World climate leaders are now conceding that the global warming will shoot past the hard limit they set a decade ago, breaching what they consider a danger zone., but they are not conceding defeat.

United Nations officials, scientists, and analysts are saying all is not loss because even though the world will stay that in danger zone for decades, global temperatures can eventually be forced back down below the red line they set in the Paris climate agreement. It's called overshoot.

The limit, initially agreed in the 2015 Paris climate agreement, is to prevent global temperatures from reaching or exceeding 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times. The figure is based on temperatures averaged over a decade and is now at about 1.3 degrees Celsius (2.3 degrees Fahrenheit) and even exceeded the 1.5 mark for a year last year. 

The risks including global extinction of coral reefs, exponential growth of killer heat waves, triggering tipping points for irreversible changes in the Amazon Basin, ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica and maybe even the entire Atlantic ocean current system, according to a special 2018 U.N. report that showed how 1.5 starts the danger zone.

For years UN officials have insisted that 1.5 is still alive. But now, even though they insist the goal is still pertinent, those same leaders in the last few weeks are acknowledging that at least for a few years or more likely decades the 1.5 mark will be in the world's rear view mirror.

The idea behind overshoot is that temperatures will push past the 1.5 mark, but will be reduced over time. The hope is that once the world stops putting heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere from burning coal, oil and natural gas, then natural carbon sinks such as trees and oceans that suck the carbon pollution out of the air will bring levels down.

Add to that hopes for new technology that would pull carbon dioxide out of the air. Once the concentration of carbon in the air goes down, temperatures will too, eventually.