The publication, known as the Hamburg Climate Outlook, includes data from over 140 countries, and has found that it will be implausible to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius for social reasons, rather than technical ones.

The researchers examined ten drivers of social change — including the United Nations climate policy, legislation, and climate protests — that could reduce emissions and control temperatures. These social factors were found to be significantly more important than the “tipping points” — such as the melting of Arctic sea ice and ice sheets or the collapse of global rainforests — which often haunt climate predictions. The researchers concluded that avoiding these fearsome tipping points is essential to the sustainability of human civilisation in the late 21st century, but they would have limited influence on global temperatures before 2050.

Instead, the study found that consumption patterns, corporate responses, and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine have slowed the elimination of carbon fuels and their replacement with zero-emission alternatives.

The findings reinforced another study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), which focused on the United States and was conducted using machine learning. It concluded that the world would breach the internationally agreed-upon goal of 1.5 degrees Celsius warming between 2033 and 2035 — a much more pessimistic view than previous models such as those offered by the United Nations’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and one which has reignited the debate on whether it’s still possible to limit global warming to the 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming set as an aspirational goal in the Paris climate agreement of 2015.

While the algorithm determined that a high-pollution world would cross that threshold by 2050, while a world with steep emissions cuts would delay it only until 2054, some scientists believe that there is still hope. Michael Mann of the University of Pennsylvania and Bill Hare and Carl-Friedrich Schleussner of Climate Analytics, argue that the 1.5-degree mark is still possible if the world reduces its carbon emissions by 50 percent by 2030. They believe that giving up on keeping the warming below 1.5 degrees was “a self-fulfilling prophecy,” and the challenge is to limit warming as much as possible, regardless of a precise threshold like that set in the Paris Agreement.

The view of these scientists is in line with the University of Hamburg’s findings that attitudes and consumption habits, not technical factors, are the main engines pushing global society down its current path toward severe climate disruption.

So the answer to whether we can reduce heating to the goals set in the Paris Agreement, it seems, does in fact still lie with us. What we choose to do in the next few years will be critical to our own success — or downfall.