www.lesswrong.com/posts/KQpcGSxcHGveWRuek/rent-from-oil-a-goldmine

The post treats near-term overshoot or recent annual temperatures as proof that the Paris Agreement's goals have already been failed. But the Paris Agreement's temperature target is defined in terms of long-term global average warming, not a single month, year, or short-term overshoot.

The UN's own climate explainer states that countries agreed under the Paris Agreement to keep the long-term global average temperature increase well below 2°C and pursue efforts to limit it to 1.5°C. It then explicitly says: "Monthly and annual breaches of 1.5°C do not mean that the world has failed to achieve the Paris Agreement's temperature goal" because the goal refers to warming "over decades, not individual months or years."

A March 18, 2025 UN Geneva news release on the WMO State of the Global Climate report makes the same point even more directly: "While a single year above 1.5°C doesn't break the Paris Agreement's long-term goals". The same article quotes António Guterres saying that "the Paris Agreement goals are still achievable" and that limiting long-term warming to 1.5°C is still possible.

So the article's statement that we have already failed the Paris Agreement's goals is not accurate as stated. It is fair to say the world is dangerously off track, or that current pledges are insufficient, but that is different from saying the Agreement's goals have already been failed in the Agreement's own long-term sense.