Season 4: Episode 1

1.5 to Stay Alive

After decades of scientific study and political wrangling the world has agreed—at least on paper—that 1.5C of heating must be the upper limit of our impact on the climate system. How could something that sounds so small matter so much?

This is Threshold Season 4: “Time to 1.5.” In this episode, we take you inside the scientific and political origin story of 1.5C, from the holocene to the halls of COP26 in Glasgow. 

Guests

Read More

• Who Has The Most Historical Responsibility for Climate Change? — The New York Times

• Stop Telling Kids They'll Die From Climate Change — Wired

• To Build a Beautiful World, You First Have to Imagine It — The Nation

• What is the Paris Agreement? — Live Science

• Johan Rockström: ‘We need bankers as well as activists… we have 10 years to cut emissions by half’ — The Guardian

• Global Carbon Atlas — A scientific program that aims to draw a complete picture of the carbon cycle on planet Earth

Credits

Transcript

[00:00] INTRODUCTION

AMY: Think about something you love. A person. A place. Your town. Your country. Your farm. Your neighborhood. Zoom in on one specific face.

ALI: Hey, ahm, it's me…

AUDREY: If you're happy and you know it clap your hands...

AMY: Your friend. Your sister. Your cat. Your kid. Your mom. Think about how you feel when you're in that place you love. Think about what it's like to look into the eyes of that special person, and see them looking back at you.

ADDIE: Hi Mommy! (giggle)

AMY: And now imagine that someone comes to you out of the blue with a message. “There's danger ahead,” they say. “Everyone and everything you love is at risk.

MUSIC

AMY: Some of the pain ahead can't be avoided. But if you act quickly and decisively enough, you can prevent the worst. You can make the coming danger less dangerous. You can make it shorter, and less frightening. You can help everyone you love suffer less. But you have to act now. This is not a metaphor. This is our reality.

MUSIC

AMY: The threat is a global climate system thrown into chaos. Some of that danger is already upon us. But it could get much worse, or, eventually, better. And all of us who happen to be alive right now are choosing between those two options.

ALOK SHARMA: So much rests on the decisions that we collectively take today.

AMY: After decades of scientific study and political wrangling the world has agreed—at least on paper—that one-point-five degrees of heating must be the upper limit of our impact on the climate system. One-and-a-half degrees Celsius of global heating over pre-industrial temperatures, and no more.

TINA STEGE: One-point-five is non-negotiable. The safety of my children and yours hangs in the balance.

AMY: We've already warmed the planet around one-point-two degrees Celsius on average, and more warming is baked in. So we are living through the last remaining years before we hit the line that we have decided not to cross.

KERIAKO TOBIKO: One-point-five is not a statistic. It is a matter of life and death.

AMY: The trick here is that there's a time lag. A gap between cause and effect. The climate is a huge, unwieldy ship, it can't be turned at the last minute. We can't wait to hit one-and-a-half degrees before we act. The responsibility for preventing warming beyond that rests with us, right now.

TWILA MOON: What we do is the determinant.

AMY: We're on track to reach one-point-five degrees and keep right on going, to two-point-four degrees of heating, or more. If we want to change that story, and limit warming to one-point-five, we don't have much time left. How much time? No one can say for sure, but based on current emissions trajectories, we have until roughly 2029. We're releasing this in early 2022, so let's call it seven-ish years. Maybe a little more, maybe a little less. But approximately the time between kindergarten and middle school. Slightly longer than one U.S. Senate term. The average lifespan of a guinea pig.

CHRISTIANA FIGUERES: We now have one last chance to truly change our course. This is the decisive decade in the history of humankind. That may sound like an exaggeration, but it's not.

AMY: This all sounds very scary, I know. And it is. Our situation is dire. But think about it this way: we don't always get advance warning for human suffering, let alone instructions on how to reduce it. With climate, we do. We can see the danger coming toward us, and we have the power to lessen the pain for everything and everyone we love. Including ourselves. Will we choose to do that? And do it fast enough? Welcome to Threshold, I'm Amy Martin, and this is season four: Time to 1.5.

MUSIC: THRESHOLD THEME

“At 1.2 we’re starting to feel the pain. At 1.5 there will be more pain, and beyond two, I would strongly advise us not to go.

We are at a critical point. We need to get emissions to zero now, otherwise, things are going to be much worse.

Everybody’s doing a little bit, little bit doesn’t count. Are they doing enough to stay below 1.5.

So we’re in uncharted territory, and we have to embrace it.”

[05:45] SEGMENT A

ALOK SHARMA: Dear delegates, dear friends, good afternoon….

AMY: I'm at the global climate talks in Glasgow, Scotland in November 2021. The Threshold team came to this UN conference, known as COP26, to learn about how the world is working together—sort of—to put the brakes on the climate crisis. Representatives from almost every country in the world are in a cavernous room, sitting behind their microphones in long rows. U.S. climate envoy John Kerry is just a few seats away from me, I can see his leg bouncing in agitation. As you can imagine, it's hard to get everyone in this room to agree on anything. But one concept that almost everyone seems to be on board with is keeping one-point-five alive. Here's the representative from Costa Rica:

COSTA RICA: For Costa Rica all decisions and all the work here in Glasgow should be framed to keep this 1.5 alive.

AMY: And from the Marshall Islands:

MARSHALL ISLANDS: ...to get us on the trajectory to 1.5 that is the lifeline for my country. And I argue it's the lifeline for everyone in every country.

AMY: And from the United States:

UNITED STATES: We have to reduce emissions by 45% in the next ten years in order to keep 1.5 degrees alive.

AMY: And from Grenada:

GRENADA: Colleagues, the world is watching and expects us to do the right thing. And that is to close this COP with a truly ambitious outcome that keeps 1.5 alive. We cannot let them down. This is our last real chance.

AMY: So, what is the number—one-point-five—all about? What does everyone mean when they say we have to keep one-point-five alive? Well that story begins with a simple problem: the need for a goal. Back in the early 1990s, when countries first came together to start working on climate through the United Nations, they pledged to keep greenhouse gas emissions—quote—“at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.” Anthropogenic means human-caused. So that was the best we could come up with at the time: we were going to limit human-caused interference to a non-dangerous level. But what was that level? How much interference with the climate was too much? How could that be quantified, so the whole world has something to work toward, and work to avoid? The process of answering those questions was both scientific and political. And I mean political in the broadest sense of the word — the complicated process of groups of humans trying to make decisions together. We're going to trace both threads of the one-point-five origin story in this episode, starting with the question of how a number that sounds so small could matter so much.

JOHAN: We cannot negotiate with nature, we cannot negotiate with the planet.

AMY: Johan Rockström [YOU-ahn ROCK-strum] will be our guide through the scientific side of the one-point-five story. He's a professor of Earth systems science at the University of Potsdam, in Germany. He's originally from Sweden, and he consults with business and government leaders around the world on climate. And Johan says we've already heated up the planet close to one-point-two degrees Celsius. That's average global temperatures—some places, like the Arctic and many parts of Africa, are much hotter already.

JOHAN: So one-point-two is a lot that we've done already now, and going to one-point-five would be very dramatic.

AMY: Johan knows it can be hard for people to get why they should care about something that sounds as small as one-and-a-half degrees Celsius, or two-point-seven degrees Fahrenheit, of warming. But Johan says from a climate perspective it really matters. And to understand why, he says it helps to know that the Earth has three basic steady states, three versions of climate equilibrium. The first is called Snowball Earth, which is like an ice age on steroids, where the whole planet is completely frozen. The second is called Hothouse Earth, with a lot of carbon dioxide in the air, no ice left anywhere, extremely high seas, and large portions of the planet most likely uninhabitable for humans. So those are the two extremes.

JOHAN: And then in the middle, you have this oscillation, with a planet that has periods of ice age and shorter interglacials.

AMY: This middle ground is where we are now, fluctuating between ice ages and slightly warmer periods called interglacials.

JOHAN: And it is this interglacial state that we have more and more evidence is the only state that, as far as we know, can support the modern world as we know it.

AMY: Our current interglacial period is called the Holocene. It started about 12 thousand years ago.

JOHAN: We have been around on Earth as humans, as fully fledged modern humans, perhaps some 200 thousand years. Now, we've been largely hunters and gatherers during almost all that time.

AMY: So picture your distant ancestors running around the planet for around two hundred thousand years. They have all of the intellectual firepower that we have now. Theoretically, they could have invented writing or started building pyramids at any point. But they didn't.

JOHAN: Until we leave the last ice age and enter the last twelve thousand years interglacial, the Holocene. And that's where we have the take off point for civilizations as we know it.

MUSIC

AMY: And here's where we can start to see how seemingly small temperature changes can have a big impact on humanity. For most of the Holocene the global mean temperature was around 14 degrees Celsius, or 57-ish degrees Fahrenheit. Scientists know this through studying chemical signatures left in ancient sediments, ice cores, and fossils. So the Holocene has been a remarkably stable period in terms of climate. And people put that stability to good use.

JOHAN: When we enter the Holocene, that's when we domesticate animals and plants and start developing agriculture and sedentary communities. That has been, we know, the very prerequisite for civilizational development and the modern world as we know it.

AMY: And now for the punchline here. Guess how much average global temperatures changed during this period.

JOHAN: The Holocene, the only state that we've been able to develop civilizations in, has a maximum range for the global mean temperature or plus or minus one degrees Celsius. So the planet never exceeds plus one.

AMY: But now it has because of us. And we can already see a disrupted climate beginning to disrupt human societies.

MUSIC

AMY: This is a key concept that I hadn't really thought about that much before I started reporting on climate: the importance of stability for human development. On the individual level, it's easy to see. A kid growing up in a relatively peaceful home has a better chance of doing well in school than a kid who is forced to constantly deal with chaos and upheaval. Stability means kids can spend more of their internal resources on their own growth, instead of warding off danger or worrying about the next unwelcome surprise. But the same could be true for us at the civilization level. Maybe it's only when have some predictability around our basic resources—food, water, shelter—that we can start to focus on things other than survival. Johan says that's what seems to have happened around 10,000 years ago.

JOHAN: We domesticate animals and plants largely simultaneously on different continents. So something very special happened with planet Earth eight to ten thousand years ago when we could benefit from tremendous harmony in our rainy seasons and our growing seasons and the stability of our climate. It made sense to to sow and harvest because we could get the benefit from that investment basically each year. So that is basically, I think, a very strong piece of the puzzle here, that the Holocene is so, so necessary for us.

AMY: So throughout the last 10,000 years or so, average global temperatures fluctuated around the 14 degrees Celsius mark. But not by much. The Earth never got more than one degree colder or hotter than that. Until people started burning massive amounts of fossil fuels, releasing heat-trapping gases into the air.

JOHAN: So we have already crashed through the warmest temperature on Earth since we left the last Ice Age. We've already gone through. So we are de facto already outside of the Holocene range.

AMY: One thing that's really important to understand here is that climate is not binary. It's on a spectrum. So it's not like if we hit one-point-six degrees, we suddenly wake up to an utterly changed world.

JOHAN: It's not an escarpment where we just abruptly collapse. But the risk is that things start gradually and unstoppably moving in the wrong direction.

AMY: So think of global heating like turning the knob on a stove, not flipping a light switch. Changes are incremental. But as Johan said, even at one-and-a-half degrees of warming, we're already far outside of what would be happening naturally if we hadn't started bingeing on fossil fuels around 200 years ago.

JOHAN: I mean, if if we would just think of this. The IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the science panel of the UN shows that if we continue burning fossil fuels as today, we may reach between three and four degrees Celsius warming by the end of this century. And if you check that point what would that correspond to in time if you would wind that back in geological history? Well, it would actually wind back the climate clock to the planet, as we had at roughly 10 million years ago.

AMY: Wow.

JOHAN: 10 million years ago. So in my mind, that sentence is enough to say how how can there be one skeptic in this in this world? I mean, I mean, it's never happened before, as far as we know geologically, that anything has changed so fast. It's been changing, I can assure you, but never at that rate and never at that scale.

AMY: Johan says if we manage to keep temperature rise to one-and-a-half degrees, and no more, we might, just barely, be able to hold on to something like the Holocene. But we can't say for sure, because of this whole “climate is on a spectrum” thing. Or maybe a better way to think of climate is as a complex network of processes, and each of them is on a spectrum. And no one knows for sure where the trip wires are—how and when we might trigger interactions between the planets' systems that could send us into truly terrifying territory. Maybe even the Hothouse Earth scenario, which would fundamentally alter all life on the planet. A huge proportion of species would go extinct, and human civilizations would crumble. We might not die out as a species, but we would be radically changed. And it would hurt.

JOHAN: And as you can imagine, this is like the grand quest, where is that tipping point where we are at risk of moving from a Holocene state that can support us towards gliding towards a hothouse? And the truth is, we do not know where that point is.

AMY: Let's not find out.

JOHAN: Let's not find out. I mean, we cannot experiment with our home because we don't have, you know, we don't have an alternative.

MUSIC

AMY: But one thing we do know is that once we hit a tipping point, it's next to impossible to un-tip it. That's because of the time lag I mentioned earlier: this gap between cause and effect in the climate system. Johan thinks about this in terms of commitment time and impact time.

JOHAN: And impact time is that is the moment when things blow up. Meaning when can we expect six meter sea level rise? When can we expect the Greenland ice sheet to melt? When can we expect the collapse of the coral reef systems?

AMY: Impact time gets a lot of attention. When will we lose all the sea ice? When does Miami become uninhabitable? When do these various climate bombs explode? But Johan thinks we should be paying a lot more attention to commitment time, because that's the point at which we've set the course that will inevitably lead to those outcomes. When we've assembled the bomb and set the timer, with no way to turn it off.

JOHAN: And what we find in science increasingly is that the commitment time for many of these occurrences is in the next 10 years. We have to avoid pressing the buttons. And that is about commitment time. It's not about impact time. It's commitment time.

AMY: So I've got some good news and some bad news for you. Let's start with the bad. It's quite likely that we've already moved through the commitment time for hitting one-point-five degrees in the future. That damage has been done. But the good news is that we can still influence the crucial question of what happens after that. Are we going to reach one-point-five degrees and keep on going, continuing to warm the world? Or will we graze the one-point-five mark and then start bending the temperature curve back down? The difference between these two options is vast. And that's what we're deciding right now, and over the next 7-ish years. It's like we have a lit stick of dynamite in our own living room, and we're watching the flame move closer and closer to the explosives. But we haven't decided whether or not to put it out. It's an extremely dangerous situation, but our choices have a huge impact on whether or not that danger gets amplified or diffused.

AMY: This might sound bizarre in such a dark time, honestly, but I actually find great hope in that, like we know we haven't pushed the button yet. We're really close, but we haven't. Like we actually still have time to not do that.

JOHAN: That is correct. And that's that's a very good way to put it, that as far as we know today, at one point two, we're starting to feel the pain. At one point five, there will be more pain. But as far as we know, we will not cross irreversible tipping points. It won't be a pressure of the on buttons. So if we can hold the one-point-five line, we will have a higher frequency of extreme events. We will have adaptation challenges, but at least we will still be within a manageable Holocene-like planet. And it's between one point five and two that it starts getting scary. And beyond two, I would strongly advise us not to go.

AMY: The reality is, no amount of tinkering with our climate is safe. So what we're really talking about here is how much risk we're willing to live with as we transition off of fossil fuels. That's what one-point-five degrees is, essentially: a mutually agreed-upon level of danger. And this is where the Earth science and the social science really start to weave together. Because the level of danger you're willing to accept has a lot to do with who you are, and where you live.

ADELLE: Between one and a half degrees and two degrees. We can see islands underwater.

AMY: We'll have more after this short break.

Break

[22:49] SEGMENT B

AMY: Welcome back to Threshold, I'm Amy Martin, and in this episode we're trying to understand how the world landed on one-point-five degrees as our global climate goal. Before the break, we spent some time on the physical science. Now for the politics.

SOUND: people chanting during an outdoor protest

AMY: I'm standing in a crowd of tens of thousands of people in Glasgow, Scotland. They've gathered to try to push world leaders to take meaningful action at the UN Climate Conference.

PROTEST: What do we want? Climate justice! When do we want it? Now!

AMY: This is just one of dozens of times I heard the words “climate justice” during the two weeks of the conference. And it wasn't only at protests. This phrase is all over the climate discourse. But I think it's possible that some people hear it, and think: wait, isn't climate a science problem? How is it a justice issue? The truth is it's both, and the justice part can be traced back to the simple fact that the climate crisis was created by people, and it was not created equally. Some countries have done a lot more to cause the problem than others. And climate damage doesn't land equally either. Many of the people and places that are feeling the impacts of climate change first and hardest did the least to cause it. One of those places is Bangladesh.

SALEEM: Well, Bangladesh is very much a global poster child for the impacts of climate change.

AMY: Dr. Saleemul Huq is the director of the International Center for Climate Change and Development at the Independent University Bangladesh (BAHN-glah-desh).

SALEEM: You're free to call me Saleem, that's my first name.

AMY: The first time I talked to Saleem was in August of 2021. I was in the U.S., he was in the capital of Bangladesh, Dhaka [TAH-kah, soft “t” sound at the beginning], and you can hear the sounds of the traffic out his office window while we talked.

SALEEM: We are a poor, very densely populated country living on the delta of two of the world's biggest rivers, the Ganges and the Brahmaputra, which regularly flood. And we also suffer from cyclones that come in regularly from the Bay of Bengal and affect the coastal population of the country.

AMY: Saleem says from where he sits, the question of what the global climate goal should be has never felt abstract or academic. He's a biologist, and he has served as a lead author on multiple UN scientific reports.

SALEEM: We've known for quite a long time now that we are vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, and we've been investing in improving our ability to cope with those impacts of climate change, and also advocating at the global level for countries that are responsible for causing the problem to reduce their emissions so that we don't have a much bigger problem than we otherwise might have.

MUSIc

AMY: When Saleem says he wants the countries responsible for causing the problem to reduce their emissions, this is what he's referring to: according to the UN Environment Programme, the G20 nations—that's 20 of the world's biggest economies—are responsible for 78% of cumulative global greenhouse gas emissions. In rough terms, that means ten percent of countries have done almost 80% of the damage. That's a statistic that's worth hanging on to, because it informs everything about climate. I mean, we all know how annoying it can be to have to clean up our own messes. But to be forced to deal with a mess someone else has made that's spilling out onto you....that's a whole 'nother thing entirely. And that's what's happening in Bangladesh. The average Bangladeshi burns a tiny fraction of the carbon that the average American burns every year. But the impacts of climate change are hitting the country very hard. As Saleem said, Bangladesh is a densely populated country, with about 165 million people live there, about half the population of the United States, living in an area roughly the size of the state of Illinois. And as the climate warms, and sea levels rise, all of those people have less and less land to live on. The coastal areas of Bangladesh are getting swallowed up by the sea, and without a dramatic reduction in global emissions soon, millions of people will be forced to relocate.

SALEEM: If that happens, which we hope it won't happen, it can still be prevented, then we are talking about millions of people being displaced from the low lying coastal area of the country. The order of magnitude of numbers of these climate refugees or migrants, it's about 10 million over the next decade or two. We are certainly not prepared for that, but we are thinking about what we can do and how we can prepare for that.

AMY: Saleem has been trying to help his country prepare for decades. He's attended every single one of the global climate conferences, starting way back in 1995.

SALEEM: So I'm one of the few people who's been to every single one of the twenty five conferences of parties that have been held so far. I should point out, I don't go as a negotiator. I'm a researcher. I'm an academic. I'm a professor. I go as an observer.

AMY: So Saleem has had a front-row seat to this question of what the global climate goal should be from the beginning. There was the fuzzy objective back in the '90s of “preventing dangerous anthropogenic interference.” But to figure out what “dangerous interference” actually meant in scientific terms and then get the whole world to agree to that was no simple task. It took years. And during that time, as studies were run and climate conferences were held, two degrees emerged as the target. Limiting global heating to two degrees above pre-industrial levels. That was never officially decreed or anything, but in 2015, as the world headed to the Paris climate conference, two degrees was the number on many peoples' lips. There was just one problem. Some people, including Saleem, said that was the wrong goal.

SALEEM: The vulnerable countries came together and they argue that two degrees is no longer a safe threshold. The argument was that it's safe for many who are better off, but it's not safe for the poorest people on the planet, and we're talking hundreds of millions of the poorest people on the planet. They will not be safe under two degrees. In order to make them safe, we have to lower the threshold to one point five degrees.

AMY: Saleem says scientists and policy-makers from Bangladesh had been pushing to make one-point-five the goal for over a decade already. And they weren't alone.

ADELLE: We are at a critical point. We need to get emissions to zero now, otherwise things are going to be much worse in the future.

AMY: Dr. Adelle Thomas is a Senior Fellow at the Climate Change Research Center at the University of the Bahamas, and a senior research associate with Climate Analytics, a global think tank. Her area of expertise is geography, and like Saleem, she has been a lead author on multiple UN scientific reports.

ADELLE: At one and a half degrees, it's going to be worse than it is now. But at that level of warming, we still have a shot to survive. At two degrees Celsius, it becomes much more difficult for us to envision a future for many of our islands.

AMY: The Bahamas is part of a group of countries known as “small island developing states” or SIDS. Think Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Jamaica. Adelle says scientists living and working on these islands have been seeing the impacts of climate change for a long time. And not only sea level rise. They're also dealing with drought and many other problems.

ADELLE: Our marine systems, which are so incredibly important for us, are absolutely at risk at two degrees Celsius. So coral reefs. One and a half degrees, there's still a chance of coral reefs being able to survive. At two degrees, 99% of coral reefs are expected to die.

MUSIC

ADELLE: So there is a significant, significant difference in the risks that we face at one and a half or two degrees, which is why SIDS came up with this whole “one-point-five to stay alive” slogan that they use at the negotiations to really try to bring across how important it is for us to limit temperatures to one and a half degrees.

AMY: One point five to stay alive. This became the rallying cry of small island developing states and dozens of other countries that could see the writing on the sea wall. Even one degree of warming put them at enormous risk. Two degrees was unthinkable.

ADELLE: For low lying places like the Bahamas, the difference between one and a half and two degrees is your islands will be underwater.

AMY: So it's existence.

ADELLE: Yes. The difference between one and a half and two is the existence of an island.

AMY: Of a whole nation, of people's homes, of everything they've ever known and their whole history, and…

ADELLE: Yes. Yes. So this is why we have to be so vocal and, you know, not passive because our existence is at risk. And I think that if it was any other country whose existence was at risk, they would be just as adamant about us limiting temperatures to one-point-five.

MUSIC

AMY: A few years ago, while reporting for season two of our show, I spent time on the island community of Shishmaref, Alaska, which is also threatened by climate change. And while I was talking to Adelle and Saleem, faces of the people I met there were flashing through my mind. Kids who were playing a few yards from the sea wall. Elders pointing out into the ocean, telling me what the place looked like a few decades ago. Where I saw nothing but waves, they saw all these drowned ghosts. Places, and memories, buried by the sea. Shishmaref and dozens of other coastal Alaskan communities are facing the same existential crises Adelle is talking about in the Bahamas.when I left Alaska, and tried to explain the situation in Shishmaref, more than one person said, well, you know, winners and losers. If their island is getting washed away, I guess they can't live there anymore. That's really sad, but I'm not really sure it's my problem.” I asked Adelle how she responds to that line of thinking.

ADELLE: I think people that say winners and losers often are the winners because they can't imagine what it would be like to be a loser. If you were faced with the prospect of not having a home, then I think your mentality would be much different and you would be able to see why it's such a big deal.

MUSIC

ADELLE: So if you yourself could imagine that you no longer have a country and you would be at the whim of whoever wants to take you in. When we see the attitudes towards immigrants currently. Imagine now we have complete countries where no one can live and those people must move somewhere else. Imagine yourself as that person. And can you still say there are winners and losers and the losers just have to figure it out? I think people should try to be much more empathetic and put themselves in a situation of not having anything and, and see that if it's still possible for us to limit temperatures to one point five, then we should be doing everything possible to do that.

AMY: So why not do that? If holding warming to one-point-five degrees means preventing entire countries from getting wiped off the map and protecting millions of people from becoming homeless, if it means having some chance of maintaining the Holocene-like climate that allowed us to flourish, why not aim for that? Why was two degrees the de facto goal back in 2015, before the Paris climate conference? To answer that, we have to return to the 10 percent of the countries who have created 80% of the problem. Setting the global goal at one-point-five versus two degrees meant those countries would have to make more changes, faster. To put it very simply, aiming for one-point-five is harder than aiming for two. So the major emitters strongly resisted as long as they could.

SALEEM: Going into Paris, the United States, China, they were all against it. They were not going to agree.

AMY: In fact, Saleem says being against one-point-five was almost the only thing the U.S. and China agreed on at the start of the Paris conference.

SALEEM: And I'll give you a rough framing of how these private conversations would go, particularly with countries like the US and Germany and the U.K. and so on. In private, they would say, don't ask us to agree to one point five,it's just too difficult. It's going to be very, very difficult for us to do that. Two degrees is difficult enough. One point five is even more difficult. And and so it's going to be extremely hard for us to sell it or agree to it. To which our answer was, it may be difficult, but it's not impossible. And as long as it's possible you have to do it.

MUSIC

AMY: Saleem says representatives of the poorer and more vulnerable countries came into Paris prepared to press harder than they ever had before. They knew it was now or never—they had to get the one-point-five goal written into the agreement if it was ever going to have a chance of being realized. He says that led to a lot of intense conversations.

AMY: When you say that there was a lot of arm twisting and backdoor conversations. I mean, were you privy to any of those that were you seeing somebody like, you know, I'm from the Marshall Islands and you've got to listen to me? Like is it that personal?

SALEEM: Very much so. Very, very personal.

AMY: It was personal, he says, because the stakes are so personal. And so incredibly high.

SALEEM: You cannot have a heads of all the governments of the world meeting and effectively saying that we find it too difficult to help the poorest people on the planet. So you guys are on your own, you're not going to survive and we are not going to do anything to help you. We will help the other five, six billion people who are better off to help them survive climate change, but we are writing you off. You, you the small island states, you the poor, vulnerable developing countries and people. Sorry, we are not going to help you. And that's an impossible thing for them to say.

MUSIC

AMY: But that is in fact what they were saying. Even if they didn't want to say it in public. So in Paris, thousands of scientists, political leaders, negotiators, and activists came together to force the issue. Representatives from the small island developing states, especially the Marshall Islands, and other parts of the developing world took a leading role. They had a unified message: two degrees is not good enough. We have to aim for one-point-five. They argued in the side corridors. They protested outside the conference grounds. They carried signs saying “1.5 to Stay Alive.” But Saleem says throughout the whole two weeks of the conference, it was not clear what would happen.

FABIUS: It is my deep conviction that we have come up with an ambitious and balanced agreement…

AMY: This is Laurent Fabius [LOH-rawn fah-bee-OOZ (double check this)], speaking through an interpreter at the Paris Climate Conference. Fabius was France's minister for foreign affairs at that time, and he was also the conference president. This recording is from a speech he gave on December 12, 2015, the 13th day of what was supposed to be a 12-day conference, with all the global delegates gathered in a big hall.

FABIUS: We need to show the world that our collective effort is worth more than the sum of our individual actions.

AMY: The battle over one-point-five versus two degrees was just one of many issues they'd been struggling to address at the conference. There had been tons of drama. Accusations of subterfuge. Unlikely alliances. Sub-deals and side deals and multiple all-nighters. And now, on the last day, delegates have a final draft of the agreement in their hands. Fabius is essentially giving them a pep talk before they go off to scrutinize it, and decide whether or not to approve it.

FABIUS: This text, the one that we have built together, our text, is the best possible balance.

AMY: Fabius knows there are a lot of people in that room who are not happy. Some think the agreement goes too far, some say it isn't nearly strong enough. So he's basically begging everyone to keep moving forward, despite their differences.

FABIUS: Today, we are close to the final outcome. If adopted, this text will mark a historic turning point.It confirms our key objective. The objective that is vital. That of continuing to have a mean temperature well below two degrees and to endeavor to limit that increase to one-point-five degrees. (applause)

AMY: And finally, later that day, it happened.

SOUND CLIP: Fabius speaking in French, gavel thump, people cheering

AMY: The Paris Climate Agreement was accepted.

SALEEM: I was there. I was in the room when that happened.

AMY: What was it like?

SALEEM: Well, we are all on our feet, you know, clapping like crazy, because it was a huge achievement.

AMY: I mean, I would have been bawling. Were you crying when the gavel came down?

SALEEM: I was very emotional. Very emotional.

AMY: With the signing of the Paris Agreement, the world had finally united around a central climate goal. And limiting warming to no more than one-point-five degrees was part of it. The language wasn't as robust as many people wanted; one-point-five was included as an aspiration, not a firm commitment. But still, it was a major step forward.

SALEEM: We did everything we could do to persuade other countries to come on board. And one by one by one by one, they came on board. They supported us.

AMY: And since Paris, the case for making one-point-five the global goal has only grown stronger. More science has come out making it even clearer that two degrees of heating is dangerously high. By insisting on protection for their own communities, the “one-point-five to stay alive” crowd was actually protecting all of us.

SALEEM: To me, that is really the essence of whatever we want to do to tackle climate change. It's the one point five, it's the iconic number that everybody now has to be judged by. And we can judge countries on whether they're doing enough or not to stay below one point five. We can judge companies, whether they're doing enough, we can judge cities, whether they're doing enough. This is now the measure of testing the seriousness of actions. Everybody is doing a little bit, little bit doesn't count. Are they doing enough? And how do you define enough? Are they doing enough to stay below one point five?

AMY: The more I learn about climate change, the more I believe that the heart of this problem is conceptual. We understand the core scientific processes at work here. We know what we need to do: shift our economy away from coal, oil, and methane gas as quickly as we possibly can. That's difficult, but by no means impossible. What makes it feel next to impossible is our inability to imagine alternative realities. It's hard to visualize a modern, technologically advanced society that isn't powered by fossil fuels. It's hard to conceive of what life would actually be like in a perpetually chaotic climate, spiraling toward a Hothouse Earth. And it's very hard for people living in relative comfort—people like me—to imagine losing everything, and having no where to go, no one to turn to, no one who wants to take us in. But people who are already living closer to the edge can imagine it. And because they could imagine what more than one-and-a-half degrees of heating might mean for them, they rallied to prevent that. We're used to thinking of world leaders as the people with the most power. But with climate, the true world leaders might be the people with the least power, and the best imaginations.

CREDITS

LISTENER: I’m Claire from Charlotte, North Carolina. Reporting for this season of Threshold was funded by the Park Foundation, the High Stakes Foundation, The Pleiades Foundation, NewsMatch, the Llewellyn Foundation, and listeners. This work depends on people who believe in it and choose to support it. People like you. Join our community at thresholdpodcast.org.

AMY: This episode of Threshold was produced and reported by me, Amy Martin, with help from Nick Mott and Erika Janik. The music is by Todd Sickafoose. The rest of the Threshold team is Eva Kalea, Taliah Farnsworth, Caysi Simpson, and Deneen Wiske. Our intern is Melvin Zaid. Special thanks to Sara Sneath, Sally Deng, Maggy Contreras, Hana Carey, Dan Carreno, Luca Borghese, Julia Barry, Kara Cromwell, Katie deFusco, Caroline Kurtz, and Gabby Piamonte. Additional special thanks to our beloved home public radio station, Montana Public Radio, and also to Addie Terwilliger, Ali Solomon, Audrey Martin, Gaylen Wobeter, Matt Herlihy, and Michael Connor. In our next episode, join me for a guided tour of the atmosphere.