By Willy Blackmore | Word In Black
(WIB) – As fires torched the Los Angeles neighborhoods of the Pacific Palisades and Altadena — the idyllic foothill town that has long been home to a Black middle-class community — the Copernicus Climate Change Service released its annual report.
According to Service, one of the leading scientific organizations that track climate data, the average global temperature for 2024 was 1.6 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels — the first full year ever above the lower threshold that world governments agreed to limit warming in the Paris Agreement.
The report, like the fires, are both unprecedented and very worrying signs of things to come.
Another data point: in 2024, 568 Americans died (directly or indirectly) as a result of climate-related disasters in the United States.
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That stat, from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, is almost certainly less than the true number of lives lost. Heat-related deaths are notoriously undercounted — and extreme heat is the most deadly form of extreme weather, and particularly affects Black communities too.
But for those 568 people, many of whom died in Hurricane Helene, the rallying cry from the Paris climate summit in 2015 ended up being all too real: 1.5 to stay alive.
The slogan, chanted by climate activists and negotiators from low-lying island nations on the front lines of the climate crisis, helped establish a more ambitious goal for the landmark Paris Accords, to keep the average global temperature increase below 1.5 degrees Celsius. In 2024, we tipped past that tipping point for the first time ever.
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While one year of 1.5 degrees of warming doesn’t mean that the Paris Agreement goal is shot completely, “with the current rate of warming at more than 0.2°C per decade, the probability of breaching the 1.5°C target of the Paris Agreement within the 2030s is highly likely,” according to the Copernicus report. The average warming for 2023 and 2024 was 1.54 degrees C, according to the report.
Calculating the temperatures for everywhere, all across the planet, and comparing them to historical records dating back to 1850 is complicated work, and while Copernicus is a leading climate science organization, it is not the only one — and not all such organizations are arriving at the same tally after looking at the data from 2024. NOAA, for its part, landed on a number below the Paris threshold, 1.29 degrees C. But even at that lower temperature increase, NOAA scientists agree with Copernicus: 2024 was the hottest year ever recorded.
Although 2023 was below the 1.5-degree threshold, it was by no means an easy year when it came to climate-related disasters: heatwaves, which are so dangerous and often deadly for Black and Brown people, especially workers, baked many parts of the country for months on end. It’s a reminder that the climate crisis exists on a continuum, with the outcome becoming worse with every tenth of a degree of warming, whether it’s above or below 1.5 degrees C.
The effort to set the Paris Agreement goal at 1.5 degrees instead of 2 degrees C was made because, even a decade ago, it was already clear that the future was uncertain in places like the Marshall Islands or Vanuatu — small, low-lying Pacific island nations where even a seemingly slight rise in sea levels could all but erase.
The notion of 1.5 to stay alive can be applied then, too, for people living elsewhere who are less insulated by their socioeconomic position and the geography that often comes with it: Black and Brown Americans are on the front lines of the climate crisis in the United States and have the most to gain from making it the least bad it can possibly be.
But whether it was New Orleans during Katrina 20 years ago or Altadena right now — where the Eaton Fire will likely erase the Black community that has held on in the face of gentrification and the housing crisis — Black Americans have lost and continue to lose so much to the climate crisis.