It's never too late to fight climate change
At the beginning of September, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) released a report titled Limiting Overshoot: Navigating Exceedance of 1.5°C and Pathways Towards Return. In it, UNEP calls on the world to face the likelihood that we will exceed the Paris Agreement's goal of limiting global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. Article 2 of the Paris Agreement committed nations to keeping global average temperatures well below 2°C, and ideally capped at 1.5°C — a target specifically pushed for by small, low-lying nations who warned that 2°C of warming would threaten their very existence.
But 1.5°C was never considered "safe." We're already experiencing heatwaves, droughts, ocean acidification, and a host of other impacts wreaking havoc on ecosystems and communities around the world. In announcing the report, the Secretary-General of the United Nations stated that "every fraction of a degree will cost lives, destroy livelihoods, deepen inequality and push ecosystems closer to irreversible damage."
Unfortunately, some news outlets and social media influencers reported this as the United Nations giving up. That couldn't be further from the point. The overall trajectory of warming isn't a threshold we cross once and can never come back from — it's less a light switch than a dimmer we can still turn in either direction. That said, it's worth being honest about the exception: some specific tipping points, like major ice sheet collapse or Amazon dieback, really do work more like switches. Once crossed, those don't reset just because the global average temperature later comes back down.
Personally, I like to picture the atmosphere as a bathtub filling with water (greenhouse gases). Since the Industrial Revolution, we've had the tap running (burning fossil fuels). The drain — the oceans and forests that slowly absorb greenhouse gases — has never been able to keep pace. The water level is the global temperature, and the rim of the tub is 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. What this report says is that the water is just starting to lap over the edge.
The metaphor isn't perfect. For one thing, there are multiple taps and drains, not one of each. Methane, for instance, is a far more potent greenhouse gas than CO₂ molecule-for-molecule, but it also leaves the atmosphere much faster — so it's like a tap that gushes hard but gets shut off quickly, rather than one that drips slowly forever. There are also tipping points — ice sheet loss, Amazon degradation, biodiversity collapse — that don't undo themselves even if the water level later drops. Realistically, widening the drain enough to matter will probably require artificial carbon removal, not just natural processes working faster. And the water already in the tub is causing damage right now, regardless of whether the level keeps climbing.
But here's the key: how much damage the overflow causes depends on how much water gets over the edge and how quickly you catch it. If you came home and found your tub overflowing, you wouldn't leave the water running because it's "too late." You'd shut it off as fast as you could and go find a towel.
What the report says is that it's time to shut the water off — faster than governments around the world are currently doing, or have even pledged to do. Because the sooner we shut it off, the less mess we'll have to clean up.
The report makes a few key recommendations:
Accelerate the phaseout of fossil fuels.
Slash methane emissions specifically — since methane is both especially potent and quick to leave the atmosphere, cutting it delivers a faster cooling benefit than CO₂ cuts alone.
Protect land, forests, and oceans, which serve as natural carbon sinks and buffers against climate impacts.
Combine mitigation with adaptation. For example, increasing urban tree canopy coverage lowers heat-related mortality while reducing the need for energy-intensive, polluting cooling systems.
Limit both how high temperatures rise and how long they stay elevated — every fraction of a degree avoided, and every year of overshoot shortened, reduces risk and improves the odds of getting back below 1.5°C.
EPIC's climate program will continue looking for ways to accomplish these goals on the North Coast. Keep telling your elected officials that climate action matters to you — some of them are shying away from it right now. And you can always make personal changes too: driving an electric vehicle, installing a heat pump, or biking and taking transit more often. Humanity collectively caused this problem, and only through rapid, collective action will we fix it.
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