certain to occur by the year 2000, and these could bring about climatic changes. ... there seems to be no doubt that the potential damage to our environment could be severe. ... pollutants which we generally ignore because they have little local effect, CO2 and submicron particles, may be the cause of serious world-wide environmental changes.'
Opinion: Congress must fund Farm Bill conservation programs to protect local ranches
It was the first of dozens of studies the industry paid for or knew about, all predicting climate change dangers, including major reports in 1979, 1982, and 1991.
Then the 'climate denial' began.
In 2015 and again in 2025, the Union of Concerned Scientists documented decades of internal industry memos and strategy sessions that were organizing, funding and detailing roughly four decades of lies foisted on the American public. The industry and its executives' efforts were all, apparently, in the service of preserving their profits and avoiding any liability for the deaths and destruction they knew would one day come as a result of their product poisoning our atmosphere.
The election of Donald Trump is a clear setback to the world's ability to rein in dangerous levels of warming. Mr. Trump, who has called global warming a hoax, pulled out of the Paris accord on his first day in office. He has also, as requested by the oil industry, reversed or plans to rescind a raft of regulations to clean up climate pollution. These include tail pipe and fuel economy standards, a fee on methane emissions from oil and gas facilities, and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) waiver that has allowed California — and 11 other states — to set emissions standards stricter than those at the federal level.
In addition to largely isolating the United States on the global climate-diplomacy stage, actions like these would also hand a geopolitical win to the country's main rival, China, which has spent a decade building up a powerful clean-energy industry and is now increasingly exporting it worldwide.
Most damaging, however, we would lose more precious time. If we act now — decisively and dramatically — we still have a chance at avoiding climate change's most catastrophic impacts. Think about this as we suffer through another sweltering summer.
Mike Altshuler is a retired educator and environmental activist who lives in Edmond.
This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: Weather is hot, dangerous here. We can't let it get worse | Opinion
