As global temperatures move beyond 1.5 °C, overshoot now defines the landscape ahead, sharpening legal claims, exposing economic risks and revealing how far politics still trail the pace of change. There is a point at which ambition becomes memory. The 1.5 °C world was once a promise to the future. It is a promise written into treaties, argued in court, affirmed in court rulings, folded into national policies and business plans, and repeated in classrooms around the world. Scientists now speak of overshoot, a term suggesting that the internationally set and agreed upon line will be crossed, and management of overshoot will try to find the way back, as if recovery were a kind of faith. Surpassing this temperature threshold and then returning to it, known as climate overshoot among the science community, describes a period when the planet warms beyond the agreed limit before cooling again. The Paris Agreement was designed to avoid it. But emissions have kept climbing, and even the most optimistic models now project that the global temperature will rise past 1.5 °C in just a few years, reach 2 °C in the next decade, and will remain above that for decades before coming back down, perhaps1. The new debate is no longer only about prevention but how to recover from what has already been set into motion.