UN Warns Planet Will Blow Past 1.5 Degrees, World Leaders Form Committee To Process Feelings

NAIROBI, KENYA — The United Nations Environment Programme confirmed this week that the planet is on track to breach the 1.5-degree Celsius warming threshold within the next few years, a finding that prompted representatives from 194 countries to form an emergency working group dedicated entirely to sitting with that information.

The Global Committee on Climate Emotional Readiness, as it will be known through at least its second extension, held its first meeting Tuesday in a windowless conference room, where delegates were asked to name one feeling the report gave them before lunch. Several said "overwhelmed." Two said "numb." The delegate from a small Pacific island nation, whose entire coastline sits inside the projected range of sea-level rise, said "tired of doing this every year," a submission the chair ruled out of order for not technically being a feeling.

"We can't put a number on urgency," said committee spokesperson Marguerite Okonjo-Feld, reading from a laminated card. "What we can do is build a shared emotional baseline, so that future working groups have something to eventually work from." Okonjo-Feld confirmed the committee's next milestone is a three-day retreat to determine whether the group is ready to schedule a retreat.

By Thursday, the committee had produced exactly one action item: a request that the 1.5-degree figure appear in a slightly larger font in the next report, "so it lands." A subcommittee has since formed to study font sizing. It reports back in April.

Not everyone in the building was moping. On the rooftop terrace, a separate delegation representing eleven oil-producing nations held what organizers billed as a "resilience luncheon," serving imported ice sculptures carved into polar bears that were, per the event program, "already gone by dessert, which we felt was on-theme." A representative for the group said the luncheon's real purpose was to remind the emotional-readiness committee downstairs that "feelings are a great first step, but so is doing absolutely nothing for another decade."

Dr. Priya Vashtal, a climate scientist who was invited to neither event, said she learned about both from a hallway television with the sound off. "I've spent twenty years measuring ice cores," she said. "Nothing prepares you for this part." Asked whether the committee's approach worried her, she said only that she had started keeping a second set of graphs, "for morale."

The committee adjourned Friday without a vote, citing the need to "let this settle." A closing statement, finalized after four rounds of edits, expressed "deep concern" and "cautious hope" in equal measure, plus one line, struck before publication, that had simply read, "someone should probably do something."

At press time, the font-sizing subcommittee had itself split into two working groups: one on point size, and one on whether "font sizing" was even the correct feeling to be having about all this.