---
title: "In Antalya, the 1.5°C Line Comes Closer While the Hosts Object to the Word ‘Clean’"
description: "Climate Action Tracker finds government action stalled for a fifth year, and Copernicus says the 1.5°C limit could fall as early as 2029"
author: "Jan Sokol"
published: 2026-11-13T14:29:15Z
modified: 2026-11-13T16:34:30Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/in-antalya-the-1-5-c-line-comes-closer-while-the-hosts-objec-63d68d
language: en
tags: ["climate", "cop31", "australia", "turkey", "fossil-fuels", "world"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# In Antalya, the 1.5°C Line Comes Closer While the Hosts Object to the Word ‘Clean’

*Climate Action Tracker finds government action stalled for a fifth year, and Copernicus says the 1.5°C limit could fall as early as 2029*

By Jan Sokol · November 13, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/in-antalya-the-1-5-c-line-comes-closer-while-the-hosts-objec-63d68d

## In brief

- Copernicus says the 1.5°C long-term limit could be crossed as early as 2029, against about 2045 projected in 2015
- Climate Action Tracker says collective government climate action has stalled for a fifth consecutive year
- Current policies point to 2.7°C of warming by 2100; even full delivery of all pledges gives 1.9°C
- COP31 co-hosts Turkey and Australia have opposed adding the word ‘clean’ to electrification targets
- Climate Analytics’ Bill Hare criticised Ursula von der Leyen for not mentioning a fossil fuel transition

When the Paris Agreement was adopted in December 2015, the world expected to reach the treaty’s long-term limit of 1.5°C above preindustrial temperatures around 2045. That left three decades for diplomacy, for new power plants and old ones to be retired, for promises to turn into law. Now the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service says the line could be crossed [as early as 2029](https://climate.copernicus.eu/rapid-approach-15degc-global-warming-threshold-paris-agreement). Sixteen years have dropped out of the calendar.

Copernicus did not hedge about the cause. Its scientists wrote that “this striking change suggests that global warming has accelerated in recent years,” and named human greenhouse gas emissions as “the main driver of this trend.” The 2029 figure is a straight-line extension of the current rate of warming, not a model forecast. That makes it a description of where the present road leads. It does not say the road cannot change.

The warning reached delegates at COP31, the United Nations climate conference in Antalya, on Turkey’s Mediterranean coast, which Turkey and Australia are hosting together. As Bob Berwyn [reported for Inside Climate News, in a story republished by Ars Technica](https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/11/scientists-warn-the-1-5c-climate-change-threshold-could-arrive-by-2029/), the scientists who track what governments actually do arrived with news no better.

## The fifth year

“Our message is a stark one,” said Sarah Heck, a climate policy analyst at Climate Analytics. “Collective government action on climate change has stalled for the fifth consecutive year.” Whatever was gained in the shift away from fossil fuels, she said, had been cancelled by new oil and gas drilling and by governments “delaying, weakening or rolling back their climate policies.”

![A globe rests on a conveyor belt between a wind turbine and a smokestack releasing orange fumes against a yellow background.](https://rews.cc/img/e18acd8ade4eb78a9e46d54e2f0e740629551484.webp)

The numbers behind her words come from the Climate Action Tracker’s [global update, published on November 12](https://climateactiontracker.org/publications/warming-projections-global-update-2026/), under the title “Without rapid action, the world is heading to irrecoverable overshoot.” According to the [full report](https://climateactiontracker.org/documents/1451/CAT_2026-11-12_GlobalUpdate_COP31.pdf), today’s policies put the planet on course for 2.7°C of warming by 2100, within a range of 2.2°C to 3.4°C, a little above last year’s 2.6°C. The group attributes most of that rise to updated data and refined projections rather than to any new act of neglect. It also finds that the latest round of national targets for 2035 has done little to improve the long-term outlook. In its telling, long-term warming passes 1.5°C around 2030, a year after the Copernicus trend line.

Then there is the best case, which assumes that every pledge and every net-zero promise is kept in full. Even then, warming reaches 1.9°C by 2100. Climate scientists consider that level extremely dangerous. A world in which every government keeps its word is still, by this arithmetic, a dangerous world.

The tracker now argues that the realistic aim is a return: to push warming back below 1.5°C by the end of the century and keep it falling afterward. A month earlier, the UN Environment Programme had for the first time described the breach as [“imminent and unavoidable,”](https://www.cnn.com/2026/10/21/climate/cop31-un-climate-report-emissions-gap) and, as rews has reported, its fallback depends on [removing carbon dioxide on a scale nobody can yet manage](https://rews.cc/a/unep-concedes-1-5-c-is-gone-the-fallback-is-a-1-8-c-peak-plu-02935f). Diplomacy has its own grammar for defeat. The target is not missed. It is overshot, and then recovered.

![A red thermometer melts into a puddle against a blue background while a hand holds a spoon beneath the dripping liquid.](https://rews.cc/img/88e2688a8ce984d9c3d710f648f2078e7af12ee9.webp)

## Turning up the stove

Niklas Höhne of the NewClimate Institute granted that renewable energy had advanced. But the “brutal truth,” he said, “is that these positive developments have not yet added up to bend the curve fast enough.” Opening new oil and gas fields, he said, is like finding your dinner burning on the stove and turning the flame up instead of off.

Höhne then turned to the negotiating rooms in Antalya, where delegates are arguing over global goals for renewables and electrification, a debate rews followed as negotiators weighed [a target for electricity’s share of energy](https://rews.cc/a/climate-negotiators-weigh-a-target-to-draw-35-of-energy-from-121be4). The two hosts, he said, have so far opposed putting the word “clean” next to the electrification targets.

“It’s very hard to understand, and the only explanation I can think of is their interest in fossil fuels,” Höhne said.

He did not need to say more. Australia is among the world’s largest coal exporters. Turkey burns a great deal of coal, and its power sector still leans heavily on the most climate-damaging of fuels. Neither country, even while hosting the conference, has offered a specific plan to move away from fossil fuels. A summit belongs, for two weeks, to the country that hosts it, and that country decides which words appear on the agenda. Here the dispute is over one adjective. If it is struck out, a target to electrify the world’s economies could be met with electricity generated from coal.

![A cream electrical plug filled with black coal has two yellow prongs and a black cord, with loose coal pieces on a teal background.](https://rews.cc/img/3c4e03c48d1ab562568c0d6493b6fa87a04db07e.webp)

## The speech that left something out

Bill Hare, chief executive of Climate Analytics, aimed at the rich countries that have long claimed to lead. He noted that Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, said nothing about moving away from fossil fuels when she spoke at COP31 this week. At these meetings an omission can count for as much as a sentence.

“Governments … at this COP have a stark choice,” Hare said. If they keep supporting fossil fuels, he warned, “it would consign humanity and our ecosystems to insurmountable economic damage and irretrievable loss.”

Greta Thunberg was outside the official rooms but not far from them, at her first COP since 2021. “The climate crisis is a matter of life and death,” she said. “The actions from those in power here are completely detached from reality.”

The people the warming falls on are mostly not in Antalya: fishing communities on dying reefs, farmers whose seasons no longer arrive on time, towns downstream of melting ice. The tracker’s current-policy path leads toward exactly those losses. For now the date moves closer every year, while inside the conference halls the delegates are still arguing about the word “clean.”