Record-breaking temperatures every month since June 2023 have spiked higher than models predicted—but there is no scientific consensus on why this occurred.

The problem is a gap in climate science, with no systems in place to understand short-term phenomena—though “we need them badly,” write researchers Gavin Schmidt and Zeke Hausfather in a guest essay for the New York Times.

They ask: What can we expect from an unpredictable post-1.5°C world, and how can we prepare?

Since climate reporting generally works in seven-year cycles of data collection and analysis, current models only reflect data up to 2014. Schmidt and Hausfather advise increasing real-time monitoring through satellites and economic data so climate scientists can predict change more quickly and accurately.

“We need to create a better way for climate models to reflect new observations,” they write. But increasing climate monitoring requires sustained funding for climate labs, including from the United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the U.S. Department of Energy. U.S. President-elect Donald Trump cut NOAA budgets in 2017, and is likely to do so again.

To analyze data in under six months as the essay authors suggest, agencies like Copernicus, the European climate service provider, could pick up the slack by increasing funding to their own data collection.

As the authors call for faster research turnaround amid record-breaking temperatures, other experts warn that these repeated extremes suggest the 1.5°C limit set in the Paris Agreement will be surpassed. “This raises a number of unknowns in terms of what overshoot means for the impacts of climate change on the planet, people, and ecosystems,” writes an international team of scientists in a guest post for Carbon Brief.

One of the clearest impacts will be on extreme heat events, which will become longer, deadlier, and costlier, found researchers from PROVIDE, a group that uses climate data to predict risk under different levels of warming.

If climate policies and emissions continue as they stand, PROVIDE projects that Chennai [India] will experience extreme heat stress conditions for approximately half of the days per year. “Wet bulb” heat events, such as Chennai experienced in May, combine heat and humidity to overheat bodies beyond what many people can survive.

However, proactive investments in adaptation and mitigation could walk back some of the damage.

Even if carbon can be successfully removed from the atmosphere after overshooting 1.5°C, PROVIDE finds that days of extreme heat per year will increase to peak mid-century before declining.

PROVIDE scientists recommend planning for adaptation, regardless of when emissions peak and whether carbon can be successfully removed. Adaptation is expensive, with costs for developing countries estimated at US$194-366 billion per year.

But climate change is already expensive: climate disasters from 2014 to 2023 caused US$2 trillion worth of losses, found [pdf] a report commissioned by the International Chamber of Commerce.

“The possibility of reversing long-term impacts in the future does not reduce the urgent need to act now on closing the wide gap in current adaptation efforts,” writes the PROVIDE team in Carbon Brief.