Should the 1.5° Climate Target Be Sent to Hospice Care?

by Lowell Bliss
Director, Eden Vigil Institute for Environmental Leadership

Simon and I are both leaders in two separate faith-based climate organizations. His is the world’s largest. We were standing together at the back of a room during the COP25 climate summit in Madrid in 2019 watching young activists organize themselves for an event the next day, another effort to pressure negotiators to move the Paris Agreement forward. I leaned over. “Simon, when are you going to give up on the 1.5° target?”

Simon didn’t hesitate. “When the IPCC tells us it is no longer possible,” he said.  He sounded downright Churchillian at the time.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is the body of experts who assess the science of climate change impacts and solutions and advise the policy makers of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the UNFCCC. Recently, the IPCC concluded what is called their Sixth Assessment Cycle and released in March the “Summary for Policymakers” of their Sixth Synthesis Report. The scientists had a lot to say about a 1.5°C average global warming above pre-industrial levels. They said that even a temporary failure to prevent a 1.5° warming would have devastating and irreversible effects. They said these impacts are even worse than previously projected. And they said our breach of the 1.5° target, at our current rate of emissions, can be expected in the near term, which they define as before 2040. They tell us all of that, but then they say (at least in the paraphrase of Greenpeace’s excellent summary): “1.5°C is still within reach: With urgent action, the Paris long-term goal can still be met.”

Like the childhood game of Simon Sez, IPCC says, “It’s still possible,” and so Simon and the rest of us say: “Okay.” Earlier, we may have responded, “Phew,” but nowadays I find myself wanting to respond with an incredulous, “Really?”

I’m not a scientist nor a medical physician. Think of me as a timid sibling who has truly loved the 1.5°C target. I’m sheepishly expecting—maybe even wanting-- an older brother or sister to stand up among us in the hospital waiting room and say: “I hate to admit this, but perhaps it’s time to talk about hospice care.” Palliative care is different than therapeutic care, but it is still care; it is still professional care; and sometimes the different function and goals that it serves makes hospice care, necessary care.

My heart was first broken by the 1.5°C target long before the 6th Synthesis Report and long before I attended my first climate summit. The 2011 documentary titled The Island President tells the story of Mohammed Nasheed, president of the Maldives, travelling to COP15 in Copenhagen in 2009 to advocate for his nation of 1,200 islands. “Copenhagen” has become a byword of climate failure, but the first and deepest failure was the blow struck to Nasheed and other low-lying island nations threatened by sea-level rise. Prioritize the 1.5°C target, not the 2.0°C one, they pleaded. According to one observer, when China insisted on removing the 1.5°C target from the negotiated text, Nasheed exclaimed, “How can you ask my country to go extinct?"

I’m a praying man. I was so moved by watching The Island President that on one trip to India, I included a 24-hour layover in the Maldives. I walked around the capital island of Malé, its circumference easily traversed in a couple hours. I engaged in the practice called “pray walking,” striding along while mumbling under my breath to God: “Please move the nations to make the reductions in greenhouse gas emissions that will spare this beloved country.”

COP21 and the Paris Agreement represented a second chance for the 1.5°C target, where although it wasn’t prioritized, it did make it into the text. Article 2 established the 2°C target but also committed to “pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, recognizing that this would significantly reduce the risks and impacts of climate change.” After the Agreement was adopted, the Eiffel Tower lit up with declarations of “Accord De Paris c’est fait,” and “FORTHEPLANET” but also surprisingly “1.5 DEGREES.” Who decided that? I loved the French for that.

I’m a praying man. COP21 was my first COP. My colleagues and I were staying in a small village an hour north of Paris. One day near the end of the conference, my friends had already gone into town. I, however, hiked up to the forest behind a nearby chateau. According to the news, the fate of any agreement seemed to be in the balance, and I wanted to pray. The quotation often attributed to Martin Luther King came to mind: “The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.” The “mighty right arm of the Lord” is a reference in the Psalms, and so I prayed that God would place his hand on the far end of the universe’s arc and bend it more sharply, more quickly toward climate justice. If any eavesdropper was in those woods, they would have thought I was a Lamaze coach: “Push! Push!” I pleaded with God.

Also in Paris, whether as a negotiating sop to nations like the Maldives or not, the UNFCCC invited the IPCC—which is an independent body—to compile a report on “the impacts of global warming of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.” The report, known as SR1.5, was published right before COP24 in Katowice, Poland in 2018. The report was so devastating that it served as a jolt to the planetary conscience. It felt like the height of cruelty to our neighbors not to prioritize this more ambitious—but for some, existential—target. COP24 was also the summit that served as Greta Thunberg’s debut, and who knows how much wind the Report gave to her sails? Consequently, at all the subsequent COPs, it seemed you were more likely to hear the 1.5°C target mentioned, than the 2°C one. And when the window of opportunity kept closing on emission-reduction initiatives, the rallying cry at COP26 in Glasgow and the recent one in Sharm El Sheik was “Keep 1.5 Alive!”

Maybe it’s that slogan that has predisposed me to imagine last week’s IPCC 6thSummary report in a new context. “Keep her alive,” is something that an alarmed family says to a surgical team in the dim lighting and fraught fatigue of a hospital waiting room. The Sixth Synthesis Report said nothing new to me, including about the 1.5°C target, but something shifted in me as I examined one graph in particular. A chart at the end of a patient’s hospital bed might be designed to communicate only to attending physicians, but the graphs in an IPCC report are intended for ease of interpretation by laypeople.

IPCC, Sixth Assessment Summary for Policymakers, Panel A, Figure SPM.5, p. 29

You and I can both see the black line rising inexorably on the left, documenting past emissions between 2000-2015. We can read that “2019 emissions were 12% higher [not lower] than 2010.” The chart doesn’t tell us that in 2022, seven years after the Paris Agreement was adopted, emissions set a record, proving that they had not peaked during the pandemic-related downturn. And what about the righthand side of the graph is too difficult for us laypeople to interpret? Even the most optimistic projections about current commitments and implemented policies are unable to push the pink (the hue of hope, I suppose) into the most generous estimates of what the green and the blue need. Families in waiting rooms don’t care about next week, let alone the years 2040 or 2100, and so I trace my finger along the 2023 axis. The implications are ominous. The red line on what is actually happening is still on the way up, while the blue line of what is required to “keep 1.5 alive” is a precipitous plunge, the stuff of miracles, it seems. The graph tries to reflect this in its headline about involving “rapid, deep and in most cases immediate” reductions—but the word “involves” seems so dispassionate, and the tagline—“Net zero CO2 and net zero GHG emissions can be achieved through strong reductions across all sectors”—(emphasis mine) sounds, for all its factual basis, almost cruel.

I am a praying man. Since 2020, I’ve helped lead a global praying network called Climate Intercessors. We meet on the second Tuesdays of each month for four online prayer meetings. When I first saw the IPCC graph, I visualized that we’ve been praying in a similar fashion as I prayed in the forest outside Paris. I imagined that we’ve been asking God to put the palm of his mighty right arm on that red line of NDCs and Implementation Policies so that he might—Push! Push!—the curve more sharply, more quickly down toward what the scientists say—and we believe them—is required to meet the 1.5°C target. Neither is our network made up of people who just pray but don’t act. We lobby and march and write and work as passionately and sacrificially as those who don’t identify in the faith-based space. So, I’ve also imagined us with all our allies standing on that red line with sledgehammers pounding away at its stubborn tensile strength, blow after blow trying to make the arc bend down toward the blue. Some of our colleagues are already in solidarity with the nations most vulnerable to the suffering of a 1.5°C warmer world. I picture them with ropes looped over the red line of NDCs and implementation. They are pulling, pulling, pulling, trying to bend the arc down. The palms of their hands are bloody and their forearms ache.

For the IPCC to so glibly tell us that it “still works on paper,” feels, if not somehow wrong, then at least irrelevant to the moment. My friend recently wrote me: “Simon notwithstanding, that hope for the possibility of the 1.5°C target has been an illusion for nearly a decade; an assessment by experts siloed within their narrow disciplines projecting a possible case provided that, if everything outside of their realm goes just right (e.g. politics, international relations, military conflict, banking systems, religious engagement, etc.), then maybe they can still model their 1.5°C scenario.”

Glibness? Cruelty? Irrelevance? Whatever it felt like, it made me wake up and realize that desperate hospital waiting rooms are populated by more than just medical experts, grieving families, and timid siblings. Chaplains—professional in their own right—are also common figures at hand in a hospital when calamitous pronouncements are made. It is an act of great leadership—spiritual, emotional—for a chaplain to step forward and compassionately suggest, “It may be time that we consider a different approach to care.”

We are all familiar with the urgent spaces of a hospital, whether it be the emergency room or the ICU. “Code Blue!” the intercom blares, and the medical professionals scramble to keep the patient alive. My mom, who passed in 2018 at age 82, had a different story. She had suffered for many years from conditions which the doctors told us were “chronic but not terminal.” If Mom was going to die, it would likely be from a hardening of her liver and I remember one meeting with her physician, a geriatrics specialist, who told us, “She will be fine, and then one day she won’t be. And then when that happens, she will likely be gone within a week.” That finally happened. My sister back in Kansas called one day to break the news: Mom was failing and they were moving her immediately to hospice care. It was a Tuesday, and she was not expected to survive until the weekend.

We had said goodbye to Mom. There was no need to go to her. Mom was uncommunicative, and the best that we could do was for my sister to hold the phone up to her ear while I said “I love you” from a thousand miles away. I regret missing out on the hospice experience. I would have liked to have been there with family and friends. They talked to Mom and held her hand. They sang hymns and read Scriptures. They were expressively grateful to the nurses who treated Mom’s symptoms and kept her comfortable.

The hospice where my mother breathed her last publishes a FAQ sheet that includes the question “Isn’t hospice care really just ‘giving up’ and meant for people with just a few days to live?” I suspect they get that “giving up” question (and accusation) a lot. But hospices operate with a different, but equally legitimate, philosophy:

In reality, hospice care is a specific type of compassionate medical care for individuals in the final stages of an incurable illness, designed to help them live as fully and comfortably as they can. We encourage people to think of hospice as the "something more" after being told there are no more treatment options available. Hospice care is intended for at least the last six months of life in order to best care for the client physically, spiritually and emotionally. "

There are many reasons why people like myself who might otherwise step up and be chaplains in the moment of 1.5’s calamity are cowed into the role of timid sibling instead. One is certainly the accusation of “giving up.” Neither do we want to let our brothers and sisters down when our swings of the sledgehammer or tugs of the rope might be crucial to bending the arc of climate justice. Some might suggest that a hospice is a pleasant place to work: soft music plays, medicines are dispensed on a regular schedule, everyone says thank you. But the experience of chaplains isn’t like that . A move to hospice seems to call them to a higher level of solidarity with the suffering.

One of the biggest obstacles to answering the question of “Should the 1.5° Climate Target Be Sent to Hospice Care?” is that we have no inkling what climate hospice might look like. It is not as easy as moving my mom from therapeutic to palliative care, with their already thought-through philosophies. Right now, “climate hospice” is just a metaphor. For example, we need to ask the question: who or what is being transferred to hospice in the first place? Is it the 1.5° climate target itself? Actually, I think it is our hopes for the target, and our accumulated body of hard work on behalf of that target, which is dying and needs to be treated with dignity. Maybe it is the whole idea of targets itself that needs to be released. Why are we chasing numbers, which for all the negotiations that went into them at the COPs, still seem arbitrary? Would a stay in climate hospice allow us to replace our hopes for abstractions like warming targets with hopes for such things as life, neighborly love, and alleviation of suffering, things which already hold meaning for us? When 1.5°C is breached, we wouldn’t automatically double our commitment to the next Paris target, 2°C, but rather vow to struggle against every fractional degree of additional warming.

Is it the Maldives and the vulnerable nations that we move into hospice—similar to how the world seems to feel about Haiti right now? The only way to keep that from perpetuating the colonialism that helped cause the dying in the first place is if the world uses its hospice stay to speed up Loss & Damage negotiations, as well as full funding of adaptation funds. In the hospice, the vulnerable nations are first in line for this funding, and our response should be generous. Our compulsion to interrogate should be reticent.

It should also be noted that it is not just a dying patient that moves into hospice; the whole family accompanies him or her, and the chaplain devotes as much attention to them as to the patient. Chaplains mobilize to provide comfort and to facilitate the mourning that allows families to move on. The current mental health crisis around climate change, particularly among youth, is well documented. A study of 16-25 year old youth reported in The Lancet in 2021 showed that 59% of the respondents expressed being “extremely worried” with 84% at least moderately worried, which seems in keeping with facing a future crisis of climate change’s magnitude. But how do we interpret 68% saying they are sad, 68% afraid, and 58% angry? This sounds like the emotions you will encounter in a hospice, among our youth who didn’t have to wait for this latest report to know that something they love is dying. Saying that the 1.5°C target should be sent to hospice is another way of recognizing that many of our fellows are badly in need of immediate emotional care. And if we are going to re-deploy them to tackle the 2°C or subsequent Paris targets, there is a real danger that we find them a hollowed shell because they’ve never been allowed to mourn their losses. We need to mobilize chaplains and mental health professionals.

I’m a man who prays, but I also try to be a man who grows in his prayers. I stare at the IPCC graph and I know that my prayers—if I don’t give up on praying altogether—need to change. I once might have prayed: “God, we need a miracle from you as the only thing that will save us.” But I’ve never thought that God was under any obligation to rescue us from this mess that we’ve created. I believe I can begin to pray in the same way that my prayers changed for my mom when she entered hospice. I don’t know yet what that will sound like, but with all due deference to my colleagues and the excellent work of the IPCC, I’m ready to go find out.