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2024 Brought the World to a Dangerous Warming Threshold. Now What?

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3 months ago

January 10, 2025

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2024 Brought the World to a Dangerous Warming Threshold. Now What?

Source: Copernicus/ECMWF

Note: Temperature anomalies relative to 1850-1900 averages.

At the stroke of midnight on Dec. 31, Earth finished up its hottest year in recorded history, scientists said on Friday. The previous hottest year was 2023. And the next one will be upon us before long: By continuing to burn huge amounts of coal, oil and gas, humankind has all but guaranteed it.

The planet’s record-high average temperature last year reflected the weekslong, 104-degree-Fahrenheit spring heat waves that shuttered schools in Bangladesh and India. It reflected the effects of the bathtub-warm ocean waters that supercharged hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico and cyclones in the Philippines. And it reflected the roasting summer and fall conditions that primed Los Angeles this week for the most destructive wildfires in its history.

“We are facing a very new climate and new challenges, challenges that our society is not prepared for,” said Carlo Buontempo, director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service, the European Union monitoring agency.

But even within this progression of warmer years and ever-intensifying risks to homes, communities and the environment, 2024 stood out in another unwelcome way. According to Copernicus, it was the first year in which global temperatures averaged more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, above those the planet experienced at the start of the industrial age.

For the past decade, the world has sought to avoid crossing this dangerous threshold. Nations enshrined the goal in the 2015 Paris agreement to fight climate change. “Keep 1.5 alive” was the mantra at United Nations summits.

Yet here we are. Global temperatures will fluctuate somewhat, as they always do, which is why scientists often look at warming averaged over longer periods, not just a single year.

But even by that standard, staying below 1.5 degrees looks increasingly unattainable, according to researchers who have run the numbers. Globally, despite hundreds of billions of dollars invested in clean-energy technologies, carbon dioxide emissions hit a record in 2024 and show no signs of dropping.

One recent study published in the journal Nature concluded that the absolute best humanity can now hope for is around 1.6 degrees of warming. To achieve it, nations would need to start slashing emissions at a pace that would strain political, social and economic feasibility.

But what if we’d started earlier?

By spewing heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere, humankind has lifted global temperatures to record highs.

If nations had started reducing emissions in 2005, they could have made gradual cuts to limit warming to 1.5 degrees.

Starting in 2015, when the Paris agreement was adopted, would have required steeper cuts.

Starting today would require cuts so drastic as to appear essentially impossible.

“It was guaranteed we’d get to this point where the gap between reality and the trajectory we needed for 1.5 degrees was so big it was ridiculous,” said David Victor, a professor of public policy at the University of California, San Diego.

The question now is what, if anything, should replace 1.5 as a lodestar for nations’ climate aspirations.

“These top-level goals are at best a compass,” Dr. Victor said. “They’re a reminder that if we don’t do more, we’re in for significant climate impacts.”

The 1.5-degree threshold was never the difference between safety and ruin, between hope and despair. It was a number negotiated by governments trying to answer a big question: What’s the highest global temperature increase — and the associated level of dangers, whether heat waves or wildfires or melting glaciers — that our societies should strive to avoid?

The result, as codified in the Paris agreement, was that nations would aspire to hold warming to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius while “pursuing efforts” to limit it to 1.5 degrees.

Even at the time, some experts called the latter goal unrealistic, because it required such deep and rapid emissions cuts. Still, the United States, the European Union and other governments adopted it as a guidepost for climate policy.

Christoph Bertram, an associate research professor at the University of Maryland’s Center for Global Sustainability, said the urgency of the 1.5 target spurred companies of all kinds — automakers, cement manufacturers, electric utilities — to start thinking hard about what it would mean to zero out their emissions by midcentury. “I do think that has led to some serious action,” Dr. Bertram said.

But the high aspiration of the 1.5 target also exposed deep fault lines among nations.

China and India never backed the goal, since it required them to curb their use of coal, gas and oil at a pace they said would hamstring their development. Rich countries that were struggling to cut their own emissions began choking off funding in the developing world for fossil-fuel projects that were economically beneficial. Some low-income countries felt it was deeply unfair to ask them to sacrifice for the climate given that it was wealthy nations — and not them — that had produced most of the greenhouse gases now warming the world.

“The 1.5-degree target has created a lot of tension between rich and poor countries,” said Vijaya Ramachandran, director for energy and development at the Breakthrough Institute, an environmental research organization.

Costa Samaras, an environmental-engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon University, compared the warming goals to health officials’ guidelines on, say, cholesterol. “We don’t set health targets on what’s realistic or what’s possible,” Dr. Samaras said. “We say, ‘This is what’s good for you. This is how you’re going to not get sick.’”

“If we were going to say, ‘Well, 1.5 is likely out of the question, let’s put it to 1.75,’ it gives people a false sense of assurance that 1.5 was not that important,” said Dr. Samaras, who helped shape U.S. climate policy from 2021 to 2024 in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. “It’s hugely important.”

Scientists convened by the United Nations have concluded that restricting warming to 1.5 degrees instead of 2 would spare tens of millions of people from being exposed to life-threatening heat waves, water shortages and coastal flooding. It might mean the difference between a world that has coral reefs and Arctic sea ice in the summer, and one that doesn’t.

Each tiny increment of additional warming, whether it’s 1.6 degrees versus 1.5, or 1.7 versus 1.6, increases the risks. “Even if the world overshoots 1.5 degrees, and the chances of this happening are increasing every day, we must keep striving” to bring emissions to zero as soon as possible, said Inger Anderson, the executive director of the United Nations Environment Program.

Officially, the sun has not yet set on the 1.5 target. The Paris agreement remains in force, even as President-elect Donald J. Trump vows to withdraw the United States from it for a second time. At U.N. climate negotiations, talk of 1.5 has become more muted compared with years past. But it has hardly gone away.

“With appropriate measures, 1.5 Celsius is still achievable,” Cedric Schuster, the minister of natural resources and environment for the Pacific island nation of Samoa, said at last year’s summit in Azerbaijan. Countries should “rise to the occasion with new, highly ambitious” policies, he said.

To Dr. Victor of U.C. San Diego, it is strange but all too predictable that governments keep speaking this way about what appears to be an unachievable aim. “No major political leader who wants to be taken seriously on climate wants to stick their neck out and say, ‘1.5 degrees isn’t feasible. Let’s talk about more realistic goals,’” he said.

Still, the world will eventually need to have that discussion, Dr. Victor said. And it’s unclear how it will go.

“It could be constructive, where we start asking, ‘How much warming are we really in for? And how do we deal with that?’” he said. “Or it could look very toxic, with a bunch of political finger pointing.”

Methodology

The second chart shows pathways for reducing carbon emissions that would have a 66 percent chance of limiting global warming this century to 1.5 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial average.

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Science

Oregon health officials investigate rare brain disease blamed for two deaths

Published

6 hours ago

April 17, 2025

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Oregon health officials investigate rare brain disease blamed for two deaths

Health officials in Hood River County, Ore., are investigating three cases of a rare and fatal brain disease known as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

Two people have died and a third person is showing symptoms consistent with the disease. The disease has been confirmed in one of the deceased through an autopsy; the other two cases are considered probable, according to a statement from the Hood River County Health Department.

All three cases were diagnosed in the last eight months. County health officials declined to provide particulars about the individuals, such as their age, gender or town of residence.

“At this time, there is no identifiable link between these three cases,” a Hood River County statement said. The county has a population of about 24,000.

Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease is a neurodegenerative disorder caused by misfolded proteins known as prions. These prions lead to rapid brain deterioration, resulting in severe neurological symptoms and death. Although the disease is known for its sporadic occurrence, clusters raise concerns among public health officials about potential environmental or dietary exposure.

Symptoms include issues with memory, walking, coordination, speech and behavior changes, according to experts. It does not spread through the air, water, touch or social contact, according to Hood River County health officials.

The disease is considered incurable and is always fatal. Roughly 350 cases are diagnosed in the United States every year, according to the National Institutes of Health.

The disease is rare in people, affecting roughly 1.4 people per million. However, because the disease takes years to develop, any person’s chance of developing the disease is closer to 1 in 5,000 or 6,000, said Michael Geschwind, a professor of neurology at UC San Francisco in the Memory and Aging Center.

The disease is similar to chronic wasting disease, or CWD, which is also a prion-fueled disease, and was detected for the first time in wild deer in California and Washington last year.

CWD was first reported in 1967, in a captive Colorado deer. It has since spread to deer in 36 states. There are no known cases of the disease in Oregon wildlife.

For decades there has been concern that CWD could move into human populations through the ingestion of contaminated meat.

That’s because in the 1980s, a prion disease in sheep, known as scrapies — which humans do not seem to get — moved into cows, and soon people throughout the United Kingdom, France and elsewhere were becoming infected with mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy.

Since then, public health officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and several states have been paying close attention to clusters of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease — investigating outbreaks to determine whether infected deer, elk or moose meat was involved.

They — and researchers from other agencies, such as the U.S. Geological Survey’s National Wildlife Health Center — also have been monitoring wild deer populations and keeping tabs on hunters who may have been exposed.

Although widespread geographically throughout the United States and Canada, the disease is considered relatively rare in wild populations of deer, elk and moose, said Brian Richardson, the emerging-disease coordinator at the USGS wildlife center.

“It may well be [in Oregon], but it’s hard to find rare events,” he said.

To date, there are no known incidents of people acquiring a prion disease by consuming deer, elk or moose meat, said Geschwind, the UCSF professor.

He said roughly 85% to 90% of Creutzfeldt-Jakob cases are considered sporadic, with no identified cause or source of infection. In 10% to 15% of the cases, the disease appears to be genetically inherited — with some people acquiring mutations associated with the disease.

However, there have been a few cases in which sources of infection or contamination have been identified, and almost all of them were from a medical mishap.

Prions are notoriously difficult to inactivate or destroy — withstanding standard sterilization techniques — and can remain intact for months and years on a surface, Geschwind said.

In a small number of cases, he said, people acquired the disease as a result of contaminated and improperly cleaned surgical equipment. In a few other cases, it was acquired by people who used products — such as growth hormone, or who received corneal transplants — derived, inadvertently, from infected cadavers.

It’s these proteins’ durability and longevity that have many researchers worried. Studies have shown that deer that harbor the disease can pass the infectious prions to other deer through saliva, blood, urine and feces.

“So, if the animal is licking a plant or licking a salt lick, for example, and another animal comes along and licks that plant or salt lick, then that might be a way of spreading the disease,” Geschwind said.

In addition, the decomposing body of a deer that died of the disease can infect the surrounding environment where the animal expired — potentially contaminating plants, seeds, fungi and soil, Richardson said.

He said not only is there the issue of surface contamination, but also research has shown that the proteins can “be taken up via rootlets and deposited in aerial plant tissues. Whether these plants contribute to chronic wasting disease transmission and what type of risk these plants pose to humans remain open questions.”

Geschwind noted that the work done by federal researchers to better understand the disease, provide diagnostic autopsies on presumptive cases, monitor wildlife and investigate clusters has provided a level of protection for the American public, which could be destabilized by proposed cuts to federal agencies.

“The idea of cutting government funding of rare disease is very short-sighted, because even though CJD is a rare disease, what we have learned from prion diseases has implications for all neurodegenerative diseases,” he said, noting Alzheimer’s disease, frontotemporal dementia, Parkinson’s disease and multiple system atrophy.

“All these diseases act in a prion-like manner in which normal proteins misfold, and those misfolded proteins cause the cells to not work partly and lead to disease,” he said. “But the basic mechanism that we’ve learned from this very rare disease applies to diseases that are thousands of times more common. To get rid of the research? It’d be a very grave mistake.”

Science

Faces From a Meth Surge

Published

22 hours ago

April 16, 2025

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The devastating stimulant has been hitting Portland, Maine hard, even competing with fentanyl as the street drug of choice. Although a fentanyl overdose can be reversed with Narcan, no medicine can reverse a meth overdose. Nor has any been approved to treat meth addiction.Unlike fentanyl, which sedates users, meth can make people anxious and violent. Its effects can overwhelm not just users but community residents and emergency responders.Here are voices from one troubled neighborhood.

Science

A Scientist Is Paid to Study Maple Syrup. He’s Also Paid to Promote It.

Published

2 days ago

April 15, 2025

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A Scientist Is Paid to Study Maple Syrup. He’s Also Paid to Promote It.

For more than a decade, Navindra Seeram, a biomedical researcher, has praised maple syrup, calling it a “hero ingredient” and “champion food” that could have wide-ranging health benefits.

Dr. Seeram, dean of the School of Pharmacy at the University of New England, has published more than three dozen studies extolling the power of maple. Much of his work has been bankrolled by Canada’s maple syrup industry and the Canadian and American governments.

At the same time, he has taken on another role: maple syrup pitchman.

“I am uniquely qualified as the world’s leading researcher on maple health benefits with the scientific reputation and credibility to promote the sales of maple products,” he has written in grant applications. He has assured leaders of the Canadian industry that he would always support maple from Quebec, according to emails obtained through a public records request.

As he straddles the realms of scientific inquiry and promotion, he has distorted the real-world implications of his findings and exaggerated health benefits, according to a review by The Examination and The New York Times of 15 years of his studies and public statements. In videos and press releases, he has suggested that consuming maple syrup may help stave off diseases including cancer, Alzheimer’s and diabetes. Other scientists told The Examination and The Times that they thought he had overstated his lab findings and made misleading claims.

Industry funding is commonplace in nutrition research and may become even more critical as scientists grapple with the Trump administration’s sweeping cuts. Dr. Seeram’s work shows the perils of intertwining science and salesmanship, propelling information that can shape consumer habits and public health.

At the University of Rhode Island, where he worked until last year, Dr. Seeram oversaw projects that were awarded $2.6 million in U.S. government funding, including a grant explicitly intended to increase maple syrup sales. That promotional work produced a stream of social media posts like, “Maple Syrup’s Benefits: Anti-Cancer, Anti-Oxidant, Anti-Inflammatory.”

In a video posted on YouTube in 2019, Dr. Seeram said nutrients in maple syrup could “potentially together prevent and/or delay the onset” of conditions such as “cardiovascular disease, metabolic syndrome, diseases of the brain and so on.”

But his studies have found something more limited: that maple syrup contains small amounts of polyphenols, compounds in plants that are generally considered beneficial. To demonstrate their effects, he tested highly concentrated maple extracts in lab settings — not people’s consumption of commercial maple syrup.

Dr. Seeram told The Examination that he believed in the power of natural medicines, which were part of his upbringing in South America. And he defended how he had spoken about his findings: “No one can go back to direct-quote from me to say, ‘It’s going to cure cancer, it’s going to cure diabetes.’”

His conclusions often include hedging language — that maple syrup “may” or “could” have meaningful health effects — or disclaimers recommending further study. But several researchers said that the caveats weren’t enough to counterbalance broad health claims, and that Dr. Seeram had leaped too far from lab findings to practical applications.

“They are framing it in a far more positive light than they should,” said Christopher Gardner, a nutrition researcher at Stanford.

In an interview, Dr. Seeram blamed a former colleague at the University of Rhode Island for stirring up what he said was unwarranted scrutiny of his work. A university official said the school had investigated and found no research misconduct.

At a maple industry conference in October, Dr. Seeram described his work as making “it simple for Mom to understand” that syrup is beneficial.

“We have to convince the consumer that this sugar is good for you,” he told an audience of maple farmers, and laid out how to reach the public: Studies like his would be published in peer-reviewed journals, leading to marketing and media coverage and inspiring consumers to buy.

The Quebec Maple Syrup Producers, an industry association that markets and regulates most of the world’s maple syrup, has long funded Dr. Seeram’s work. The association and the Canadian government have together provided at least $2.8 million for his research, according to a 2019 grant application. The association disputed that figure but would not provide details; neither would Dr. Seeram.

The association has also hired him for consulting and what it termed “PR activities” for at least a decade, according to emails and invoices. In 2023, his fees totaled $37,000, emails show.

In response to one of several emails from association officials thanking him for his work, he wrote in 2018 that he would “always work to find ways to promote maple products from Quebec.”

The maple association approached him in 2009, after the owners of POM Wonderful had funded and used some of his research on pomegranate to promote their juice during the pomegranate craze of the 2000s. (The Federal Trade Commission later issued a cease-and-desist order accusing the company of making misleading or false claims, based in part on a study he coauthored.)

Though Dr. Seeram had not previously researched maple, he told The Examination he was intrigued because he had recently moved to the Northeast, where it is an important agricultural product. Over the next couple of years, Dr. Seeram announced he had discovered dozens of polyphenols in maple syrup, including one his team named Quebecol.

Based on his lab tests of concentrated compounds, he began suggesting that maple syrup had wide-ranging applications for human health.

“Maple syrup is becoming a champion food,” he said in a 2011 press release. “Several of these compounds possess antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties, which have been shown to fight cancer, diabetes and bacterial illnesses.”

But experts say the low levels of these compounds in syrup are unlikely to improve health. Dr. Seeram acknowledged in interviews that a person would have to consume gallons of maple syrup to get the nutritional equivalent of the extracts. He noted, as he often has, that he isn’t encouraging anyone to consume more sugar, merely to choose maple syrup over alternatives.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture, another important benefactor, awarded more than $2.6 million for Dr. Seeram’s work. This included nearly $500,000 in 2017 to study whether maple syrup extract could improve the health of obese mice. Their health did not improve, and in some cases worsened, according to study findings cited by a government website and a student dissertation. The results weren’t published in an academic journal. Dr. Seeram, who in recent weeks stopped responding to queries from The Examination and The Times, didn’t answer questions about this study.

In 2018, the U.S.D.A. awarded $500,000 to a group led by Dr. Seeram for a promotional campaign that would showcase maple research on a University of Rhode Island website. Dr. Seeram’s grant application said he would be responsible for translating the science into “lay-friendly terminology.”

The website, overseen by his team, called maple syrup “immensely healthy for you.” And though it carried disclaimers that more research was needed, it made misleading statements connecting studies of reduced-sugar maple extract to the consumption of maple syrup, such as: “Did you ever think that you could fight high blood sugar with some things as sugary and delicious as maple syrup?”

It also said the Quebecol compound could become a “potential cancer prevention drug,” noting that it looked “remarkably similar” to the breast cancer drug Tamoxifen — a comparison Dr. Seeram has also made in presentations.

In interviews, three cancer researchers called this comparison misleading. Geoffrey Greene of the University of Chicago said it was like expecting the brother of a concert violinist to also be a concert violinist because they looked similar.

When asked why he has used his research to promote maple products, Dr. Seeram said he was simply fulfilling the terms of the government grant. A U.S.D.A. spokeswoman said the University of Rhode Island was responsible for the website’s claims.

The university wouldn’t comment on the research. After inquiries from reporters, the website was taken down. The university said this was part of a broader effort to remove dormant pages.

One of Dr. Seeram’s studies involved giving maple syrup extract to genetically modified worms to examine Alzheimer’s-related effects. His team observed that some worms fared better, but on average they were worse off. Nevertheless, the top-line summary in Dr. Seeram’s paper, published in 2016 by the journal Neurochemical Research, ignored the negative results and said the syrup extract “showed protective effects” for the worms.

An industry association press release said maple syrup extract had prolonged the worms’ lives — even though on average they died sooner — with a disclaimer that more research was needed. That nuance was lost in headlines in Canada, India, England and the United States proclaiming that maple syrup could protect against Alzheimer’s.

Christopher Link of the University of Colorado Boulder, who pioneered Alzheimer’s research on that kind of worm, criticized the study, citing the lack of basic details like the number of worms tested and whether the experiment had been replicated. Dozens of plant extracts have produced positive results in similar experiments, Dr. Link said, but that doesn’t mean they have real-world applications.

In a statement, Julie Barbeau of the maple association said it adheres to strict ethics rules and has had “no influence whatsoever” on the scores of research projects it has backed.

At least a dozen of Dr. Seeram’s papers that the maple association says it funded didn’t disclose that relationship. Also not disclosed in his papers: his paid consultant role and a Canadian maple extract patent that names him and Ms. Barbeau as co-inventors.

Six publishers of Dr. Seeram’s work said they require authors to declare potential conflicts of interest. Dr. Seeram did not respond to questions about his disclosures.

In public statements, he has acknowledged receiving financial support from the maple association. And in earlier interviews, he said that industry funding is vital, because other research dollars are scarce. He also defended his patents, saying, “The driver here is not for me to get rich.” The maple association said it was protecting its intellectual property.

Last year, the association hailed a new study, which it funded, as the “first human clinical trial” of maple syrup.

Participants replaced a small amount of sugar in their diet with maple syrup — for instance, to sweeten coffee. The scientists told Newsweek that the results, published in The Journal of Nutrition, showed that maple syrup improved measures of blood sugar, blood pressure and fat, and might help lower the risk of diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

Dr. Seeram, who was not an author of the study, said the results validated his work.

But three independent experts who reviewed the research said the conclusions were overstated — emphasizing a few positive results among dozens of measures — and the study appeared to show no meaningful difference between maple syrup and refined sugar.

“They took it too far,” said Kimber Stanhope, a nutritional biologist at the University of California, Davis.

The lead researcher, André Marette of Laval University, said that while the differences between maple syrup and refined sugar were “modest,” they were meaningful. Through a public relations firm hired by the industry association, he said, “We were careful to state that the clinical relevance of the work will need to be further substantiated.”

In the meantime, the findings have reached the general public. “Sweet!” effused a headline in a women’s magazine last fall. “Maple Syrup in Coffee Could Help You Lose Weight.”

Mago Torres contributed reporting.