When the Paris agreement on climate change was gavelled into being in December 2015, it briefly looked like that rarest of things: a political victory for climate activists and delegates from the poorest regions of the world that, due to colonization by today’s wealthy nations, have contributed little to the climate crisis — but stand to suffer its worst ravages.
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Nearly all modeled pathways for limiting global heating to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels involved temporarily transgressing this target. Each still arrived back at 1.5°C eventually (the deadline being the random end point of 2100), but not before first shooting past it.

Scientists responsible for modeling the response of Earth’s climate to greenhouse gas emissions — primarily caused by burning fossil fuels — called these “overshoot” scenarios. They became the dominant path along which mitigating climate change was imagined to proceed, almost as soon as talk of temperature limits emerged.

De facto, what they said was this: staying below a temperature limit is the same as first crossing it and then, a few decades hence, using methods of removing carbon from the atmosphere to dial temperatures back down again.
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The rise of overshoot ideology

Even if global average surface temperatures are ultimately reversed, climate conditions at regional levels might not necessarily follow the global trend and might end up different from before. Delayed changes in ocean currents, for instance, could mean that the North Atlantic or Southern Ocean continue warming while the rest of the planet does not.

Any losses and damages that accumulate during the overshoot period itself would of course be permanent. For a farmer in Sudan whose livestock perishes in a heatwave that would have been avoided at 1.5°C, it will be scant consolation to know that temperatures are scheduled to return to that level when her children have grown up.

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