PART 1: Uncharted Territory

Chapter 1

Laurie:
This is the story of a storm. You’re standing on a ship, far out at sea. It’s a calm, beautiful day. But then you spot it — a storm on the horizon. It’s far away, but it looks powerful, dangerous. And you’re headed straight for it. So, what do you do? Other people have noticed. Together, you try to persuade the rest of the crew of the threat. Some don’t believe you. But there’s no time for that — the storm’s bearing down. Soon there’s a critical mass fighting to change course. Through your combined efforts, the ship starts to turn. More people join. The ship keeps turning. And then you sail around… and all is well.

I hear stories like this all the time. My name’s Laurie Laybourn. I’m a climate researcher and policy adviser. And I’ve spent my career listening to people talk about climate change — politicians, business leaders, scientists, activists. One day, I realised their stories sounded a lot like that ship facing a storm. But recent events mean those stories no longer make sense.

Archival voice:
“If we do not change course, we risk missing the point where we can avoid runaway climate change with disastrous consequences.”

Laurie:
Climate stories often have two outcomes: win or lose. And after years of warnings, it’s crunch time.

Archival voice:
“Humanity has long since run down the clock on climate change. It’s one minute to midnight on that doomsday clock.”

Laurie:
So, like a ship trying to avoid a storm, the story of our future is reduced to binary outcomes. And we’re told there’s still time to avoid losing.

Archival voice:
“As a climate scientist, one of the most frequent questions I get is: Is it too late to do anything about climate change? My answer is no, it is not too late.”

Laurie:
The thing that must be avoided — the point at which the ship enters the storm — that’s often a temperature target: 1.5 degrees centigrade. You’ve probably heard this number. Think of it as a safety limit for climate change, beyond which climate risks spiral. It’s based on the best science, agreed by the world’s governments in 2015. It means that the global heating caused by burning fossil fuels shouldn’t go beyond an average of 1.5 degrees centigrade. And it seems innocuous — 1.5 is a small number. But even a small change in global temperature is enough to cause worldwide havoc.

Archival montage:
“Fear and concern is growing tonight as flames light up the Los Angeles hillsides.”
“The streak of violent weather lashing the Philippines with five typhoons barrelling down…”
“We are dangerously close to a number of catastrophic tipping points…”

Laurie:
Amid the growing chaos and the spiralling risks, many people are responding with urgency. Awareness is greater than ever. Clean technologies are cheaper. A greener economy is coming into view. So the course is changing — but not by enough. That’s the simple truth. The world is headed over 1.5 degrees. While the use of green technologies has skyrocketed, fossil fuel use remains at record highs. Global temperatures continue to rise. And 2024 was the first full year in which the global temperature began breaching 1.5 degrees. In climate jargon, this is called overshoot. The world is in the process of overshooting the 1.5 safety limit.

Archival voice:
“1.5 is deader than a doornail.”
“We are moving into uncharted territory here with climate change.”
“Climate scientists are getting seriously nervous — the planet is changing faster than we expected.”

Laurie:
That means many climate stories no longer reflect reality. The course didn’t change enough. The ship is now entering the storm. So… what happens next?

That’s the question we’re asking in this series. As the world heads over 1.5 degrees, what’s in store? Can the world navigate out of this storm?

Over this series, we’ll explore the consequences of 1.5 overshoot and expose the misconceptions about what it means — and we’ll hear ideas for what to do next.

Because this is different from what’s come before. It’s a new climate reality. One of the biggest challenges is how to make sense of it — through the stories we tell. But if we listen to many mainstream climate stories, then, well, time has run out, right? Which means we’re either going to win very quickly… or maybe… we lost? That’s something more and more people feel. But is it true? And what could be a different story? That’s what we’re exploring in this episode. But first, we need to understand where the win/lose story came from — and how we got to the point where it might feel like the world lost.

So welcome to Overshoot. You’re listening to Episode One: Uncharted Territory.

Chapter 2

Laurie:
The 1.5-degree limit was set for good reason. For many countries and communities around the world, going beyond it clearly poses an existential threat.

Carlos Fuller:
Small island developing states are surrounded by oceans. We depend on the oceans for our survival. Sea level rise alone would inundate our islands.

Laurie:
That’s Carlos Fuller — Belize’s ambassador to the United Nations. Carlos is one of a cast of diplomats and activists who played a critical role in getting the world to sign up for 1.5 degrees — some of whose voices we’ll hear throughout this story. He’s part of that group because Belize is highly vulnerable to the effects of climate change. It has an extensive, low-lying coast and over a thousand small islands. So for decades, low-lying nations like Belize have had a clear, collective message.

Carlos Fuller:
We kept pressing all the countries around the world — that this was a matter of survival for us.

Laurie:
Ultimately, their survival requires the world to stop burning fossil fuels and releasing greenhouse gases. But that won’t happen overnight. In the meantime, climate change gets more dangerous. So what should be the goal for limiting that danger? And what do we mean by “danger”? Dangerous for whom? Because climate change is searingly unfair. The communities that have done the least to cause it are often the ones experiencing its worst consequences — and who have the fewest resources to cope. This is what the low-lying nations were pointing out. Because by the late 2000s, other countries were pushing for a goal of two degrees. And for the low-lying nations, that meant extinction.

Farhana Yamin:
A huge number of people and ecosystems will be damaged at much lower temperature levels than two degrees.

Laurie:
That’s Farhana Yamin — a lawyer and activist who’s worked closely with Carlos and others.

Farhana Yamin:
Even right from the beginning, the countries knew that any degree of warming in the long term spelled an existential threat for them.

Carlos Fuller:
We said, “No, that was too high.” And so around 2008 — certainly going into 2009 — we decided that 1.5 was going to be our target.

Laurie:
Meanwhile, more science was confirming that going over 1.5 would create dangers all over the world. So other nations began to join the chorus — not just those that were low-lying. Here’s Janine Felson, one of the diplomats who represented this group.

Janine Felson:
Once it became clear to political leaders that there would be significant impacts and losses — and this is a real key thing, not just losses we’ll recover from, but permanent losses, irreversible damages — the momentum behind 1.5 became unstoppable.

Laurie:
It all came to a head in 2015. The temperature rise was approaching one degree. That year’s UN climate summit was in Paris, and there was a profound sense of urgency. After years of disagreement about what target to set, a compromise was reached. The world’s nations signed an agreement to stay well below two degrees, and to pursue efforts to limit it to 1.5. So, 1.5 became the stretch goal. It was an astonishing diplomatic achievement by the low-lying nations and their allies. But it became more than that — it became the climate rallying cry.

Janine Felson:
We weren’t hearing “two degrees to get by.” It was “1.5 to stay alive.”

Laurie:
But soon, some people started to interpret this less as a specific story of survival and loss for the most vulnerable, and instead turned it into a story of win or lose on a global scale. That partly resulted from what happened after Paris. The summit also agreed that the IPCC — the UN’s climate science body — would produce a special report on 1.5, exploring the impacts of going above it. Three years later, in October 2018, the IPCC published that report. And it caused a sensation. Here’s Todd Stern — the U.S. government’s lead climate negotiator under President Obama.

Todd Stern:
It was the most impactful science report in all the time that I’ve been involved in climate change.

Laurie:
The report had two main messages. First: the threats posed by climate change were far deadlier than generally accepted. As temperatures headed to and beyond 1.5, the threats to food and water security, to human health — all of these would spiral. A new world would emerge — one far more dangerous than the one societies developed in. Staying below 1.5, and going nowhere near two, would reduce that danger — just as Carlos and his allies had been saying.

Janine Felson:
That confirmed our worst fears — that indeed, half a degree mattered for life and death for ecosystems and regions across the globe.

Laurie:
When talking about the overall threat, the IPCC scientists didn’t describe it as binary. Instead, they spoke of an escalation in risks — like how the risk to a ship begins long before it enters a storm, in the roughening winds and waves. The scientists were saying the risks and losses would balloon as global temperatures approached 1.5 and reach truly dangerous levels beyond it. Their results were presented at a ramshackle press conference in a nondescript hotel — a jarring backdrop for a world-historic moment.

Archival voice (IPCC):
Risk models project robust differences in climate between present day and 1.5 degrees, and between 1.5 and two degrees. Every bit of extra warming makes a difference.

Laurie:
“Every bit.” Those were the crucial words. No binary outcome. No grand threshold where the world “wins” or “loses.” Instead — a growing storm of risk. Millions of moments of loss as the world headed deeper into the literal and figurative storm of overshoot. A grinding sequence of small-scale binaries: lives lost, communities lost, ecosystems lost. But that subtle message got drowned out by the report’s second part — the bit about what to do. To avoid overshooting 1.5, planet-heating emissions would have to fall fast. Very fast.

Archival voice (IPCC scientist):
Limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees implies reducing emissions of carbon dioxide by about 45 percent by 2030.

Laurie:
That was 2018. The world had twelve years — until 2030. Twelve years to change course. For many people, that became the takeaway from the report. There was a clear goal — limit warming to 1.5°C — and a clear action — halve emissions by 2030. So the implication seemed clear: win or lose. The Guardian captured it in a headline: “We have twelve years to limit climate change catastrophe.” And to many, that sounded a lot like “twelve years to save the world.” Once people started to think like that… it was hard to stop.

Chapter 3

Laurie:
A lot has happened since 2018. One thing is momentous: there’s now nothing less than a green technology revolution in full swing. The pace of change is astonishing — and underappreciated. Take solar power.

Jenny Chase:

Solar power is a revolution. You can go to a DIY centre, buy a solar module for the price of eight cups of coffee, put it in the sun, and plug it in.

Laurie:
That’s Jenny Chase, a solar expert at Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Solar power now generates the cheapest electricity not just of the day — but of all time.

Jenny Chase:
We think there was just under 600 gigawatts of solar panels installed globally last year, which is up significantly from the year before. And it’s also really quite substantial relative to global power capacity, which is about ten terawatts.

Laurie:
In 2024, over ninety percent of new electricity generation built globally came from renewables. They now make up about a third of the planet’s entire electricity supply. They’re beating fossil fuels in the markets, attracting nearly double the global investment. These energy trends are some of the most remarkable in history. And there’s rapid change elsewhere too — from electric vehicles to climate education to grassroots campaigning. The pace of change is accelerating. It might not feel like it, or be reported that way, or admitted by some politicians — but the course is shifting. And in the nick of time. Because as the world has approached 1.5 degrees, something else has happened.

Johan Rockström (Archival):
The planet is actually in a situation where we underestimated risks. Abrupt changes are occurring in a way that’s far beyond realistic expectations in science.

Laurie:
Over recent years, it’s become clear that many climate impacts — heatwaves, fires, floods — are hitting at the extreme end of what was predicted, or even beyond. And it gets worse. We now know that overshooting 1.5 also means that truly catastrophic things become possible — binaries we should all be very worried about. One example is a tipping point — a moment when part of the natural world reaches a breaking point. Like a Jenga tower collapsing after you remove one block too many. Take the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation — the AMOC. It’s like a vast central heating system for the Atlantic Ocean, moving heat northwards. It’s one of the reasons why Britain is so much warmer than parts of Canada at similar latitudes. Now, the AMOC has collapsed before, deep in our planet’s past. And we now know it could happen again because of climate change. If that happened, the central heating system would break down — Arctic sea ice could extend as far south as the Netherlands and the east coast of England.

Stefan Rahmstorf:
But there will be other effects — maybe even more devastating. The shift of tropical rainfall belts. Very strong rain is not going to be where it used to be.

Laurie:
That’s Professor Stefan Rahmstorf, a world-leading AMOC expert. Shifting monsoons, a European deep freeze — changes beyond what societies are built to handle.

Stefan Rahmstorf:
The changes will really threaten food security. That would be one of the main concerns.

Laurie:

And for good reason. Studies have estimated that food growing in the UK would be largely wiped out. §Combined with other climate impacts, AMOC collapse could destroy more than half of the world’s ability to grow wheat and maize — two crops that underpin the global food supply. That’s a planetary-scale cataclysm. And AMOC collapse is just one of several tipping points identified by scientists. It used to be thought that global temperatures would need to rise three, four, or five degrees to trigger them. But in recent years — in one of the most significant scientific developments — this threshold has been revised down. Scientists now think the danger zone really begins around 1.5 degrees — if not before.

Stefan Rahmstorf:
I now consider it more like fifty-fifty — whether we cross that critical tipping point that sends the AMOC into a downward spiral this century. Most likely even within the next few decades.

Laurie:
That’s one expert view — and there are others. It’s uncertain, very uncertain, whether the AMOC could collapse in the coming years. But that’s exactly the problem. We might not know precisely when things could happen as the world overshoots 1.5, but going over it puts the world into an unprecedented danger zone. And it’s not just tipping points. Other threats are emerging too — like the growing chance that multiple major food-growing regions, or “breadbaskets,” will be hit by extreme weather at the same time. One estimate puts that chance at about fifty percent — a coin toss — by the 2040s. Crops failing simultaneously in these regions could cause a global food crisis. So overshooting 1.5°C isn’t just about sea level rise, heatwaves, or floods. It’s also about the risk of truly disastrous things happening on a global scale. These are the stakes now, with climate change. And that’s why it’s so critical that change has been happening — that the course is shifting. But then, in 2024, something shocking happened.

Archival voice (BBC News):
New figures show that last year was the hottest year since records began. Temperatures were 1.6 degrees higher.

Laurie:
As many scientists are quick to stress, that doesn’t mean the Paris Agreement’s stretch goal has been lost. That happens only when temperatures stay above 1.5 for decades. So — there’s still a chance, right? Well, for decades, the rate of planet-heating pollution has been going up — more emissions each year than the last. Like a ship accelerating toward a storm. Recently, that acceleration has begun to slow, as cleaner technologies have kicked in. But that only means the ship’s acceleration has been dialled back — it’s still accelerating, just not as quickly. And that brings us to today.

Glen Peters:
It’s virtually impossible not to cross 1.5 degrees now. It’s just not possible physically to turn the ship around so fast that you can stay below 1.5 degrees.

Laurie:
That’s Glen Peters, a climate scientist at the Centre for International Climate Research in Norway. Think of that ship approaching a storm. There’s no precise point, no exact moment when it enters. But from the trajectory and speed, it’s clear — it’s now impossible to avoid doing so.

Glen Peters:
So we can say with some confidence that within five or ten years, we’ll cross 1.5 degrees.

Laurie:
The ship is entering the storm.

Chapter 4

Laurie:
This is where the world finds itself. Climate chaos is hitting harder and faster than anticipated. Global-scale risks like AMOC collapse can’t be ruled out.

And the low-lying islands? The existential threats they warned about are here. Some are even activating plans to relocate their populations. Millions — billions — of moments of loss are lining up each year. All this fundamentally challenges many mainstream climate stories. Some are simply no longer believable. Because the world has clearly run out of time for 1.5. Which — if you follow those stories — means it didn’t win. That leaves two conclusions. The first: winning can still happen — it just has to be extremely quick. Some people think it will. Global-scale technologies are often invoked: machines to suck carbon from the air and clean up the mess. We’ll hear more about those in the next episode. They’ll play a role — but they’re no silver bullet. Because there is no imminent salvation, however uncomfortable that is to admit. It’s a fantasy. So if the world didn’t win — then it lost. It wasn’t saved. So now what? The end?

If salvation isn’t imminent, then maybe damnation is inevitable. And there are lots of people who now believe that.

Archival voice 1:
We face near-term human extinction as a result of climate chaos — as a result of environmental catastrophe.

Archival voice 2:
Near-term, climate-change-caused societal collapse is inevitable and unavoidable.

Archival voice 3:
Now I suspect we’re facing extinction in the near future.

Laurie:
With the state of the world and the huge risks lurking above 1.5, these views are becoming convincing to more people. Because if the binary outcomes of AMOC collapse or multiple breadbasket failure are now possible, it’s tempting to assume they’d lead to a far bigger catastrophe — a single global collapse. And that’s partly because, in many of the countries that dominate international climate narratives — places like Britain and the United States — that story makes cultural sense. These are societies steeped in stories of doom and dystopia, stories that feel like they explain our current moment. The most common example? Easter Island.

It’s remote — over two thousand miles from South America. The island was settled by Polynesians around the year 1200, in a feat of transoceanic sailing. After that, the population couldn’t leave. Generation after generation, they used the island’s resources. And centuries later, catastrophe followed — or so the story goes.

Archival narrator (BBC):
They used up all their resources. This brought conflict. And their civilisation collapsed.

Laurie:
To this day, all that’s left are a small population of islanders and hundreds of stone statues — the moai — reminders of a society brought to its knees by the overuse of nature. And, like the Easter Islanders, we’re all stuck on one planet, using up its resources. That’s the key message we always hear.

Archival voice (BBC):
Perhaps Easter Island is a little window on our own world.

Laurie:
Because the Easter Islanders were just like us — going about their lives, destroying nature, ignorant of the consequences. It’s simple. It’s intuitive. We can be selfish, short-termist. That’s why stories of doom and inevitable damnation sound so compelling. Here’s author and academic Jared Diamond, who made this story famous.

Archival voice (Jared Diamond):
How could the Easter Islanders have deforested their environment? What did they say when they were cutting down the last palm tree? Didn’t they see what they were doing?

Laurie:
But there’s a problem with this story. It’s just not true. The reality is far more complex. Firstly, the island is called Rapa Nui — the name also shared by its people, though ignored by many outsiders who think they know its story. The island’s environment was transformed — its palm trees did disappear — but that was because of rats, which arrived with the islanders. And anyway, the palms weren’t that useful to them. Instead, they developed a culture that protected resources, that stopped the overuse of nature. Here’s Professor Carl Lipo, an archaeologist who’s spent years studying Rapa Nui.

Carl Lipo:
Archaeologically and ethno-historically, we see consistent evidence that these people had figured out what worked on the island.

Laurie:
Rapa Nui society did collapse — but the main factor was, well, a familiar one. It was the arrival of Europeans. They brought disease, captured and sold Rapa Nui people into slavery. Within a few decades in the late 1800s, more than ninety percent of the population died or were taken from the island.

Carl Lipo:
Because they were so isolated, they really weren’t prepared for the external changes that came with Europeans.

Laurie:
So a canonical story of environmental doom just isn’t true. Like the stories of imminent salvation from climate change, it’s a fantasy — one built on lazy assumptions about human nature and the world’s fate. More interesting — and more relevant — is why those Europeans came. They were driven by unregulated profit-making systems that had spread across the world, pushing people to enslave others and exploit resources. So really, this is a story of how globalised economic systems encourage destructive ways of making money. That’s far more relevant today — like how international fossil-fuel companies are pushing the world into overshoot, all to protect their profits. But that can be changed. It wasn’t inevitable that Rapa Nui society would be destroyed by European expansion. Choices made it happen.

Similarly, it’s not inevitable that overshoot will lead to doom — to the AMOC collapsing and taking global society with it. Avoiding that comes down to choices — particularly those made by governments and companies. How to respond to overshoot. How to explain it. How to hold those responsible accountable.

And what targets come next — including keeping 1.5 alive, as a reminder of the risks and losses we must eventually recover from.

Because there is no inevitable damnation or imminent salvation. Both are fantasies. And they stem from the biggest fantasy of all — the grand, global binary of win or lose. We need to ditch those fantasies. Instead, we need stories where the future isn’t reduced to binaries — stories that help us handle the complexity and tragedy we now face. Because the stories we tell shape what we choose to do — and who we choose to look out for. That brings us back to the story of the ship and the storm. And to help understand, let’s hear from some sailors.

Miranda Merron:
The best strategy to avoid a storm is to sail around it — to take a course that avoids being whacked by it.

Laurie:
That’s Miranda Merron, who’s completed the Vendée Globe — a non-stop, solo, round-the-world race. If you’d hoped to sail around, it’s understandable that as you enter the chaos, you’d hope for instant salvation or assume all is lost. But neither are useful. Fantasies aren’t useful. They can’t help sailors navigate, or make the boat more robust, or spot threats off the bow. Instead, they threaten the crew’s ability to do those things. Here’s another sailor — Nikki Henderson, the youngest person ever to skipper a round-the-world yacht race.

Nikki Henderson:
If you can’t avoid it, you then need to make a top-level strategy — what are we going to do? What’s our plan?

Laurie:
When a ship enters a storm, a huge shift has to happen — from the mindset of “sailing around” to one suited for being in the storm.

Nikki Henderson:
So first comes the “how do we sail through?” And then comes the “how do we stay alive while we do it?”

Laurie:
As this series will explore, overshoot means a similar shift is needed for climate change. Much of our approach still assumes we can sail around the storm. The new climate reality demands that we learn how to navigate within it. So, in the coming episodes, we’ll keep returning to our story of the ship and the storm — to make sense of what that means for our collective future.

Miranda Merron:
There’s always a risk, when facing storm conditions, that the cohesion of the crew may be challenged. And so it’s really important that everyone on board understands what’s coming — and their role in keeping themselves and the boat safe.

Laurie:

That’s a key motivator for this series. We won’t shy away from the terrifying new reality the world faces in overshoot, however difficult that is to face. There are no bedtime stories here. Because more than anything, this series is about dispelling the fantasies that hold us back — and offering new ideas for how to face and respond to the bewildering, frightening reality the world now confronts.

Nikki Henderson:
It’s really hard to accept that something scary and uncontrollable and dangerous is approaching you — and that you can’t escape it. The mistake people make — and this could be an analogy for life — is that we try to shove the fear down in a box.

Laurie:
So, over this series, we open that box — the box of a world beyond 1.5 degrees. We’ll hear ideas, historical stories, and lived experiences that might guide us through what’s next. Like the protesting pensioner who discovered how complacent our leaders are about what’s coming…And the postman with a plan to deliver the mail after a nuclear war. And at every step, we’ll confront the vested interests that don’t want to change course — and should be held accountable for what’s happened and what comes next. Like the fossil-fuel companies insisting everything’s fine, that nothing has to change — because in the future we’ll be able to easily clean up the mess. So much so, they now claim to have invented zero-carbon oil. But that’s next time — on Overshoot.

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