Climate Emergency Forum Sep 20, 2026, report at DIY Hospice on a Heating Planet blog
"Earth, our world if we can even keep it, is characterized now by very high risks to the stability of the cryosphere, including the ice sheets of the Arctic, Greenland, and Western Antarctica, as well as mountain glaciers. Continued high heat increases their vulnerability, raises the likelihood of accelerated melting and consequential increasingly rapid sea level rise, intensifying extreme weather, including high impact heat waves and increasingly intense cyclones and essentially uncontainable wildfire, which directly threatens communities"
[KE: I searched a bit for more videos on YouTube about 1.5 C being overshot, and surprise surprise, there was a stream of vloggers saying 1.5 C is temporary, it'll pass, not that big a thing, literally. One robotic female sat in an easy chair and said elegantly, there is no need to worry, in several languages, creepy horror movie stuff. I'm not going to link those videos here, but we are surrounded by a massive propaganda machine that's lying. Why?]
video UN Admits: 1.5°C Is Gone Sep 20, 2026 Climate Emergency Forum
Transcript & w critical screen shots below:
"In diplomatic language we have now blown the political consensus guardrail of 1.5 degrees C. And less diplomatically, by their inexcusable dalliance and delay, the major governments and their fossil fueled patrons have now really led us to the brink."
23 Screen Shots at bottom
Herb: Hello, and welcome to another edition of the Climate Emergency Forum. I'm Herb Simmens, author of A Climate Vocabulary, Of the Future, and I will be your host today.
And today we're taking a close look at an extremely important new publication from the United Nations Environmental Program. It's called Governing Climate Overshoot, Pathways, Impacts, and Governance. And I suspect if you're listening to that title, you're probably shaking your head wondering what it says.
Like a lot of UN reports, it sounds sort of bureaucratic, but it's extremely important in terms of what it signifies. It's historic, actually, because it marks the first time that any UN agency, as far as we know, has formally acknowledged that the world is now in what's sometimes called temperature overshoot, above 1.5 degrees C over the pre-industrial temperatures the average temperatures around the planet, and will likely remain there or increasing for some period of time.
Despite the monumental implications of this finding for humanity and the planet, the report received little press attention. And that of course is not surprising because that's par for the course for almost every climate report. Most major outlets covered it for a day. And then as so often with climate warnings, it just disappeared from the news almost immediately to be replaced by the usual entertainment and trivia that characterizes our news today.
[And the illegal unnecessary War-ke]
And consistent with nearly every other major climate assessment, we have not seen any discernible, at least I haven't, increase in governmental action in response.
So
today we'll be discussing what the report concludes, what it recommends, and equally important, what it doesn't address, but arguably should have. Our goal is to give you a clear, honest, as we always do, comprehensive understanding of what it means for your future and the future of this planet.
As always, we encourage you to stay with us through the end of the program, when I'll present the Climate-3, three of the most important climate stories of the past week each in one minute or less. We very much appreciate your support of the Climate Emergency Forum. If you can, please like this program, subscribe to our channel, visit our website at climateemergencyforum.org, take a look at our podcasts and consider a donation so we can continue to be one of the few programs on YouTube devoted entirely to the climate emergency.
Our regular panelists are with us today, Dr. Peter Carter, founder of the Climate Emergency Institute, joining us from British Columbia, and Paul Beckwith, climate system scientist from Ottawa, Canada. We also, I'm delighted to say, have a special guest, Dan Galpern, who is returning yet again. Dan has been a guest on the program several times. And Dan, you are the advisor to one of the most esteemed, if not the most esteemed climate scientists on the planet, Dr. Jim Hansen, and you have your own website where you promote legal and other interventions to address the climate emergency. You've worked all over the world on law cases, and you've made an incredible difference in our actions to make and secure a safe and healthy climate.
So with that, eager to begin the program, let's start with you, Dan. What's your take? I know you've written a blog post on your website that we will link. What's your take on this report?
4.28
Dan: Thank you, Herb, and of course, Peter and Paul, good to be with you. Let me be clear about this. The subject matter of the report could not be more weighty. Earth, as it approaches 1.5 degree Celsius above pre-industrial levels and beyond, essentially our world, if we can even keep it, is characterized now by very high risks to the stability of the cryosphere, including the ice sheets of the Arctic, Greenland, and Western Antarctica, as well as mountain glaciers. Continued high heat increases their vulnerability, raises the likelihood of accelerated melting and consequential increasingly rapid sea level rise, intensifying extreme weather, including high impact heat waves and increasingly intense cyclones and essentially uncontainable wildfire, which directly threatens communities whose drifting and diffusing smoke implicates the safety of our common air shed and increasing vulnerability of human and natural systems, including the intensity of climate impacts rising with each fraction of additional fossil fuel-induced warming, so much so that social and ecosystem limits to adaptation capacity are increasingly approached.
[You got to find a shorte and simpler way to say that if you want normal humans to understand it, please. k e]
And so through their report, which they entitled Limiting Overshoot, the United Nations Environmental Program and their literally hundreds of cooperating experts throughout the world have urged us all in effect to get real at long last.
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get real at long last.
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They point out in diplomatic language that we have now blown the political consensus guardrail of 1.5 degrees Celsius. And less diplomatically, I would say, by their inexcusable dalliance and delay the major governments and their fossil fueled patrons have now really led us to the brink.
And so in the report, they note that everything we do going forward matters. Every fraction of a degree more of warming matters. Every investment in clean energy and other solutions matters. And that if we allow additional tons of carbon pollution to be pressed into our beleaguered atmosphere, we limit the opportunity for reversal after overshoot. And we foreclose viable futures that might otherwise be salvaged through a combination of mitigation, through deep decarbonization and intelligent adaptation.
[In simpler terms, it will be too late]
And so to succeed, they say, we need stronger political will, multilateral action, and as they say, more agile and inclusive governance at every level.
And the actions to be taken as a priority include immediate and deep cuts to greenhouse gas pollution, both to reduce the peak of warming and the duration of overshoot. So that's what I would say at the outset.
Herb: Well, that's a mouthful, isn't it? I think it's fair to say also that not only have we reached this threshold and people differ in terms of how they describe it, whether it's a target or a physical limit, and we'll talk about that I'm sure later, but we've also reached it a hell of a lot faster than most of the projections, maybe all the projections over the last decade or two.
So it's kind of like a climate whiplash. It's like we turned around and went about our business and here we are already at or near 1.5, depending upon how we measure it over what number of years we look at. Let me turn to Peter.
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| Dr. Peter Carter |
Peter, I know you've looked at the report. You've been eager for us to discuss this report. Please give us your assessment.
Peter: Thank you, Herb and thanks for that,
Dan. Very interesting and important, as you say. So I want to start off by reminding ourselves that it was back in 2023 that James Hansen first said and gave a press release that 1.5C was dead. The scientific community as well has been dragging its feet on this. Thank you, UNEP, for finally coming around and acknowledging that it is too late to avoid 1.5C, but they say more than that. I'll focus on quotes mainly.
So as Dan says, this is a very, very, very big report. Today, for us, it's the most important report. It confirms that we're in this dire emergency of over 1.5C. I want to point out, though, when we're talking temperature numbers, that our governments have us over 2.5 degrees C. So that really, for me, is the most important number, in a sense.
Now, the press release says the following. The best case peak temperature rise is 1.8 degrees C, and others suggest 2 degrees C. So that's pretty darn important, isn't it?
Because in actual fact, UNEP is saying, and James Hansen and others would certainly agree with that, that we're at 1.8 degrees C. We're way over 1.5.
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We're at 1.8 degrees C. We're way over 1.5. the imperative of immediate emissions decline has been pretty well ignored.
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The most important part of the report to me is the immediacy, which Dan has already mentioned. Immediacy of response policies and immediacy of global emissions decline is mentioned several times in this report. And that's very, very, very good, because I have been saying over and over, the imperative of immediate emissions decline has been pretty well ignored.
But the UNEP report really badly misleads us when it more than gives the impression that we can just get our temperature overshoot down. You know, when you read the press release and the rest, it says, well, you know, we can, the quote is, we can still limit, adapt to, and return from higher temperatures. Incredibly, the report delays that, actually, until after 2050. Now, that's no way established by the science, right?
That's a sort of hopeful statement, but the science does not back that up.
It's certainly not easy. It's certainly not definite. We certainly have to start working on that immediately also. There's a couple of other things from the press release I want to quote here.
The peak and decline pathway, of course, that would minimize peak temperatures is through, quote, immediate and sustained cuts to greenhouse gas emissions, including methane. So all emissions, right, have to be cut on an immediate basis to avoid going, actually, way over 1.5, because we're already at 1.8, according to UNEP. The other thing that's most important that they mention, and Dan'salso referred to, is that above 1.5 degrees C, the impacts and the risks of tipping points intensify with every fraction of a degree. Again, I want to point out, we're actually at 1.8.
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Above 1.5 degrees C, the impacts and the risks of tipping points intensify with every fraction of a degree. Again, I want to point out, we're actually at 1.8
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11.42
So we are in desperate, desperate territory.
Another couple of things from the report. They mentioned the quite- I mean, they're very good on how they mention the impacts that we're going to suffer, catastrophic impacts that we're going to suffer if we don't act on an immediate basis and make things work. That would be acting against, of course, all our governments and leaders, but that's what we've got to do.
So they mentioned intensified extreme weather events, ecosystem loss, submersion of small islands, severe damage to human health, food security, water supplies, and economy. They mentioned a warming ocean, which will continue with declining oxygen levels and rising acidity that makes it harder for marine life to survive.
These are all quotes I'm giving you from the report.
Crossing these thresholds makes it difficult and not impossible to reverse on humans' timescales this accelerating global warming situation that we're in today.
They also mentioned potential tipping points of irreversible changes to the ice sheets. Yes, they also mentioned AMOC as a tipping point, which will be at very, very high risk, and the Amazon rainforest, which I think is very clear from past research and what's happening today, that would be very, very high risk of collapsing with a dieback and, of course, a massive release of carbon and losing, of course, one of the world's major carbon sinks.
Dan's mentioned the Arctic, and yeah, that's really, really key because if we go further, further over, and at 1.8 degrees C, 1.8 degrees C is within the realm of sea ice loss. We already have the Arctic switched from a carbon sink to a carbon source. Research published this year shows that Siberia methane emissions have doubled. So yeah, the Arctic is absolutely key here.
Herb: Okay, thanks, Peter. Maybe misunderstood, but I believe I heard you say that we are already at 1.8 degrees C. I mean, my understanding is we're a little over 1.6 right now. Maybe you could clarify that?
Peter: The UNEP report says that under a best case scenario, that we are at 1.8 degrees C. So in practical-
Herb: We will be at 1.8?
Peter: Yeah, we will be. It means we're committed to at least 1.8.
Herb: Thank you, Peter. I appreciate that you mentioned the tipping points, which in my reading the report, I thought they could have given more emphasis to that. There's a lot of uncertainty about them, but as you point out, they are, almost every scientist agrees, largely if not entirely, irreversible. And essentially they take the climate out of humanity's hands in some respects. And so that's really important. All right, let's go to Paul.
Paul, you've heard Dan and you've heard Peter. What would you like to add to that perspective?
14.5
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| Paul Beckwith |
So, and James Hansen is the most accurate forecaster for these global temperatures. And he uses paleo record data, he uses information in aerosols, he uses information on past events in the paleo climate, for example, the last glacial maximum and other different warming periods to work out the climate sensitivity, which he argues is 4.5 Celsius for a doubling of CO2, as opposed to this 3.0, which is what the IPCC and therefore mainstream science uses.
So basically, we've been thrown a smokescreen where we're in a land of fog from believing the IPCC and the mainstream climate scientists
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So basically we've been thrown a smokescreen where we're in a land of fog.from believing the IPCC and the mainstream climate scientists.
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And I think it's becoming clear and it will become clear over the next few years that Hansen is much more on the mark than the IPCC reports, which puts us in a much worse situation than we would be otherwise.
So Hansen says that this year will probably be a record warm year, probably exceeding the record warm year from the powerful El Niño just three or four years ago. And 2027 will even exceed 2026, maybe even going as high as 1.8. So that's just the bottom line.
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UN: 1.5 C over shot; Hansen: 2026 to break heat records, 2027 will be even hotter. There's the headline... -ke
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Herb: Thanks, Paul. I mean, we've tossed around a lot of numbers, 1.5 and 1.8 and whatever. I mean, these are sort of abstractions because nobody experiences 1.5 or 1.8. Our temperatures every day vary by 20 or 30 degrees. The amount of temperature increase over the land is considerably greater than that over the oceans. Parts of the world, particularly as you get to the Northern and Southern latitudes, have temperature increases much greater, two, three, four times greater. It's like the old cliche where the top part of your body is in heat and the bottom part is in cold. You know, you may have an average temperature, but half of you is freezing and half of you is burning up.
So I think we have to really recognize the limitations of any of these numbers, but I'd like to give my major critique of this report. And I think to me, while it is valuable in sort of announcing to the world and legitimizing that we shouldn't see any more slogans on the walls at COP meetings that say, let's keep 1.5 alive. But, you know, there's not one word that talks about solar radiation management. Sometimes it's called sunlight reflection, geoengineering. And to me, that's an absolute outrageous omission because I think many of us and more and more people recognize the enormous potential of solar radiation management.
And we've talked about it many times on this program to stabilize and ultimately cool the temperatures. And there's a major emphasis on CDR as has been mentioned and it's impracticality, but literally not a word. It's like the greatest degree of censor I've ever seen or one of the most in my entire life.
So I'd like to get your perspective where I assume it was done not for technical or scientific reasons, but for political reasons. And I don't think a United Nations report should be allowed to do something like that. So Dan, let me turn it back to you.
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The greatest degree of censor I've ever seen or one of the most in my entire life.
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18.40
Dan: I mentioned a few of these things in my blog piece today and people can find that at cprclimate.org. But I think this report is far from perfect. You mentioned its failure to even mention solar radiation management. The words nuclear energy do not appear in the report. Neither do the words James Hansen appear. There's no discussion, for example, of global warming acceleration. And I would have expected them to have some reasonable discussion of that.
With respect to CDR, carbon dioxide removal, there's only three sentences on ocean-based carbon dioxide removal, even though there's been a considerable amount of work, including in the United States, but also elsewhere, including in Europe, on that potential. So yeah, in their 96 pages of actual text, they left out a lot, I certainly agree.
And yet I still think that the report is a valuable contribution, not only for putting to rest, at least as finally as Peter Carter noted, the stated diplomatic goal of staying under 1.5 degree Celsius of warming above pre-industrial levels, but importantly, calling the world's attention, hopefully, to the fact that every little bit now matters, that we are essentially at the end of our rope in terms of the global carbon budget, and immediate action is needed.
By the way, Herb, you mentioned that, I think it was you, Herb, that there's been almost no response by any governments to this report. I need to say that there was a major action with respect to climate by the United States 12 days after publication of Limiting Overshoot, and that was to lift all restrictions on power plant carbon emissions, whether from gas-fired power plants or coal-fired power plants. So that's a response, perhaps not in the proper direction.
Herb: Yes, I think future historians, if there are any future historians, will look back on our age of hyper irrationality, I think, and wonder and scratch their heads so much that they'll probably get rid of some of their hair. I'm trying to imagine that literally the same week, within a week or 10 days, this administration in the United States finds yet another way to accelerate the collapse of civilization, literally.
21.05
Dan: Yeah, and let me just add just one thing if I can. And that is, I wasn't saying that only to make a joke, but also to point out that is, I think yet another, to me, surprising by its absence of any discussion, there is a call to action of all governments, but there's not even a hint that at least some governments are actually moving in the opposite direction. There should have been at least some mention of that, perhaps though it was too obvious to be deemed to need mention. I'm not sure,
I just don't understand, though it seems like an elephant in the room that goes unmentioned, I think that they could have done better with respect to that.
Herb: Well, I think it's more likely that they were afraid that Donald Trump would hear about it and cut the UN budget even more. But in any case, we can only speculate. Peter.
Peter: I'd like to actually hear from Dan on what weight this would carry at the next climate conference, which is in November in Turkey, right? Because normally the only science which is acknowledged in the negotiations is the IPCC report. We've had lots and lots of excellent UNEP reports, but they don't actually formally get acknowledged as I understand it in the COPs. So that's pretty crucial.
I want to finish off then with just a reminder on two quotes here. The report puts: “The best case scenario peak temperature at 1.8 degrees. Others suggest 2.0 degrees C.” The other one that, it's just another quote, which is saying that we have to be immediate: “Pursuing efforts to limit warming to 1.5 degrees C, bringing it down, requires immediate and deep emissions reductions across all sectors.” So to me, the big thing about this UNEP report is that finally, finally confirmed that action and greenhouse gas emissions reductions, according to the science, has to be immediate.
Paul: Global warming is greatly accelerating. In fact, the acceleration has picked up. It used to be 0.2 degrees Celsius rise per decade, and now it's 0.4 degrees Celsius rise per decade, as Hansen clearly shows in article after article. Also, the main reason for that is given quite clearly by Hansen as less aerosols. There's a direct cooling effect when you have aerosols and there's an indirect effect. The indirect effect means that there's less low level clouds so there's less reflection of solar radiation. So we're warming, solar absorption is greatly larger. The Earth energy imbalance is greatly larger. In fact, it's almost doubled in the last few decades.
The other thing, according to Herb, of course, is that nobody experiences average temperature. So if you're in a Northern country like Canada, we're warming at least double of the global average. Then if you're up in the Arctic, you're warming five to seven times the global average. If you're in Antarctica, double the average at least. If you live at high altitude or in an alpine environment, it's double and so on. So nobody lives in an average climate. We're talking, we mostly talk about the averages. That's what the climate models come up with, the averages.
But there's a huge variation and also there's urban heat island effect. So big cities can be two to three Celsius warmer than the surrounding countryside. And this is one of the reasons why human mortality is greatly increased during heat waves in large cities. Especially, you know, we've seen this in Europe, we've seen this in North America.
Also the behavior of the climate system, the jet streams going down and getting stuck in place because of the huge Arctic warming means that we've had this summer, often a ridge stuck over North America with a heat wave underneath and a ridge stuck over Europe with a heat wave underneath. And those two ridges are connected by the jet stream and a trough over the Atlantic Ocean, which is one of the areas that's warmed the least. It's a so-called global warming hole or cold blob in the Arctic Ocean.
So we can explain a lot of these things and what we think is gonna happen in the near term to mid term future is pretty dire. I just, you know, highly stressed. Don't miss what James Hansen has to say in his reports
25.32
Dan: So I would say that Jim Hansen not only points out Earth's climate sensitivity to greenhouse gas forcing and points also to the reduction in aerosols, but of course he also points out we have continued near record high greenhouse gas emissions. And the report points out at least that third point.
In answer to Peter's question to me, at the COPS, the nations in their consensus documents do point to documents that have been produced by the United Nations Environmental Program for at least over the last six COPS. The environmental program has published reports on the implementation gap, that is the failure of countries to meet their own obligations, their own self-imposed obligations under their nationally determined contributions. And also the ambition gap, the failure to be ratcheting up, that is tightening limitations on greenhouse gas pollution to which every nation that is a signatory is at least nominally, to the framework convention and the Paris agreement, is at least nominally committed.
So these things do get noticed.
Unfortunately, the advice is largely been honored in the breach.
Herb: Yeah, that's probably a statement that you could have made and maybe you did make probably the last 10 years or 15 years of doing this. We could probably rebroadcast programs year after year and have to change very few words and reach the same conclusion. The bottom line is yet another report indicating we're failing, yet another report indicating we're getting close to irreversible tipping points, catastrophic impacts on all life on the planet and another report whose response is as close to zero as can be determined. We will continue at the Climate Emergency Forum to not just publicize these reports, but to urge each of our viewers and we have thousands of viewers for each of our programs to watch this report, but most importantly, to take action.
take action.
[take action. Heating Planet blog needs an assistant or two, I could be producing three times as many of these posts if I were three people. I'll pay you what I make, nothing, now but audience growing so ad revenue should start soon. I'll teach you how to do a blog like this if you don't know how, so volunteering here could earn you money in the future. Comment here If interested or DM me on Blue Sky or twitter.
https://bsky.app/profile/rogueagent48.bsky.social
https://x.com/CassandraofTro2 -ke]
27.42
take action
There's so many ways you can do it. You can do it by writing to your legislators. You could do it by talking to your friends and neighbors. You could do it by joining a climate group. You could do it by reducing your own greenhouse gas emissions. It's not enough simply to watch this stuff and get upset as I think I certainly am just reading these reports, but we still have a chance, as all of our guests and commenters have said today, every one-tenth of a degree makes a huge difference. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people will live better lives for each 0.1 degree that we can avoid.
And so let us not forget that. Let us not use this report and its conclusions and deficiencies as a means of throwing our hands up and saying it's too late, let's just go out to the ballpark or the theater or to have another drink and worry about something else.
So [laughs] with that moralizing on my part, I apologize to any viewers who may not appreciate that, but it comes to my heart because we really are here to mobilize you to act, to do what we can as large or as small as possible to make a difference.
So thanks again to Peter, thanks to Paul and in particular for Dan, you've come back every few months and as always, you're always welcome here and just let us know when you've got something you wanna tell our audience and we will, as always, make room for you.
Climate-3.
With that, I will now shift to what we call the Climate-3. So the first is evolution and adaptation have long been thought of as solitary endeavors, the survival of the fittest. But what if species could indeed draw in their longstanding relationships, not to succeed or fail alone, but to evolve and adapt together to climate breakdown? 44 It's sometimes called co-evolution and that's the question evolutionary ecologists, biologists and geneticists are trying to answer in Alaska in the first of a kind $15 million project supported by the US National Science Foundation.
Over six years, scientists will assess five species and their connections to each other to see if they adapt in ways that support each species survival in this new world that we're coming to. This seems like a kind of common sense thing to do, but apparently it hasn't been studied before because as these ecosystems change and they are changing more rapidly in the Arctic than anywhere, every species will have to adapt and the more they can work together, just like humans, the better it will be. So this is an important scientific experiment and hopefully we'll all be around in six years to give you the results, if not sooner.
And the second is we've talked here a bit about the fact that many people don't know that what's the most powerful climate forcing agent, if you will, greenhouse gas, if you wanna call it a gas, is water vapor and it controls the intensity of rainfall. And so scientists expect the increases in this water vapor to increase the frequency or intensity of extreme precipitation events. And this has now been confirmed. An analysis of 3000 stations in the United States show virtually every station exhibits a positive correlation between water vapor and extreme daily precipitation.
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[See Global flooding series videos & images ongoing now at Heating Planet Blog https://cityofangels25.blogspot.com/2026/09/global-flooding-blog-series-heating.html ]
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And for example, many of you know, even if you're not in the United States of the incredibly tragic flooding in Texas in 2024 where 27 campers and counselors drowned in a matter of minutes or so. And it turns out now that the water vapor over that part of Texas was incredibly high at that time.
So as water vapor increases, precipitation increases in dramatic ways, one more of the sort of amplifying impacts of climate that we're just learning how it works, but the news as always is not good.
And the third is that this is really interesting. And we've talked a number of times and I'm sure we will in the coming months about what's often called the Godzilla El Niño, this massive El Niño that's basically sort of arriving very soon. And for the first time now that I've seen, prominent scientists have called for emergency interventions to protect marine life as the ocean heats to unprecedented levels. These include literally removing endangered species from the water and experimenting with local geoengineering.
Researchers, they say, should stage rescue missions to take endangered species out of the ocean and house them until temperatures subside.
[um, how long…? Maybe permanent relocation of animals in preparation for humans is more reasonable- My two cents.. ]
During the 23-24 El Niño, for example, scientists moved 25 rare Tasmanian red handfish into tanks and later returned them to the wild.
Others temporarily put corals into aquariums and localized geoengineering techniques such as spraying tiny particles of seawater into low clouds, marine cloud brightening, should also be recommended to lower the temperatures in particular areas.
So rather than just sit back and be helpless as this comes from and watch nature be devastated, these scientists are calling for emergency action in the next few months. And we will keep an eye on it and see how much of this emergency action has occurred and what impact it has. So those are our three sort of climate headlines out of dozens and dozens the past week. And let me again, thank Peter, thank Paul and in particular Dan for joining us as our special guest today. And as always, we thank you so much for attending and we look forward to another program. We will see you soon, next week. Thank you so much.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nbp6MWNbas
23 Critical Screen Shots right-click to share
Paul Beckwith
I post screen shots and transcripts because printed words abd digital pictures last forever whereas videos can be disappeared. -ke
