Last week, the United Nations made a seemingly inevitable announcement: we lost. Climate change, they declared, had emerged victorious in the fight for our planet’s future. Our inefficient laws and vague promises of action were not enough to win. We now know the world has finally failed to meet the 1.5°C limit needed to stave off the worst effects of climate change. Overshoot is now unavoidable, and warming will continue. In short, we messed up. Badly.
The news doesn’t come as a shock– in the past year alone we’ve been slammed by reports of climate tragedies from fronts across the globe. Already, 2025 is on track to be the highest year on record for greenhouse gas emissions. In October, we reached our first climate tipping point– the widespread mortality of warm-water coral reefs. The destruction of one of Earth’s most important ecosystems is now irreversibly underway. Amidst this, warming oceans create stronger, slower storms that rip trails of death and destruction across communities worldwide. These storms are paired with rising sea levels, the result of rapid glacial melt that threatens to drown entire cities. On Friday, melting glaciers in the Himalayas caused torrential floods that wiped an entire town in Nepal off the map.
Changing weather patterns further weaken the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current (AMOC), a network of oceanic currents vital to moderating our world’s climate. Britain, in particular, continues to experience colder and colder winters as a result of harm to the AMOC. Within the century, models predict the region to become close to that of Scandinavia, with winters being up to 5°C colder. Worse yet, changing climates and human neglect have created a new mass extinction event, with countless species dying at unimaginable rates.
Current worldwide climate policies have us reaching 2.8°C of warming by the end of the century. At this rate, we barely have an 8% chance of staying under 2°C. So catastrophic is this that it will expose over half of the world’s population to extreme heat. In our equatorial band, where rising temperatures are paired with increased humidity, the worst estimates promise a grim fate: a future where simply moving around outside could be lethal. Heat is already killing us– in the sugar cane region of El Salvador, rising temperatures have led to as much as one-fifth of the population contracting chronic kidney disease due to dehydration. Without expensive treatment, life expectancy is mere weeks. As temperatures continue to rise, these problems will spread beyond the equatorial region. In the United States, chronic kidney disease cases are already increasing, although the leading cause remains diabetes.
The heat issue persists beyond direct harm to the human body. Rising global temperatures have led to shifting climates for dangerous pathogens, allowing them to spread further and faster. Already, the formerly tropical West Nile Virus has become a persistent issue in Connecticut’s summer months – something unheard of prior to 1999. How long will it take, one must wonder, until other tropical diseases come to haunt the Northern hemisphere? Malaria has already occurred locally in Florida – how long until dengue joins it? How long until they reach the rest of the world?
No matter the issue, rising temperatures now pose serious threats. Increased heat means decreased food production for a growing population– an issue we still don’t have an effective solution to. Planting further north won’t work, since the soil there, even if it warms, will not be fertile enough to support the growing needs of the billions of people that inhabit our planet. A study by climatologist David Battisti from the University of Washington found that by the year 2100, there is a 90% chance that over three billion climate refugees will be forced to relocate to avoid starving in soon-to-be infertile environments. The fate is already rapidly approaching– climate delegates from Iraq at COP30 have announced that in the next two decades, half of Baghadad’s farmland will have degraded beyond use.
The consequences of our loss are inescapable. That does not, however, mean we should stop fighting. Even if our world is irreversibly changed, we can still battle for the chance to survive, albeit in a crippled state. To limit overshoot and return to 1.5°C by 2100, emissions would need to fall 26% by 2030 and 46% by 2035 compared to 2019 levels. This rapid change will be hard, and in fact may not be possible with the current state of global politics. But every tenth of a degree prevented from being added to our atmosphere means fewer deaths in the next heat wave; fewer refugees forced to flee from failed harvests; fewer communities swallowed whole by glacial melt. We may have missed our chance to avoid an era of human-made apocalypse, but we have not lost our ability to fight to save as many lives as possible in it.
We can no longer consider the fight for our world to be about the preservation of a clean, untouched earth. That ship has sailed. Instead, we must now work to limit the lives that will be irreversibly changed and lost at the hands of our emissions. Acting now is to choose between regional food shortages or mass famine; millions of climate refugees or billions. It is an unfathomable choice, but one that will need to be made for the sake of our future.
If we act now, we still have a seat at the table to determine the consequences of our failure. Rapidly phasing out fossil fuels, doubling down on stronger global agreements, providing more efficient climate relief: none of these steps will change the past. They can, however, shape the future into one where people can still build a life. We may not be able to return to what we had, but we can still choose to fight for what’s left. Our choice will define the lives of billions.