By the closing months of 2024, scientists at the EU’s Copernicus service had confirmed what the summer had made undeniable: the year was on track to be the hottest ever recorded, breaking the record set only the year before, and the first full year to push past 1.5 degrees of warming above the pre-industrial era.
The year was a catalogue of what that number looks like on the ground: floods that submerged Valencia and the Sahel, a hurricane that gutted the Appalachian mountains, wildfires that consumed California and the Amazon, oceans at temperatures never measured before. Each disaster was met with emergency funding, sympathy and then, within weeks, forgetting.
And that, perhaps, is the strangest thing about the climate moment: the evidence is no longer contested, the technology to respond exists and is cheapening every year, and yet the response remains a matter of political will rather than feasibility. The question is not whether the world can change course, it is whether it still wants to. Every hottest year recorded is a ballot cast in favour of the status quo.