Climate science says 1.5C is dead. No one wants to bury it.

ANTALYA, Turkey — “Anything is possible if you believe,” croons Turkish pop megastar Tarkan in his theme song for this year’s global COP31 climate conference.

Attendees appear to have taken his words to heart.

The Antalya summit marks the first climate talks since the United Nations told the world global warming would soon exceed 1.5C, effectively burying the totemic Paris Agreement target that has steered COP negotiations for more than a decade.

Yet leaders here are straining to keep the goal on life support.

“We are on course to overshoot the 1.5 degree target, and every fraction of a degree matters. So we must double down,” said European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in her speech to fellow leaders on Wednesday.

“Let’s show that the fight for 1.5C is not over,” Hilda Heine, president of the Marshall Islands told leaders.

Even before the talks began, Danish Climate Minister Samira Nawa told POLITICO her country’s priority at COP31 was “to push for keeping the 1.5C target in the heart of global climate ambitions.”

Other leaders and ministers, reviving slogans from COPs past, have exhorted their colleagues to “keep 1.5 alive” or ensure the target remains “within reach.”

But scientists say that dream is over.

The U.N. last month said that, even if countries dramatically slash planet-warming emissions starting right now, the best outcome would be a rise in global temperatures of 1.8 degrees. If they also deploy vast amounts of carbon removal tech to clean up the atmosphere, there’s a chance of getting back to 1.5 degrees after surpassing it — in theory.

In reality, though, greenhouse gas emissions are still rising and the carbon-hoovering technologies needed to achieve that reversal are unproven at scale.

The collective ambition of national climate plans, already insufficient before the U.N.’s announcement, is even weaker than projected last year. Countries that have been among the strongest proponents of meeting the 1.5-degree target are watering down efforts to achieve it.

But at the same time, many countries (and climate scientists) fear that publicly dumping the rhetoric around 1.5C will open the door to weakening global ambitions even further. Highlighting other possible targets, such as the 1.8C mentioned by the U.N., would be a “slippery slope,” warned one European climate negotiator.

“I do not support the political messaging of keeping 1.5C alive — but on the other hand, I don't want to lose it,” said Johan Rockström, a leading climate scientist and director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

“Politicians, when they say that, may naively think that we somehow still are on this linear, incremental journey that can simply take us to safety, which is not the case,” he added. “On the other hand, if we scientifically criticize it, the risk is that they do indeed say: ‘OK, let's just drop it and aim for 2 degrees instead,' which would be a big mistake.”

For island nations already losing land and livelihoods to rising oceans, the 1.5 degree target is not merely symbolic. It represents their very survival.

“Our response to the threat of overshoot must be overwhelming, or the world we know is over,” said Heine, the Marshall Islands president. “Overshoot means waves eating away our shores, flooding that destroys towns, schools, hospitals. It destroys our land and ocean.”

The temperature target was not chosen arbitrarily. It represents the level of warming scientists say the planet can endure before the heat trapped in the atmosphere unleashes exponentially greater dangers.

In the Paris accord, countries vowed to limit warming to below 2 degrees and “ideally” 1.5 degrees. The second target has become so dominant that the International Court of Justice last year declared it the primary goal.

A group of developed and highly vulnerable nations, known as the High Ambition Coalition, have called for a credible response to the overshoot as one key COP31 outcome.

“There is no way we can lose that anchor, out of our moral responsibility toward the people who have contributed the least and are the most impacted,” said Christiana Figueres, who headed the U.N. climate body when the Paris Agreement was adopted.

But promises have not aligned with reality.

“Leaders, and in particular those from developed countries, cannot keep expanding fossil fuel production while claiming to be committed to 1.5 degrees,” U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres told world leaders in his opening speech on Wednesday.

Yet immediately after his speech, leaders did just that.

Australia, COP31 co-hosts with Turkey, is expanding investments in coal and natural gas, even as its Climate and Energy Minister Chris Bowen urges leaders in Antalya to act with “urgency, solidarity and resolve.”

“With every minute that we fail to achieve the targets set out in the Paris Agreement, the risks and costs we face continue to grow,” said Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Two days earlier, he had celebrated the discovery of two new oil fields.

“The science is clear. Breaching 1.5 isn’t where we down tools and give up,” Katie White, the U.K.’s climate minister, said in response to the U.N. findings. White promised COP31 was the place to double down on action — but a day later, her own department approved a major natural gas project in the North Sea.

Meanwhile the United States, the largest polluter in world history, has withdrawn from the Paris Agreement and is no longer part of COP talks. Donald Trump’s abandonment of efforts to address global warming has left a large gap in the world’s collective efforts to cut emissions.

Tina Stege, the Marshall Islands’ climate envoy, acknowledged the difficulty of the challenge. But she was unbending.

“That's not a reason to not do everything that we absolutely can,” she told reporters. “Every country that showed up at this talk to do the work needs to do that work and more.”

Doing more means ramping up clean electrification and alternative fuels, say experts.

It also means dramatically curbing short-term climate pollutants, such as methane. That’s emerging as a possible response to the overshoot declaration in the final agreement from this year’s negotiations, according to the European diplomat cited above.

“If we cut methane by nearly half by 2030, we could avoid almost 0.3 degrees of warming by the 2040s and save 250,000 lives every year,” said Mia Mottley, the prime minister of Barbados, on Wednesday. “This buys us the time to get back to the 1.5 degrees.”

The politics are tricky. Even as technological advances have allowed for better detection of the potent pollutant, the U.S. and Europe have weakened regulations aimed at curbing methane emissions.

Mottley was adamant nonetheless that flagging global ambitions were no reason to give up.

“I call for a global movement: 1.5 billion voices for 1.5 degrees,” she said. “We need to do this before we meet at COP32 next year. … Make 1.5 impossible to ignore on the planet Earth.”