Vox Sentences - The climate crisis, in context

Monday, November 27, 2023

Hi everyone,

The first piece of news: You have a new Sentences writer! My name is Dylan Scott and I have covered health care at Vox for the past six years. I’ll be with you here through the holidays. You can reach me at dylan.scott@vox.com with tips, comments, and recipes.

Let’s get into it. 

UP FIRST: The state of the climate crisis

CATCH UP: The Israel-Hamas truce gets an extension

The real climate breakthroughs aren't at COP28

Karlotta Freier for Vox

As world leaders meet in Dubai for the annual Conference of Parties (COP) climate summit, the planet is leaning further and further over the precipice. This year is set to be the hottest year ever recorded. Wildfires, floods, and deadly storms continue to wreak havoc across the world.

But, as Vox climate editor Paige Vega writes in her introduction to a new editorial series, the world’s nations are “on the cusp of blowing past” their long-held target for curbing the Earth’s warming. The planet is cascading toward an uncertain and unprecedented future, and recent catastrophes may be but a preview of what is to come.

This year’s COP28 will earn a batch of headlines, but conferences such as these often don’t amount to much. President Joe Biden will not attend, as the Israel-Hamas war occupies the administration’s attention. (Some senior US officials will still be there, of course.) The United Arab Emirates is reportedly using the diplomatic get-together to sell its oil to other countries.

The official agenda is to review the world’s progress in slowing climate change and to figure out ways to improve. But based on a United Nations report released a few months ago, the attendees will be faced with the fact that we collectively continue to fall short:

• The planet is on pace for record-setting warmth. Some models project that, in 2023, the Earth will for the first time experience average temperatures 1.5 degrees Celsius higher than average temperatures back when temperature recording began in the 1800s.
• The 2015 Paris climate agreement signed by most of the world had set the explicit goal of preventing the planet’s temperature from exceeding that threshold. It was viewed as a realistic goal at the time, which helped induce a political consensus, and experts said that the consequences of the changing climate would likely be more manageable if the temperature were kept to those levels.
• Eight years later, the world appears approaching failure. (To be clear, the Paris Agreement technically calls for not breaching 1.5°C over an accumulated 10-year average, so this year’s milestone would not in and of itself qualify as a breach. But the trajectory is not good.)
• Scientists believe global emissions would need to fall 43 percent by 2030 in order to keep warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius through 2100. But as of now, the world is actually on track to increase its emissions output in the years to come.
• The 1.5-degree threshold doesn’t represent a magic number between apocalypse and utopia; it’s more a diplomatically palatable goal. But any increase in temperature is going to mean more wildfires like those in Maui this year and more record-setting storms like Tropical Storm Otis.
• We don’t know exactly what will happen if the planet’s temperature exceeds 2 or 3 percent of pre-industrial times, but we know it’ll be bad: “This would take the climate outside of the range of observations which have been made over the last several hundred thousand years,” one climate scientist wrote in an influential 1975 paper.

Read the rest of Umair Irfan’s explainer on the 1.5-degree threshold here. If you need help decoding the COP28 announcements, Rebecca Leber has a breakdown of the five key phrases we non-bureaucrats need to know to follow along. More stories will follow this week on how communities ranging from indigenous Mexicans to the people who live in the mining towns of Appalachia are forging their own path toward a better climate future.

A last-minute extension on the Israel-Hamas truce

Alexi J. Rosenfeld/Getty Images

Monday was going to be the last day of the Israel-Hamas ceasefire that led to hostage releases over the past four days. However, the two sides reached an agreement to extend the truce by another two days.

As part of the extension, Hamas has agreed to release 20 Israeli women and children, the Wall Street Journal reports, while the Israeli government has agreed to release 60 Palestinian prisoners. That 3-to-1 ratio matched the existing terms between the two sides.

• Under the terms of the previous ceasefire, Hamas had agreed to release 50 Israeli hostages, all women and children, and Israel had said it would release 150 Palestinian prisoners, likewise all women and minors. The sides had completed three exchanges as of Monday morning, but another was on hold as the parties reviewed lists of those to be released.
• Though fighting is paused in Gaza, violence erupted in the United States when three Palestinian men in their 20s were shot on Saturday in Burlington, Vermont. A 48-year-old white man was arrested for the shooting and he is expected to be arraigned on Monday. Two of the victims were reportedly wearing a traditional Palestinian scarf, and the shooting is being investigated as a hate crime.
• The weekend also saw a small scrum off the coast of Yemen. A ship linked to a prominent Israeli billionaire was briefly seized by armed assailants before being retaken with the aid of the United States military. The Houthi militant group in Yemen then fired a missile in the direction of a US Navy ship in the Gulf of Aden, though there were no injuries or damage.

• Nearly 50 countries are reporting measles outbreaks this year, three times the number that experienced an outbreak in 2020. More than 130,000 children died from measles in 2022, a 43 percent increase from the year before; this year could see another spike. A dozen countries have the polio virus circulating. Experts warn these are the deadly consequences of the world falling behind in childhood vaccinations during the pandemic. [New York Times]
• New Zealand’s new government is planning to reverse the country’s world-leading “generational” smoking ban. The measure, which passed last year, would have banned the sale of cigarettes to anyone who was born after 2008; it was projected to save up to 5,000 lives annually. [BBC]
• America’s cost-of-living squeeze, quantified. It now costs US families nearly $120 for a set of household goods that would have cost them $100 a few years ago. As the political world ponders why American voters remain so frustrated with a “good” economy, this may give us a clue. [Bloomberg]

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