Overshoot: has the world surrendered to climate breakdown?

In 2015, 196 countries signed the Paris Agreement, a legally binding treaty with the goal of limiting global heating to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.

Since then, climate planning has increasingly revolved around overshooting this target, with the hope that temperature levels can be brought back down in later decades. Temperature overshoot models are now the default, but also a cause of scientific concern, as the devastating impacts of crossing this threshold may not be reversible. 

In their new book Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown, Andreas Malm and Wim Carton study this risky approach to policy, and the economic interests that they theorise have led to it. Alasdair spoke to them both about the new book.

Andreas Malm is Associate Professor of Human Ecology at Lund University, and the celebrated author of How to Blow Up a Pipeline, among other works. Wim Carton is Associate Professor of Sustainability Science at Lund University, and the author of over 20 academic articles and book chapters on climate politics.

Further reading: 

• Buy Overshoot from Verso Books
• 'The overshoot myth: you can’t keep burning fossil fuels and expect scientists of the future to get us back to 1.5°C', The Conversation, August 2024
• 'Why Carbon Capture and Storage matters: overshoot, models, and money', Land & Climate Review, 2022
• 'What does the IPCC say about carbon removal?', Land & Climate Review, 2022
• 'Global warming overshoots increase risks of climate tipping cascades in a network model', Nature Climate Change, 2022
• 'Overshooting tipping point thresholds in a changing climate', Nature Climate Change, 2021
• 'Carbon Unicorns and Fossil Futures: Whose Emission Reduction Pathways Is the IPCC Performing?', in Has It Come to This? The Promises and Perils of Geoengineering on the Brink, 2020
• How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire, Verso Books, 2020

Click here to read our investigation into the UK biomass supply chain, or watch a clip from the BBC Newsnight documentary.