Thread: Any doubts about Climate Change?

NOAA–August 2024 was the warmest August recorded

Summer 2024 was the warmest Summer recorded (June–August)

NOAA

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Big oil faces a rising number of climate-focused lawsuits, report finds

Big oil is facing a soaring number of climate-focused lawsuits, a new analysis has found. ItÂ’s a sign that more communities are demanding accountability for the industryÂ’s contributions to the climate crisis.

For the report, published on Thursday, Oil Change International and the climate research organization Zero Carbon Analytics pulled data from a Columbia University database, focusing on cases in which the worldÂ’s 25 largest fossil fuel producers were named as defendants.

The number of cases filed against those companies globally each year has nearly tripled since 2015 – the year the UN Paris climate agreement was signed – with 86 cases filed and 40 currently pending, the authors found.

“No major oil and gas company is pledging to do the bare minimum to prevent climate chaos, so communities are taking them to court,” said David Tong, a campaign manager at the research and advocacy group Oil Change International, who worked on the report.

The suits were filed by cities, states and other government organizations, as well as environmental groups, Indigenous tribes and individuals. Fifty were filed in US courts, while 24 were filed in European countries, five in Australia and four in Nigeria.

The largest growth in litigation was in complaints demanding compensation for climate damages, which account for 38% of cases, the authors found. Thirty-three such lawsuits have been filed since 2015, 30 of which were brought since 2017. A key reason for the increase in these cases is that “the science has just gotten a lot better”, Noah Walker-Crawford, a research fellow at the London School of Economics’ Grantham Institute, said on a Tuesday press call.

Attribution science allows scientists to “link specific extreme weather events to climate change with greater accuracy”, and also quantify the climate impacts attributable to specific fossil fuel companies’ emissions, explained Walker-Crawford, who did not work on the report.

No fossil fuel company has yet been forced to pay climate damages, but the potential liabilities are massive, with previous reports estimating the sectorÂ’s largest polluters are responsible for trillions of dollars in lost homes, livelihoods and infrastructure.

The climate damage case that has progressed the farthest was brought by a Peruvian farmer in 2015 against energy giant RWE, which he accuses of contributing to climate impacts that are threatening his Andean home. In an unprecedented move in 2022, judges from Germany visited Peru to determine the level of damage caused by RWE, which is also EuropeÂ’s largest emitter. RWE did not respond to a request for comment.

In the US, the lawsuits seeking climate damages also accuse defendants of intentionally sowing doubt about the climate crisis despite longstanding knowledge of the planet-heating impacts of their products.

The report’s authors documented an increase in other kinds of climate lawsuits, including challenges to allegedly misleading advertising. Such suits today make up 16% of all climate complaints against oil majors and are a “are a winning legal tactic”, the authors wrote. Nine cases have concluded, of which judges ruled in favor of the defendant in only one.

About 12% of climate lawsuits in the analysis were brought against fossil fuel companies over their failure to implement emissions reduction plans that align with the Paris climate accord. A landmark 2021 ruling wherein a Dutch court ordered Shell to cut its emissions by 45% by 2030 came in response to one such lawsuit. Shell declined to comment.

Ryan Meyers, senior vice-president at the fossil fuel lobby group American Petroleum Institute said the study described an “ongoing, coordinated campaign to wage meritless, politicized lawsuits against a foundational American industry and its workers”, and called the efforts “nothing more than a distraction from important national conversations and an enormous waste of taxpayer resources”.

New kinds of climate litigation are also emerging. This year, victims of climate disasters and NGOs filed the worldÂ’s first-ever criminal climate lawsuit in France against the CEO and directors of the French oil company TotalEnergies; it alleges the defendants have contributed to the deaths of victims of climate-fueled climate disasters. TotalEnergies did not respond to a request for comment.

The analysis does not account for all climate litigation filed worldwide. Other complaints target companies working in other parts of the fossil fuel supply chain, such as pipeline companies, and still others challenge governments for their pro-fossil fuel policies.

Michael Gerrard, the faculty director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, who did not work on the analysis, said that although the fossil fuel industry faces a “formidable number of cases”, “none of them have broken through” except some focused on advertising. But he added that the coming years “may bring some important and possibly decisive developments in this campaign”, and that new legal theories are in development.

These lawsuits “will not solve the climate crisis alone”, said Tong of Oil Change International, but they can be an important vehicle to hold polluters accountable.

“The growing number of lawsuits against fossil fuel corporations underlines how their historic and continued role in driving and profiting from climate change is catching up to them,” he said.

NASA-August 2024 was the warmest August recorded

NASA Summer 2024 (June-August} was the warmest Summer recorded

NASA

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Climate scientists troubled by damage from floods ravaging central Europe

Picturesque towns across central Europe are inundated by dirty flood water after heavy weekend rains turned tranquil streams into raging rivers that wreaked havoc on infrastructure.

The floods have killed at least 15 people and destroyed buildings from Austria to Romania. The destruction comes after devastating floods around the world last week when entire villages were submerged in Myanmar and nearly 300 prisoners escape a collapsed jail in Nigeria, where floods have affected more than 1 million people.

Climate scientists say they are troubled by the damage but unsurprised by the intensity. “The catastrophic rainfall hitting central Europe is exactly what scientists expect with climate change,” said Joyce Kimutai, of Imperial College London’s Grantham Institute.

She said the death and damage across Africa and Europe highlighted “how poorly prepared the world is for such floods”.

Scientists take care when attributing extreme rains to human influence because so many factors shape the water cycle. Although it is well established that hotter air can hold more moisture, whether violent downpours occur also depends on how much water is available to fall.

Sonia Seneviratne, a climate scientist at ETH Zürich, said immediate analyses of the central European floods suggested most of the water vapour came from the Black Sea and Mediterranean Sea, both of which have grown hotter as a result of human-induced climate breakdown, resulting in more water evaporating into the air.

“On average, the intensity of heavy precipitation events increases by 7% for each degree of global warming,” she said. “We now have 1.2C of global warming, which means that on average heavy precipitation events are 8% more intense.”

Weather station data indicates that bursts of September rainfall have become heavier in Germany, Poland, Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia since 1950, Kimutai said.

In Poland, the floods collapsed a bridge and washed houses away, according to local media. In the Czech Republic, helicopters rescued stranded citizens from rising waters. In Austria, one firefighter is reported to have died in the rescue efforts.

In the Austrian capital, Vienna, which has been home to EuropeÂ’s biggest weather and climate conference since 2005, the rain flooded a motorway and closed metro lines.

Erich Fischer, a climate scientist at ETH Zürich, said scientists at the conference used to discuss the physics of how climate change increases rainfall intensity over lunch on the banks of the New Danube. “It is ironic to now see these banks, where we were sitting in the sun and discussing the science of extreme precipitation, now being flooded.”

The death toll from floods hinges on how well communities prepare for the rain and respond to its effects. Scientists have urged governments to invest in adapting to extreme weather events through early warning systems, more resilient infrastructure and support schemes for victims, while also ending their reliance on fossil fuels.

“It’s clear that even highly developed countries are not safe from climate change,” said Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at the Grantham Institute. “As long as the world burns oil, gas and coal, heavy rainfall and other weather extremes will intensify, making our planet a more dangerous and expensive place to live.”

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Gore calls out climate backsliding amid progress on renewables

Corporate giants and some countries are backsliding on their climate commitments — a worrying sign in a year that otherwise saw hopeful growth in renewables, Al Gore and his investment colleagues say in a new report from Generation Investment Management.

Why it matters: The sustainability trends report details the slowdowns in the pace of growth of electric vehicle deployment in the U.S., along with hiccups in the speed of wind energy deployment in some areas.

Zoom in: Gore tells Axios that the hard work of trying to meet ambitious emissions reduction and deforestation targets has become more clear to CEOs and world leaders, and led many to walk away from past promises.

• "We see that some of the ballyhooed climate promises are beginning to resemble New Year's resolutions: easy to make and hard to keep," Gore says. "And the reality is, as we note candidly, the world is not on track at present, to reach the goal of net zero emissions by 2050."
• Oil and gas companies that were leaning into the renewables side of their businesses have gone in the other direction, chasing shareholder returns.
• Meanwhile, major financial firms with sustainability targets have been fleeing groups of like-minded corporations.
• Part of this is coming from political pressure, Gore says, with a campaign against ESG investing and so-called "woke capital" stoking fears of potential legal liability for companies that stay in certain climate alliances.

Yes, but: Renewable electricity generation has made major gains in the past year, Gore says, with solar power as the big standout. The overall snapshot from the report of the energy transition is of significant momentum despite many setbacks.

• "The way we see it, there is a big wheel turning in the right direction, and some smaller wheels turning in the opposite direction," he says.
• "The big wheel is going to prevail in setting the direction of travel for the world, but the pace of the transition away from fossil fuels is what's being struggled over now."
• In particular, Gore and his colleagues call for a "new wave" of laws that would set national end dates for fossil fuel use in order to put teeth into otherwise empty net zero emissions promises.

Between the lines: The report itself calls out those who have not fulfilled recent climate commitments:

• "The bigger problem has been a lack of courage, fortitude and determination at a global scale as some of the leaders who made big promises at the climate summit in Glasgow in 2021 realize how difficult those promises will be to keep," it states.

The intrigue: Gore, who serves as chairman of Generation Investment Management, says there has been a deflation of the hype surrounding the deals reached in Dubai last year, including the landmark official agreement to "transition away" from fossil fuels.

• He places much of the blame for this on fossil fuel companies and their allies, as well as interest groups going after climate commitments in the financial sector and at the national, regional and local government level.

• Gore cited green hydrogen technology and battery storage additions that could be game-changers in determining the least costly, and most reliable sources of power.

Zoom out: In the U.S., the Biden administration has pitched its climate programs as ways to add domestic jobs and factories.

• But the report finds the goals of shifting quickly to "clean" energy and using the transition as industrial policy — to create jobs by expanding clean tech manufacturing, are at odds due to China's "nearly insurmountable" lead in the markets for solar panels, electric cars, batteries and more.
• "How this tension gets resolved will determine how fast the energy transition can proceed," it states.

"Renewables have been winning" the competition with fossil fuels for the cheapest source of electricity generation, he says. "Now roughly $2 are being spent on the renewables side for every one on [expanding] fossil fuels. And that's genuine progress."

• "But again, we're not on track to where we need to be," Gore says.
• Gore hopes the coming year will bring progress on a demand-side signal to reduce fossil fuel use, saying, "It's been obvious for some time that we need a global price on carbon."

The bottom line: The report reads as a "yes, but" summary of this point in the energy transition, which lines up with where the U.S. and many other countries are.

• Perhaps the most important insight is found at the start, where Gore and Blood write: "Unfortunately, the biggest problem we confront has not gone away: the sheer power of human and economic inertia."

JMA–August 2024 was the 2^nd warmest August recorded

Summer 2024 (JJA) was the 2^nd warmest Summer recorded

JMA

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• Global heating ‘doubled’ chance of extreme rain in Europe in September

Planet-heating pollution doubled the chance of the extreme levels of rain that hammered central Europe in September, a study has found.

Researchers found global heating aggravated the four days of heavy rainfall that led to deadly floods in countries from Austria to Romania.

The rains were made at least 7% stronger by climate change, World Weather Attribution (WWA) found, which led to towns being hit with volumes of water that would have been half as likely to occur if humans had not heated the planet.

“The trend is clear,” said Bogdan Chojnicki, a climate scientist at Poznań University of Life Sciences, and co-author of the study. “If humans keep filling the atmosphere with fossil fuel emissions, the situation will be more severe.”

Storm Boris stalled over central Europe in mid-September and unleashed record-breaking amounts of rain upon Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia. The heavy rains turned calm streams into wild rivers, triggering floods that wrecked homes and killed two dozen people.

The researchers said measures to adapt had lowered the death toll compared with similar floods that hit the region in 1997 and 2002. They called for better flood defences, warning systems and disaster-response plans, and warned against continuing to rebuild in flood-prone regions.

“These floods indicate just how costly climate change is becoming,” said Maja Vahlberg, technical adviser at the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, and co-author of the study. “Even with days of preparation, flood waters still devastated towns, destroyed thousands of homes and saw the European Union pledge €10bn in aid.”

Rapid attribution studies, which use established methods but are published before going through lengthy peer-review processes, examine how human influence affects extreme weather in the immediate aftermath of a disaster.

The scientists compared the rainfall recorded in central Europe over four days in September with amounts simulated for a world that is 1.3C cooler – the level of warming caused to date by burning fossil fuels and destroying nature. They attributed a “doubling in likelihood and a 7% increase in intensity” to human influence.

But the results are “conservative”, the scientists wrote, because the models do not explicitly model convection and so may underestimate rainfall. “We emphasise that the direction of change is very clear, but the rate is not.”

Physicists have shown that every degree celsius of warming allows the air to hold 7% more moisture, but whether it does so depends on the availability of water. The rains in central Europe were unleashed when cold air from the Arctic met warm, wet air from the Mediterranean and the Black Sea.

Warmer seas enhance the rainy part of the hydrological cycle, though the trend on parts of the land is towards drier conditions, said Miroslav Trnka, a climate scientist at the Global Change Research Institute, who was not involved in the study. When the conditions were right, he said, “you can have floods on steroids”.

Trnka compared the factors that result in extreme rainfall to playing the lottery. The increase in risk from global heating, he said, was like buying more lottery tickets, doing so over a longer period of time, and changing the rules so more combinations of numbers result in a win.

“If you bet long enough, you have a higher chance of a jackpot,” said Trnka.

The study found heavier four-day rainfall events would hit if the world heats 2C above preindustrial levels, with a further increase from today of about 5% in rainfall intensity and 50% in likelihood.

Other factors could increase this even more, such as the waviness of the jet stream, which some scientists suspect is increasingly trapping weather systems in one place as a result of global heating. A study published in Nature Scientific Reports on Monday projected that such blocking systems would increase under medium- and worst-case emissions scenarios.

Hayley Fowler, a climate scientist at Newcastle University, who was not involved in the study, said: “These large storms, cut off from the jet stream, are able to stagnate in one place and produce huge amounts of rainfall, fuelled by increased moisture and energy from oceans that are record-shatteringly hot.”

“These ‘blocked’ slow-moving storms are becoming more frequent and are projected to increase further with additional warming,” she added. “The question is not whether we need to adapt for more of these types of storm but can we.”

WWA described the week following Storm Boris as “hyperactive” because 12 disasters around the world triggered its criteria for analysis, more than in any week in the organisation’s history.

The study did not try to work out how much global heating had increased the destruction wreaked by the rains but the researchers said even minor increases in rainfall disproportionately increased damages.

“Almost everywhere in the world it is the case that a small increase in the rainfall leads to a similar order-of-magnitude increase in flooding,” said Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London’s Grantham Institute and co-author of the study. “But that leads to a much larger increase in the damages.”

Global heating ‘doubled’ chance of extreme rain in Europe in September | Climate crisis | The Guardian
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• Kerry gives scathing rating on climate action: ‘Is there a letter underneath Z?

Countries are ignoring commitments they made less than a year ago to shift away from fossil fuels and to provide aid to those most vulnerable to the climate crisis, a host of leading figures have admitted during a gloomy start to a major climate summit in New York.

Al Gore, the former US vice-president, and John Kerry, the former US secretary of state and climate envoy, have led the condemnation of the largest greenhouse gas emitters, led by China and the US, for failing to follow a UN pact signed in Dubai by nearly 200 countries in December to “transition away” from oil, coal and gas.

“We made an agreement in Dubai to transition away from fossil fuels,” said Kerry, who was the US lead climate negotiator at the time. “The problem? We aren’t doing that. We’re not implementing. The implications for everybody, and life on this planet, is gigantic.”

Kerry, who in his previous position defended the US’s role as it became the world’s leading oil and gas producer under Joe Biden, admitted that the US needed to do more and said a pause placed on booming liquified natural gas export permits by the US president should remain.

“The demand is what is crushing us right now,” Kerry said of the surge in gas exports. “I have to tell you all around the world people are falling short or not even trying. In Dubai almost 200 countries agreed to transition away from fossil fuels in a way that’s fair, equitable and orderly … and they [fossil fuel companies] are just plowing ahead, like it’s business as usual.”

Asked to give oil and gas companies a grade in their efforts to transition to cleaner energy, Kerry said: “Is there a letter underneath Z?”

Kerry was speaking at an Axios event held as part of Climate Week NYC, a summit that has drawn about 100,000 government leaders, businesspeople, scientists and activists to New York alongside the UN general assembly.

The week is taking place amid a daunting backdrop of stubbornly high global emissions, record-breaking temperatures and the real possibility of Donald Trump, who has called climate change a “hoax” and has called for the demolition of Biden’s climate policies, again becoming US president in November’s election.

Wealthy countries have been handing out new oil and gas exploration leases at record levels despite the agreement at the Cop28 talks in Dubai, with decades of further planet-heating emissions set to be locked in during 2024, itself almost certain to be the hottest ever recorded. “In signing such a surge of new oil and gas licenses, they are signing away our future,” António Guterres, secretary general of the UN, said of the highest emitters in July.

“Many people felt it was a great victory to have that language about transitioning away from fossil fuels, I felt that too,” said Gore. “But now look at the agenda for this year’s Cop and they’ve completely ignored that.

“The climate crisis is a fossil fuel crisis, the fossil fuel industry is the wealthiest and most powerful industry in the history of the world. They fight ferociously to stop anything that would stop consumption of fossil fuels. They are way better at capturing politicians than emissions.”

Gore said there were some optimistic signs ahead of the upcoming Cop29, to be held in Azerbaijan in November, such as the “incredible” levels of investment flowing into renewable energy like solar and wind, primarily in China, but that the pace of the transition must accelerate drastically if the world was to avoid disastrous climate impacts.

A weariness with seemingly endless, fruitless meetings about the climate crisis – there have been annual UN talks on this for nearly 30 years – and a litany of unfulfilled promises is particularly grating for the small island states most vulnerable to the impacts of floods, droughts and heatwaves, despite themselves only emitting minuscule amounts of greenhouse gases.

“I’m tired of talks, I want to see some action,” Philip Davis, prime minister of the Bahamas, told the Guardian. “We have been talking about climate change for 29 years now where are we today? For the first time in one whole year we have been over 1.5C – that should shake us. I’m not listening now, I want to see some action, real action.”

Davis said that new fossil fuel projects in countries such as the US and UK have flouted the international agreement to move away from polluting energy. “What does that signal, that we are moving away from it?” he said. “So where does the disappointment lie? It should lie with countries like ours, whose emissions are negligible.”

Davis said richer countries also “haven’t lived up to” promises on climate finance, via either a decade-long pledge to provide billions to developing countries or a more recent agreement, struck in Dubai last year, for a “loss and damage” fund that has so far raised just $800m. “Countries need to recognize $800m isn’t enough, trillions are needed and we need to find a way to get there,” he said.

It is five years since Hurricane Dorian became the worst storm to ever hit the Bahamas, killing dozens of people and causing $3.4bn in damages, more than the entire annual revenue generated by the archipelago of nearly 700 islands. Scientists have warned that Atlantic hurricanes are becoming fiercer due to a warming ocean and atmosphere.

“When people hear the rain now, sometimes they are traumatized by it,” said Davis. “We are still rebuilding and still recovering from the damage and loss from that hurricane. We are in a perpetual cycle of rebuild and recovery. Every year we pray we don’t get another hurricane so we have to borrow again, making our debt spiral. It takes away from our ability to develop our country, to deliver social services for our people.”

Kerry gives scathing rating on climate action: ‘Is there a letter underneath Z?’ | New York | The Guardian

Copernicus – September 2024 was the 2^nd warmest September recorded.

Copernicus

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Climate warning as world’s rivers dry up at fastest rate for 30 years

Rivers dried up at the highest rate in three decades in 2023, putting global water supply at risk, data has shown.

Over the past five years, there have been lower-than-average river levels across the globe and reservoirs have also been low, according to the World Meteorological Organization’s (WMO) State of Global Water Resources report.

In 2023, more than 50% of global river catchment areas showed abnormal conditions, with most being in deficit. This was similar in 2022 and 2021. Areas facing severe drought and low river discharge conditions included large territories of North, Central and South America; for instance, the Amazon and Mississippi rivers had record low water levels. On the other side of the globe, in Asia and Oceania, the large Ganges, Brahmaputra and Mekong river basins experienced lower-than-normal conditions almost over the entire basin territories.

Climate breakdown appears to be changing where water goes, and helping to cause extreme floods and droughts. 2023 was the hottest year on record, with rivers running low and countries facing droughts, but it also brought devastating floods across the globe.

The extremes were also influenced, according to the WMO, by the transition from La Niña to El Niño in mid-2023. These are naturally occurring weather patterns; El Niño refers to the above-average sea-surface temperatures that periodically develop across the east-central equatorial Pacific, while La Niña refers to the periodic cooling in those areas. However, scientists say climate breakdown is exacerbating the impacts of these weather phenomena and making them more difficult to predict.

Areas that faced flooding included the east coast of Africa, the North Island of New Zealand, and the Philippines.

In the UK, Ireland, Finland and Sweden, there was above-normal discharge, which is the volume of water flowing through a river at a given point in time.

“Water is the canary in the coalmine of climate change,” said the WMO secretary general, Celeste Saulo. “We receive distress signals in the form of increasingly extreme rainfall, floods and droughts which wreak a heavy toll on lives, ecosystems and economies. Melting ice and glaciers threaten long-term water security for many millions of people. And yet we are not taking the necessary urgent action.

“As a result of rising temperatures, the hydrological cycle has accelerated. It has also become more erratic and unpredictable, and we are facing growing problems of either too much or too little water. A warmer atmosphere holds more moisture which is conducive to heavy rainfall. More rapid evaporation and drying of soils worsen drought conditions,” she added.

These extreme water conditions put supply at risk. Currently, 3.6 billion people face inadequate access to water for at least one month a year, and this is expected to increase to more than 5 billion by 2050, according to UN Water.

Glaciers also fared badly last year, losing more than 600 gigatonnes of water, the highest figure in 50 years of observations, according to the WMO’s preliminary data for September 2022 to August 2023. Mountains in western North America and the European Alps faced extreme melting. Switzerland’s Alps lost about 10% of their remaining volume over the past two years.

“Far too little is known about the true state of the world’s freshwater resources. We cannot manage what we do not measure. This report seeks to contribute to improved monitoring, data-sharing, cross-border collaboration and assessments,” said Saulo. “This is urgently needed.”

JMA – September 2024 was the 2^nd warmest September recorded

JMA

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New York officials call for big oil to be prosecuted for fueling climate disasters

New York state prosecutors could press criminal charges against big oil for its role in fueling hurricanes and other climate disasters, lawyers wrote in a new prosecution memorandum that has been endorsed by elected officials across the state.

The 50-page document, published by the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen and the progressive prosecutors network Fair and Just Prosecution on Thursday, comes as the US south-east struggles to recover from the deadly hurricanes Helene and Milton, both of which scientists have found were exacerbated by the climate crisis. It details the havoc wrought on New York by 2021’s Hurricane Ida and 2012’s Hurricane Sandy, and other deadly climate events such as extreme heatwaves across the US this past summer.

These disasters are fueled by the climate crisis, which is primarily caused by the burning of fossil fuels. And a growing body of evidence shows that big oil knew about the climate dangers of its products but promoted them to the public anyway, the authors write.

Officials who endorsed the strategy include Brad Hoylman-Sigal, the New York senate judiciary committee chair; Antonio Reynoso, the Brooklyn borough president, the state senator Kristen Gonzalez; the assemblymembers Emily Gallagher and Jessica González-Rojas; and the city councilmembers Sandy Nurse and Carmen De La Rosa.

“It is clear that the actions of big oil, major fossil fuel companies and their executives have endangered generations of Americans,” said González in a statement. “Big oil must be held accountable for their actions, and justice must be won for those who’ve suffered the devastating impacts of climate-related disasters.”

New York case law demonstrates that conduct like big oil’s can constitute reckless endangerment, the authors argue. They wrote that just a small number of oil and gas companies, controlled by just a few executives, have generated a substantial portion of all planet-heating pollution, while deceiving ordinary people about the dangers of their products in marketing, lobbying and other public-facing communications.

Internal documents show that fossil fuel companies have long understood “with shocking accuracy” that their products would cause major damage, the report says. In 1959, the physicist Edward Teller told oil industry leaders that the projected temperature rise associated with the sector’s planned emissions would be devastating for the state.

“It has been calculated that a temperature rise corresponding to a 10% increase in carbon dioxide will be sufficient to melt the ice caps and submerge New York,” he said at a symposium organized by the American Petroleum Institute, the country’s top fossil fuel lobby group.

And in 1982, an official at the oil corporation Exxon issued an internal report that found the global heating tied to fossil fuel emissions could “cause flooding on much of the US east coast”. Such conduct amounts to reckless endangerment, said Aaron Regunberg, senior policy counsel with Public Citizen’s climate program.

“Reckless endangerment occurs when someone engages in reckless conduct that risks injuring or killing another person,” he said. “That’s exactly what these companies and their CEOs have done.”

Forty cities and states have filed civil lawsuits against oil majors in recent years for their emissions and promotion of climate doubt. Public Citizen last year also proposed filing criminal charges – most notably, homicide – against the companies.

Asked for a response to the proposal last year, a spokesperson for the American Petroleum Institute said: “The record of the past two decades demonstrates that the industry has achieved its goal of providing affordable, reliable American energy to US consumers while substantially reducing emissions and our environmental footprint.”

But the scheme has sparked curiosity from experts and public officials, won broad support from likely US voters in polls and captured the imaginations of climate advocates.

“Big oil’s behavior is immoral, and it’s high time to recognize it’s also illegal,” said Durwood Zaelke, president of the advocacy non-profit Institute for Governance & Sustainable Development.

Public Citizen released a similar memo earlier this year laying out a case for Arizona prosecutors to press criminal charges against big oil for its role in a deadly 2023 heat wave. The New York case could be easier to make, Regunberg said.

While the Arizona memo proposes filing reckless manslaughter or second-degree murder claims, which have high standards for causation, the New York proposal calls for reckless endangerment, a charge that covers harm caused without explicit intent.

“Reckless endangerment statutes criminalize reckless conduct that creates a risk of injuring or killing someone,” he said. “So proving this crime doesn’t require the same demonstration of causation as offenses like homicide or assault, where prosecutors need to prove that a defendant’s conduct actually caused a specific victim’s injury or death.”

This proposal also opens the door for New York prosecutors to bring charges against individual oil executives, the memo says.

Rachel Rivera, a member of environmental justice group New York Communities for Change whose home was destroyed by Hurricane Sandy, expressed support for the proposal. Sandy “was done to us by oil and gas companies”, she said.

“If I committed a crime like that against a corporation, you can bet I’d get prosecuted,” said Rivera. “So why shouldn’t they be held accountable? Isn’t that why we have a criminal justice system?”

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Overwhelming majority of young Americans worry about climate crisis

The overwhelming majority of young Americans worry about the climate crisis, and more than half say their concerns about the environment will affect where they decide to live and whether to have children, new research finds.

The study comes just weeks after back-to-back hurricanes, Helene and Milton, pummeled the south-eastern US. Flooding from Helene caused more than 600 miles of destruction, from Florida’s west coast to the mountains of North Carolina, while Milton raked across the Florida peninsula less than two weeks later.

“One of the most striking findings of the survey was that this was across the political spectrum,” said the lead author, Eric Lewandowski, a clinical psychologist and associate professor at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine. “There was no state sample where the endorsement of climate anxiety came in less than 75%.”

The study was published in the Lancet Planetary Health, and follows a 2021 study covering 10 countries. Both the previous and current study were paid for by Avaaz, an advocacy group.

The new study was conducted by researchers from NYU School of Medicine, Stanford University, Utah State University, the University of Washington and George Washington University, among others.

In an online survey, researchers asked young people aged 16-25 from all 50 US states to rate their concerns, thoughts and emotions regarding the climate crisis; about their political affiliation and about who has responsibility for causing climate change. Researchers conducted the survey online from July to November 2023.

An overwhelming majority of young people said they were worried about the climate crisis – 85% said they were at least moderately worried, and more than half (57%) said they were “very or extremely” worried. Nearly two-thirds endorsed the statement: “Humanity is doomed,” and more than half of the sample (52%) endorsed: “I’m hesitant to have children.”

“I often hear adults say that our generation, gen Z, will fix what they have broken. What they may not understand is the pressure this puts on all of us,” said Zion Walker, a student and member of the Climate Mental Health Network’s Gen Z Advisory Board, in a statement. “Yes, we are taking steps and fighting for the future, but many of us are overwhelmed by the daily reality of climate disasters – waking up to news of wildfires engulfing homes and hurricanes taking lives.”

Large majorities of both main political parties – 92% of Democrats and 73% of Republicans – said they worried about the climate. Respondents also said they had negative thoughts about the climate and had planned action to respond to their concerns, including voting for political candidates who would pledge to support “aggressive” action.

Using a statistical technique called a regression model, researchers also found that young people who reported more exposure to more climate-related disasters were more likely to want a plan for action.

“One of the findings we talk about in the text was the proportion of people who want this to be talked about,” said Lewandowski. He added that more than 70% of young people want the climate to be a subject of discussion, “and for older generations to try to understand how they feel.”

The new research represents an emerging topic in mental health stressors. The relationship between mental health impacts and natural disasters – such as Helene, Milton and even Covid-19 – is well established. Researchers have even found a dose-response relationship, with more reported depression symptoms associated with greater exposure to disaster. Climate anxiety, such as worry about the future of the planet, is an area of emerging research.

“Stressors like divorce, unemployment, having your kids do poorly in school, having a hard time looking after your ageing parents are all associated with worse mental health,” said Dr Sandro Galea, dean of the Boston University School of Public Health, who was not involved in the research.

Although less studied, Galea said, “having stressors around climate, worsening of the planet, fear of things like conflict – those are all very plausibly associated with poor mental health.”

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Climate change harming young people's mental health, study says

Human-caused climate change is having widespread and significant negative effects on young people's mental health across the country, a new study finds.

Why it matters: The study is one of the largest to date to examine how young people are responding to global climate change and government action.

• The research also reveals new insights into the mental toll on adolescents and young adults of extreme weather events that climate change either propelled or made worse, depending on the type of event.

Zoom in: The peer-reviewed study, published Thursday evening in The Lancet Planetary Health, provides the latest — and perhaps the most authoritative — look at what the authors refer to as "climate emotions," including despair, fear, anxiety and depression, among others.

• The researchers analyzed the results of an online survey of about 16,000 U.S. youth between the ages of 16 to 25 between July and November of last year.
• They found a large majority, or 85% of respondents, are at least moderately worried, with about 58% "very or extremely worried," about climate change and its impacts.
• A smaller but still sizable group reported that these concerns were harming their mental health, with 38% stating their feelings about climate change were interfering with their daily lives.
• The survey used includes respondents from every state.

Respondents identifying as Democrats or Independents tended to be more worried than Republicans in the survey.

Yes, but: The survey used in the study relied on a non-probability sample, which means its results can't be directly applied to the overall U.S. population in a statistical sense.

• In that way, it differs from most epidemiological surveys.
• However, it can be used to observe general trends and can be combined with other evidence to bolster particular conclusions.

Between the lines: Respondents who reported exposure to more types of extreme weather events tended to be more distressed about climate change and more in favor of action to address the issue.

• "Respondents desire action from industries, corporations, and governments, including the U.S. government," the study states.
• Such people were also more likely to have plans to act on this issue, such as voting for candidates who support cutting greenhouse gas emissions, than those less affected by extreme weather.

The intrigue: A majority of total respondents, including 37.9% of Republican respondents, to the online survey stated climate change would make them hesitant to have children.

• And majorities of all respondents, including 57.8% of Republicans in the survey, said the issue would influence where they choose to live.

• "This is a kind of less partisan issue in this younger generation," said the study's lead author, Eric Lewandowski of NYU's Grossman School of Medicine.
• A higher proportion of Democrats (45.7%) compared to Republicans (33.7%) said that their feelings about climate change affect their daily life.

Zoom out: Other studies have found evidence of younger people in multiple countries, including the U.S., reporting distress over climate change.

What they're saying: One interesting finding of the research, Lewandowski said, is that young people are looking to have more conversations about climate change and to be validated in their concerns, rather than have older generations dismiss them.

• "Talking about the danger when there is danger is helpful," he told Axios in an interview. "We think of these climate emotions as a normal human reaction" in the face of a threat.
• "These statistics confirm what we've been seeing in the trenches," said study coauthor Lise Van Susteren, a psychiatrist in Washington who is an expert on the psychological impacts of climate change. "The young people are really struggling. And they are struggling in ways that I've not seen before."
• She hopes the findings will help lead to a "social tipping point" on climate.

Of note: The study was funded by Avaaz, a youth-oriented nonprofit organization that promotes action on climate, human rights and other issues.

NOAA – September 2024 was the 2^nd warmest September recorded

Year to date (Jan. – Sept) was the warmest Jan. – Sept. recorded

NOAA


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Here’s how much ground the world needs to make up on climate change

How is the world doing on climate change? Not great

It’s report card season for climate change.

Each year, the United Nations takes stock of whether countries are on track to cut carbon emissions and limit global warming.

The grade this year: needs more improvement than ever.

Global greenhouse gas emissions rose to a new record in 2023, and if countries do not change course, the world will see warming of more than 5.5 degrees Fahrenheit (3.1 degrees Celsius) by the end of the century.

That would blow past the targets set in the 2015 Paris climate agreement: Countries have agreed to try to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius to avoid the most catastrophic impacts of climate change.

Those are the findings of a new report from the United Nations Environment Programme, which tracks how rapidly countries are cutting heat-trapping emissions from burning fossil fuels.

“The findings of this report are fairly similar to last year: Another year passed without action means we’re worse off,” says Anne Olhoff, chief scientific editor of the report.

Global emissions aren’t falling fast enough

Greenhouse gas emissions need to fall immediately to limit warming to about 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) by 2100. If nations continue current policies, warming could reach more than 5 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100. Even if countries fulfill their existing pledges to cut emissions, the world will still see severe climate impacts.

gigatons of carbon dioxide per year

climate pic

Scientific research shows that limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius is a crucial benchmark for avoiding some of the most severe impacts of climate change. Beyond that level, heat waves and storms become much more destructive. Melting polar ice would cause sea levels to rise, flooding coastal cities. Hotter ocean temperatures would kill off the majority of the world’s coral reefs. Since the planet doesn’t heat up evenly, the U.S. would see even more warming than the global average.

To reach the 1.5 degree Celsius goal, emissions would need to drop rapidly by the end of this decade, falling 42% from 2019 levels, according to the report.

If countries stay on their current path, global emissions could remain virtually unchanged by 2030.

The annual ”emissions gap” report comes just weeks ahead of global climate talks at the COP29 summit in Baku, Azerbaijan. There, countries will discuss global efforts to tackle climate change and transition away from fossil fuels. The summit will set the stage for next year’s negotiations, when countries are expected to announce more ambitious goals for reducing their climate emissions going forward.

Most countries are not on track to meet their current pledges to cut emissions. Even if countries do meet those pledges, emissions would only fall 10% by 2030. That underscores how vital it is for countries to make larger pledges next year, the report says.

"We are teetering on a planetary tightrope," says UN Secretary-General António Guterres. "Either leaders bridge the emissions gap or we plunge headlong into climate disaster with the poorest and most vulnerable suffering the most."

The world has made progress in building more renewable energy capacity. Solar and wind power is now often cheaper than burning fossil fuels like coal and natural gas, and renewable energy generation is reaching historic levels. But global emissions still rose last year because of a growing demand for energy from many sectors of the economy, from aviation to data centers to air conditioning. While emissions are beginning to fall in the European Union and the U.S., they’re rising in China, India and the Russian Federation.

Still technically possible to limit warming to 1.5 degrees

While it gets more difficult to reach the 1.5 degree Celsius goal with every year that passes, it is still technically possible, the report notes.

To keep the goal alive, close to 60% of the world’s electricity would need to come from renewable sources by 2030, the report found, more than quadrupling the current amount. Still, the report points out that a handful of countries have shown it’s possible to adopt renewables at an even faster rate, including Denmark, Lithuania and Uruguay.

Reducing deforestation and restoring land could also help reduce emissions, since vegetation helps store carbon dioxide.

Many of the strategies to rapidly cut emissions are cost-effective, the report found, especially given the sizable economic impact of increasingly worse disasters fueled by climate change.

New climate pledges need ‘quantum leap’ in ambition to deliver Paris goals

NASA – September 2024 was the 2^nd warmest September recorded.

NASA

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Record levels of heat-related deaths in 2023 due to climate crisis, report finds

Heat-related deaths, food insecurity and the spread of infectious diseases caused by the climate crisis have reached record levels, according to a landmark report.

The Lancet Countdown’s ninth report on health and the climate breakdown reveals that people across the world face unprecedented threats to their health from the rapidly changing climate.

“This year’s stocktake of the imminent health threats of climate inaction reveals the most concerning findings yet,” warned Dr Marina Romanello, executive director of the Lancet Countdown at University College London.

“Once again, last year broke climate change records with extreme heatwaves, deadly weather events, and devastating wildfires affecting people around the world. No individual or economy on the planet is immune [to] the health threats of climate change.

“The relentless expansion of fossil fuels and record-breaking greenhouse gas emissions compounds these dangerous health impacts, and is threatening to reverse the limited progress made so far and put a healthy future further out of reach.”

The report finds that in 2023, extreme drought lasting at least one month affected 48% of the global land area, while people had to cope with an unprecedented 50 more days of health-threatening temperatures than would have been expected without the climate crisis. As a result, 151 million more people faced moderate or severe food insecurity, risking malnutrition and other harm to their health.

Heat related deaths among the over-65s rocketed by 167% in 2023, compared with the 1990s. Without the climate crisis, an ageing global population means such deaths would have increased, but only by 65%. High temperatures also led to a record 6% more hours of lost sleep in 2023 than the 1986–2005 average. Poor sleep has a profound negative effect on physical and mental health.

Hotter and drier weather saw greater numbers of sand and dust storms, which contributed to a 31% increase in the number of people exposed to dangerously high particulate matter concentrations, while life-threatening diseases such as dengue, malaria and West Nile virus continue to spread into new areas as a result of higher temperatures.

But despite this, “governments and companies continue to invest in fossil fuels, resulting in all-time high greenhouse gas emissions and staggering tree loss, reducing the survival chances of people all around the globe”, the authors found.

In 2023, global energy-related carbon dioxide emissions reached an all-time high, 1.1% above 2022, and the proportion of fossil fuels in the global energy system increased for the first time in a decade during 2021, reaching 80.3% of all energy.

Responding to the findings, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general of the World Health Organization, said: “The climate crisis is a health crisis. As the planet heats up, the frequency and intensity of climate-related disasters increase, leaving no region untouched.”

The report makes it clear, he added, that “climate change is not a distant threat, but an immediate risk to health”.

António Guterres, the United Nations secretary general, said: “Record-high emissions are posing record-breaking threats to our health. We must cure the sickness of climate inaction – by slashing emissions, protecting people from climate extremes, and ending our fossil fuel addiction – to create a fairer, safer and healthier future for all.”

Temperate countries are also seeing the effects of the climate crisis. In 2013-2022, the UK’s overall mean increase in heat-related deaths was estimated at nine deaths per 100,000 inhabitants, while there were 8.5 million potential working hours lost due to heat exposure in 2023.

Dr Lea Berrang Ford, head of the Centre for Climate and Health Security at the UK Health Security Agency, which published its own report on the health impacts of global heating on the UK, said: “Climate change is not solely a future health threat. Health impacts are already being felt domestically and globally, and these risks will accelerate.

“There are significant opportunities for win-win solutions that can combat climate change and improve health. The health decisions we make today will determine the severity and extent of climate impacts inherited by today’s youth and their children.”

Dr Josh Foster, lecturer in human environmental physiology at King’s College London, said the report’s “alarming” trends would “result in more frequent mass mortality events in older people as the devastating impacts of climate change are realised”.

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Alarm grows over ‘disturbing’ lack of progress to save nature at Cop16

Governments risk another decade of failure on biodiversity loss, due to the slow implementation of an international agreement to halt the destruction of Earth’s ecosystems, experts have warned.

Less than two years ago, the world reached a historic agreement at the Cop15 summit in Montreal to stop the human-caused destruction of life on our planet. The deal included targets to protect 30% of the planet for nature by the end of the decade (30x30), reform $500bn (then £410bn) of environmentally damaging subsidies, and begin restoring 30% of the planet’s degraded ecosystems.

But as country representatives dig into their second week of negotiations at Cop16 in Cali, Colombia – their first meeting since Montreal – alarm is growing at the lack of concrete progress on any of the major targets they agreed upon. An increasing number of indicators show that governments are not on track. They still need to protect an area of land equivalent to the combined size of Brazil and Australia, and an expanse of sea larger than the Indian Ocean to meet the headline 30x30 target, according to a new UN report.

Weak progress on funding for nature and almost no progress on subsidy reform have also frustrated observers. At the time of publication, 158 countries are yet to submit formal plans on how they are going to meet the targets, according to Carbon Brief, missing their deadline this month ahead of the biodiversity summit in Cali, where governments are not likely to set a new deadline.

“Progress has been too slow. I think political prioritisation of nature is still too low. This is reflected by progress on the targets. Several target are very easy to measure: 30x30 has metrics on area and quality, finance has a dollar figure. We have new data on both that show we’re not on pace,” said Brian O’Donnell, director of the Campaign for Nature.

“This is a moment to demonstrate seriousness and build trust. On finance especially, it’s been disturbing at times to go to parties to ask for their path forward for finance and be treated as if we are asking for something new or unrealistic, as opposed to what they just agreed two years ago. To me, that is a reflection of not a true commitment to this,” he said.

The world has never met a target to stem the destruction of wildlife and life-sustaining ecosystems. Amid growing scientific warnings about the state of life on Earth, there has been a major push to make sure this decade is different, and that governments comply with targets designed to prevent wildlife extinctions, such as cuts to pesticides use and pollution.

Leading figures in conservation and science have raised concerns about the progress governments are making towards the targets in Cali. Martin Harper, CEO of Birdlife International, said meaningful action on commitments was vital.

“We cannot accept inaction as the new normal. This means more action to bolster efforts to recover threatened species, to protect and restore more land, fresh water and sea, and to transform our food, energy and industrial systems. We have five years to raise hundreds of billions of dollars. If we don’t see it materialise, I dread to think where we will be in 2030,” he said.

NASA – October 2024 was the 2^nd warmest October recorded

NASA

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Analysis: Global CO2 emissions will reach new high in 2024 despite slower growth

Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil fuels and cement will rise around 0.8% in 2024, reaching a record 37.4bn tonnes of CO2 (GtCO2), according to the 2024 Global Carbon Budget report by the Global Carbon Project.
This is 0.4GtCO2 higher than the previous record, set in 2023.

Total CO2 emissions – including both fossil and land-use emissions – will also set a new record at 41.6GtCO2, reflecting a growth of 2% over 2023 levels.

This is due, in part, to higher than usual land-use emissions driven by extreme wildfire activity in South America.

Despite the increase in 2024, total CO2 emissions have largely plateaued over the past decade, a sign that the world is making some modest progress tackling emissions.

But a flattening of emissions is far from what is needed to bring global emissions down to zero and stabilise global temperatures in-line with Paris Agreement goals.

The 19th edition of the Global Carbon Budget, which is published today, also reveals:

• Emissions emissions are projected to decrease significantly in the EU (down 3.8%) and slightly in the US (down 0.6%) in 2024. They are expected to increase slightly in China (up 0.2%), and increase significantly in India (up 4.6%) and the rest of the world (up 1.6%, including international shipping and aviation).
• Global emissions from coal increased by 0.2% in 2024 compared to 2023, while oil emissions increased 0.9% and gas emissions increased by 2.4%. Emissions from cement and other sources fell by 2.8%.
• Global land-use emissions clocked in at 4.2GtCO2 in 2024. This represents a 0.5GtCO2 increase over 2023 and was primarily driven by wildfire emissions linked to deforestation and forest degradation in South America. Overall, land-use emissions have decreased by around 28% since their peak in the late-1990s, with a particularly large drop in the past decade.
• While the land sink was quite weak in 2023 – leading to speculation that it may be on a path toward collapse – it appears to have largely recovered back to close to its average for the past decade.
• If global emissions remain at current levels, the remaining carbon budget to limit warming to 1.5C (with a 50% chance) will be exhausted in the next six years. Carbon budgets to limit warming to 1.7C and 2C would similarly be used up in 15 and 27 years, respectively.
• The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is set to reach 422.5 parts per million (ppm) in 2024, 2.8ppm above 2023 and 52% above pre-industrial levels.

Both global fossil and total CO2 emissions at record levels

The 2024 Global Carbon Budget finds that CO2 emissions from fossil use are projected to rise 0.8% in 2024, reaching a record 37.4GtCO2 – 0.4GtCO2 higher than the previous record, set last year.

Total CO2 emissions, which include land-use change, are also expected to reach record highs at 41.6GtCO2, or 2.0% above the previous record set in 2023.

This large increase was driven both by consistent growth in fossil-fuel emissions and abnormally high land-use emissions in 2024 – due in part to wildfires in South America exacerbated by a strong El Niño event and high temperatures.

Each year the Global Carbon Budget is updated to include the latest data as well as improvements to modelling sources and sinks, resulting in some year-to-year revisions to the historical record.

The figure below shows the 2024 global CO2 emissions update (dark blue solid line) alongside 2023 (grey dotted) 2022 (yellow dotted), 2021 (bright blue dotted) and 2020 (red dotted). The shaded area indicates the uncertainty around the new 2024 budget.

The 2024 figures are generally quite similar to those in the 2023 Global Carbon Budget, though they show somewhat higher emissions prior to 1980 and slightly lower emissions over the past seven years. Revisions to the data mean that 2023 is no longer a hair below 2019 levels, as was reported by Carbon Brief last year, but rather exceeds them by nearly 0.5GtCO2.

Total global CO2 emissions have notably plateaued in the past decade (2015-24), growing at only 0.2% per year compared to the 1.9% rate of growth over the previous decade (2005-214) and the longer-term average growth rate of 1.7% between 1959 and 2014.

This apparent flattening is due to declining land-use emissions compensating for continued increases in fossil CO2 emissions. Fossil emissions grew around 0.2GtCO2 per year over the past decade, while land-use emissions decreased by a comparable amount.

However, despite the emissions plateau, there is still no sign of the rapid and deep decrease in CO2 emissions needed to reach net-zero and stabilise global temperatures in-line with Paris Agreement goals.

If global emissions remain at current levels, the remaining carbon budget to limit warming to 1.5C (with a 50% chance) will be exhausted in the next six years. Carbon budgets to limit warming to 1.7C and 2C would similarly be used up in 15 and 27 years, respectively.

Global fossil CO2 emissions also grew more slowly in the past decade (0.7% per year) compared to the previous decade (2.1%). This was driven by the continued decarbonisation of energy systems – including a shift from burning coal to gas and replacing fossil fuels with renewables – as well as slightly weaker global economic growth during the past decade.

‘No sign’ of promised fossil fuel transition as emissions hit new high

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This year has been masterclass in human destruction, UN chief tells Cop29

This year has been “a masterclass in human destruction”, the UN secretary general has said as he reflected on extreme weather and record temperatures around the world fuelled by climate breakdown.

António Guterres painted a stark portrait of the consequences of climate breakdown that had arisen in recent months. “Families running for their lives before the next hurricane strikes; workers and pilgrims collapsing in insufferable heat; floods tearing through communities and tearing down infrastructure; children going to bed hungry as droughts ravage crops,” he said. “All these disasters, and more, are being supercharged by human-made climate change.”

Guterres was addressing scores of world leaders and high-ranking government officials from nearly 200 countries gathered in Azerbaijan for the Cop29 UN climate summit. Over a fortnight of talks, nations will try to find ways to raise the vast sums of money needed to tackle the climate crisis.

Developing countries want guarantees of $1tn a year in funds by 2035 to help them cut greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to the impacts of extreme weather.

The talks have been overshadowed by the re-election of Donald Trump, an avowed climate denier, to the US presidency. Although leaders including the UK’s Keir Starmer, Barbados’s Mia Mottley and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan addressed the summit, the heads of government of most of the world’s biggest economies stayed away.

Starmer confirmed stringent new plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions, as revealed by the Guardian, which were praised by campaigners and experts. The UK is one of the first leading economies to present such a plan, months ahead of a UN deadline of next February.

The cut, of 81% by 2035 compared with 1990 levels, will be partly met by decarbonising the electricity sector, but the government is also likely to have to add new policies to encourage public transport and walking, and a switch from gas heating to electric heat pumps.

Starmer told journalists at Cop29 that this need not involve drastic changes to people’s lifestyles, , saying: “The race is on for the clean energy jobs of the future, the economy of tomorrow. I don’t want to be in the middle of the pack, I want to get ahead of the game.”

He told reporters: “At this Cop I was pleased to announce that we are building on our reputation as a climate leader with the UK’s 2035 NDC target to reduce all greenhouse gas emissions by at least 81% on 1990 levels.”

Rebecca Newsom, a senior policy adviser at Greenpeace International, said: “Starmer’s commitment to a relatively ambitious new target for cutting emissions will inject new momentum into the talks and he is right to highlight the huge opportunity offered by the green transition to cut bills, unlock investment and create jobs across the UK. But much clearer plans are still needed – particularly more investment for those working in offshore oil and gas to transition to renewable energy.”

Governments were told at Cop they must take concerted action on reducing greenhouse gases or face economic disaster that could threaten them electorally.

Simon Stiell, the UN’s top climate official, said politics, economics and the climate were now fatally entwined. Governments may be feeling the consequences of the worst inflation for decades but far more serious consequences were in store.

“Worsening climate impacts will put inflation on steroids,” Stiell said, tuning in to some of the economic fears that have helped deliver a series of electoral victories to rightwing parties around the world in the past year.

“The climate crisis is a cost-of-living crisis, because climate disasters are driving up costs for households and businesses. Climate finance is global inflation insurance.”

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Extra

Author Katherine Rundell donates royalties to climate charities in Trump protest

British author Katherine Rundell will give all the royalties from one of her books to climate charities in response to the re-election of Donald Trump.

The author of bestsellers for children and adults has said she will donate 100% of author royalties earned from sales of The Golden Mole, her 2022 book on endangered species, “in perpetuity”. The book was published in the US on Tuesday under the title Vanishing Treasures. So far she said she has donated more than £10,000, and hopes it could eventually be much more.

“The election of a climate-change denier to the US presidency is a catastrophe for all of us,” said Rundell. “It comes at a time when the planet has never more urgently needed our protection.

“It has rarely been so tempting for anyone who cares about the fate of the living world – of the Earth itself, of the parliament of the non-human, of the terrible human suffering that climate chaos will bring – to despair. But it’s much too urgent and important for despair.”

NOAA – October 2024 was the 2^nd warmest October recorded

NOAA - Year to date, Jan. – Oct. 2024 was the warmest Jan. – Oct. recorded

NOAA

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World’s 1.5C climate target ‘deader than a doornail’, experts say

The internationally agreed goal to keep the world’s temperature rise below 1.5C is now “deader than a doornail”, with 2024 almost certain to be the first individual year above this threshold, climate scientists have gloomily concluded – even as world leaders gather for climate talks on how to remain within this boundary.

Three of the five leading research groups monitoring global temperatures consider 2024 on track to be at least 1.5C (2.7F) hotter than pre-industrial times, underlining it as the warmest year on record, beating a mark set just last year. The past 10 consecutive years have already been the hottest 10 years ever recorded.

Although a single year above 1.5C does not itself spell climate doom or break the 2015 Paris agreement, in which countries agreed to strive to keep the long-term temperature rise below this point, scientists have warned this aspiration has in effect been snuffed out despite the exhortations of leaders currently gathered at a United Nations climate summit in Azerbaijan.

“The goal to avoid exceeding 1.5C is deader than a doornail. It’s almost impossible to avoid at this point because we’ve just waited too long to act,” said Zeke Hausfather, climate research lead at Stripe and a research scientist at Berkeley Earth. “We are speeding past the 1.5C line an accelerating way and that will continue until global emissions stop climbing.”

Last year was so surprisingly hot, even in the context of the climate crisis, that it caused “some soul-searching” among climate scientists, Hausfather said. In recent months there has also been persistent heat despite the fading of El Niño, a periodic climate event that exacerbated temperatures already elevated by the burning of fossil fuels.

“It’s going to be the hottest year by an unexpectedly large margin. If it continues to be this warm it’s a worrying sign,” he said. “Going past 1.5C this year is very symbolic, and it’s a sign that we are getting ever closer to going past that target.”

Climate scientists broadly expect it will become apparent the 1.5C target, agreed upon by governments after pleas from vulnerable island states that they risk being wiped out if temperatures rise further than this, has been exceeded within the coming decade.

Despite countries agreeing to shift away from fossil fuels, this year is set to hit a new record for planet-heating emissions, and even if current national pledges are met the world is on track for 2.7C (4.8F) warming, risking disastrous heatwaves, floods, famines and unrest. “We are clearly failing to bend the curve,” said Sofia Gonzales-Zuñiga, an analyst at Climate Analytics, which helped produce the Climate Action Tracker (Cat) temperature estimate.

However, the Cop29 talks in Baku have maintained calls for action to stay under 1.5C. “Only you can beat the clock on 1.5C,” António Guterres, secretary general of the UN, urged world leaders on Tuesday, while also acknowledging the planet was undergoing a “masterclass in climate destruction”.

Yet the 1.5C target now appears to be simply a rhetorical, rather than scientifically achievable, one, bar massive amounts of future carbon removal from as-yet unproven technologies. “I never thought 1.5C was a conceivable goal. I thought it was a pointless thing,” said Gavin Schmidt, a climate scientist at Nasa. “I’m totally unsurprised, like almost all climate scientists, that we are shooting past it at a rapid clip.

“But it was extremely galvanizing, so I was wrong about that. Maybe it is useful; maybe people do need impossible targets. You shouldn’t ask scientists how to galvanize the world because clearly we don’t have a fucking clue. People haven’t got a magic set of words to keep us to 1.5C, but we have got to keep trying.

“What matters is we have to reduce emissions. Once we stop warming the planet, the better it will be for the people and ecosystems that live here.”

The world’s decision-makers who are collectively failing to stem dangerous global heating will soon be joined by Donald Trump, who is expected to tear down climate policies and thereby, the Cat report estimates, add at least a further 0.04C to the world temperature.

Despite this bleak outlook, some do point out that the picture still looks far rosier than it did before the Paris deal, when a catastrophic temperature rise of 4C or more was foreseeable. Cheap and abundant clean energy is growing at a rapid pace, with peak oil demand expected by the end of this decade.

“Meetings like these are often perceived as talking shops,” said Alexander De Croo, the Belgian prime minister, at the Cop29 summit. “And yes, these strenuous negotiations are far from perfect. But if you compare climate policy now to a decade ago, we are in a different world.”

Still, as the world barrels past 1.5C there lie alarming uncertainties in the form of runaway climate “tipping points”, which once set off cannot be halted on human timescales, such as the Amazon turning into a savanna, the collapse of the great polar ice sheets, and huge pulses of carbon released from melting permafrost.

“1.5C is not a cliff edge, but the further we warm up the closer we get to unwittingly setting off tipping points that will bring dramatic climate consequences,” said Grahame Madge, a climate spokesman at the UK Met Office, who added that it would now be “unexpected” for 2024 to not be above 1.5C.

“We are edging ever closer to tipping points in the climate system that we won’t be able to come back from; it’s uncertain when they will arrive, they are almost like monsters in the darkness,” Madge said.

“We don’t want to encounter them so every fraction of a degree is worth fighting for. If we can’t achieve 1.5C, it will be better to get 1.6C than 1.7C, which will be better than getting 2C or more.”

Hausfather added: “We aren’t in for a good outcome either way. It’s challenging. But every tenth of a degree matters. All we know is that the more we push the climate system away from where it has been for the last few million years, there be dragons.”

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‘Graveyard of corals’ found after extreme heat and cyclones hit northern Great Barrier Reef

Reefs across the north of the Great Barrier Reef have seen “substantial losses” of coral cover after a summer of extreme heat, two cyclones and major flooding, according to the first results of surveys from government marine scientists.

After the most widespread coral bleaching event seen on the world’s biggest reef system, the Australian Institute of Marine Science said one area around Cooktown and Lizard Island had lost more than a third of its live hard coral – the biggest annual drop in 39 years of monitoring.

Dr Mike Emslie, leader of Aims’ long-term monitoring program, described a “graveyard of corals” off Lizard Island, with Linnet Reef one of the worst-hit.

“It was pretty sobering,” he said. “Probably the worst single impact I have seen in 30 years. We saw dead standing coral colonies and the whole scene was a drab brown mess. As far as the eye could see was corals covered in algae.”

Aims revealed the results from in-water surveys of 19 reefs between Cairns and Cooktown carried out in recent months, where 12 reefs saw a drop in coral cover of between 11% and 72%.

The results are the first official assessment of the impact of last summer’s mass coral bleaching event, which came during a fourth global event that saw heat stress high enough to bleach more than 70% of the planet’s corals, affecting reefs in more than 70 countries.

Mass coral bleaching is caused by rising ocean temperatures driven mostly by the burning of fossil fuels.

JMA October 2024 was the 2^nd warmest October recorded

Five Warmest Years (Anomalies)

1st. 2023 (+0.73°C), 2nd. 2024 (+0.58°C), 3rd. 2015 (+0.38°C), 4th. 2019 (+0.35°C), 5th. 2022,2021 (+0.30°C)

JMA

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UK will seek global coalition for climate action, says Ed Miliband as Cop29 ends

The UK will seek a global coalition to push for climate action after a fractious end to UN climate talks in Azerbaijan, the UK energy secretary, Ed Miliband, has pledged.

The Cop29 conference ended on Sunday with a deal promising $300bn in finance for developing countries by 2035, which critics called a “failure” and “betrayal”.

Miliband played a key role in the talks, attempting to bridge divisions between the rich and poor world in the hectic closing hours, late on Saturday night. He has vowed to continue working over the next year, ahead of an equally important summit in Brazil next November.

“This alliance of high ambition is the world’s centre ground of climate politics and is the best hope for the future. In our work with Brazil, hosts of Cop30, we are seeking to demonstrate this in practice,” he wrote in the Guardian.

Miliband has argued that forging a global coalition to tackle the climate crisis, and providing finance to the poor world, are in the UKÂ’s interest.

“This idea is 100% in Britain’s self-interest,” he told journalists after Cop29. “I think there is a great British tradition of ensuring that we play our part in helping vulnerable countries who are exposed to climate change. Our estimates in the department say that [the $300bn of climate finance by 2035] could help protect up to a billion people [from] some of the effects of climate change and also on mitigation.”

At Cop30 in Brazil, countries will expected to produce new plans for cutting greenhouse gas emissions. Miliband hailed the UKÂ’s recent pledge of an 81% reduction in emissions compared with 1990, and vowed to work with Brazil on energy, finance and forests over the next 12 months.

Also writing in the Guardian, the president of Cop29, Mukhtar Babayev, criticised developed countries for the fractious end of Cop29, and claimed that China would have offered climate finance voluntarily if rich countries had shown more of a lead.

Babayev, AzerbaijanÂ’s environment minister, blamed rich countries for failing to stump up enough cash for the developing world and nearly collapsing the talks by only making key concessions too late in the process.

By contrast, he said, “China spent the full two weeks coordinating their response to the negotiations in a regimented fashion with the G77 group of the world’s poorest nations. The Chinese were willing to offer more if others did so too (but the others didn’t).

“Their target of $500bn for the industrialised world’s contributions alone still would not suffice to limit global warming to 1.5C, but it was a more acceptable minimum figure – something publicly acknowledged by Kenya and several other African nations.”

China is classed as a developing country under the ​UN climate process, which means it carries no obligation to provide finance to poorer countries, while the rich economies do.

At Cop29, rich countries demanded that the donor base should be broadened to include emerging economies such as China and petrostates such as Saudi Arabia.

China did not object to the Cop29 deal and pointed to billions it was providing to the poor world already, mostly in the form of loans, in what is known as “south-south cooperation”. Developed countries were keen to point out that the deal struck allowed for China to contribute, while stipulating that ​t​he developed world should take the lead.

Babayev described the final moments of what he termed the “Baku breakthrough”, which came 35 hours after the official deadline. An earlier offer by developed countries to supply $250bn a year to the developing world by 2035 was widely derided but rich countries were unwilling to increase it.

He noted that it took pressure from the presidency to force the EU to increase its deal​ beyond the originally proposed $250bn.

He also wrote: “It was a mistake for western countries to insist that the final draft deal – and particularly the draft financials – was not unveiled until the penultimate day. To the global south, this rightly made it look like a fait accompli. My negotiating team argued vociferously for drafts to be made public far earlier. But that was not to be.

“Early in the negotiations it became clear that certain western voices would not shift,” he added. “That position was not universal: the new British government has reassumed the country’s role in global climate leadership, and that was clearly in evidence at the summit itself, with new UK targets on decarbonisation and net zero.”

The deal “almost didn’t happen”, Babayev said, but Azerbaijan stepped in to push the rich world to make its final $300bn offer.

Some veterans of the talks described Babayev’s views as “fake news”, “hypocritical” and “sliding off the edge of the planet”.

“The small island states and least developed country walkout on the Azerbaijani presidency was not because the presidency was supporting them, but because it was not,” said Bill Hare, the chief executive of the Climate Analytics thinktank.

“This is just one illustration of the way in which it is clear the presidency was not supporting the interest of the vulnerable countries. When the presidency talks about the global south, we know that this means the Like-Minded Group of Developing Countries negotiating bloc, [led by] Saudi Arabia and China, and does not include the interests of the vulnerable countries.”

He added: “The final deal was possible because of the alliance that developed between the European Union, the small island developing states, least developed countries and others – and not because of anything the presidency did, in fact quite the opposite. From the beginning, the presidency was quite opposed to any kind of decent outcome.”

Developing countries should receive at least $1.3tn a year by 2035 under the deal, but much of this is likely to come in private-sector investment, with an unspecified amount also coming from potential new levies, such as taxes on fossil fuels, frequent flyers and shipping.

There was heavy criticism of the Cop presidency at the talks. Several countries told the Guardian that the presidency did not appear to be in control of the process, asked other countries for assistance that was then ignored, and was unavailable at key moments.

India said after the gavel had come down on the deal that it was unhappy with the outcome. Chandni Raina, the lead negotiator for India, called the deal a “travesty of justice”.

UK increases World Bank contribution, boosting climate finance prospects

Closely-watched international climate case in the Hague wraps up its first week of testimony

A closely-watched international climate case that could yield guidance for governments around the world wrapped its first week of arguments before the top court of the United Nations in The Hague Friday. The case, though not binding, is expected to spell out what countries are legally required to do to combat climate change and help vulnerable nations fight its devastating impact.

The push for the International Court of Justice to hear this case comes — like much of the call to address climate change — from island nations who are losing territory and fear they could disappear under rising seas. The U.N. General Assembly asked the court last year for an opinion on “the obligations of States in respect of climate change.”

“The stakes could not be higher. The survival of my people and so many others is on the line,” Arnold Kiel Loughman, attorney general of the Pacific island nation of Vanuatu, told The Hague-based court.

For years his country has spearheaded calls for reductions of the greenhouse gases that are causing sea ice to melt and oceans to expand, making the seas rise. Vanuatu led this push for international legal intervention as well.

Fifteen judges from around the world must now answer two questions: What are countries obliged to do under international law to protect the climate and environment from human-caused greenhouse gas emissions? And what are the legal consequences for governments when their acts, or lack of action, have significantly harmed the climate and environment?

With 99 participating countries, it is the largest case in the court’s history.

Countries including Vanuatu, Chile and the Philippines want countries like the United States, China and Russia to reduce their emissions and provide financial help to alleviate the devastating impact of climate change that they feel endangers their very existence.

“This is a crisis of survival. It is also a crisis of equity. Fiji contributes 0.004 percent of global emissions but our people bear the brunt of climate impacts. In climate-vulnerable nations, marginalized groups ⎯ women, children and the poor ⎯ are disproportionately affected,” Luke Daunivalu, Fiji’s ambassador to the United Nations, said.

The South Pacific island nation spoke directly after the United States and Russia, both of whom are major petroleum-producing states and staunchly opposed to the court mandating emissions reductions.

Instead, what the United States and other major greenhouse gas emitters want the court to do is defer to the landmark Paris Agreement, in which countries agreed to keep global warming to a 1.5 degree C (2.7 F) limit.

The world has already warmed 1.3 degrees C (2.3 F) since pre-industrial times because of the burning of fossil fuels. Between 1990 and 2020, sea levels rose by a global average of 10 centimeters (3.9 inches) and parts of the South Pacific have seen significantly more.

“States designed this international legal framework to address the uniquely complex collective action problem posed by anthropogenic global warming, and it embodies the clearest, most specific and the most current expression of states’ consent to be bound by international law in respect of climate change,” Margaret Taylor said on behalf of the United States, referring to the Paris Agreement.

The U.S. also pushed back on an idea proposed by several countries that developed countries have a great obligation to reduce emissions and pay reparations because they have been contributing to the problem for a much longer time. “A state cannot have international responsibility for acts that take place prior to the date on which its international legal obligation came into existence,” Taylor said.

What small states like Vanuatu are hoping for does push the norms of international law. Historically, all countries are held to the same standard. Every country that is a party to the 1948 Genocide Convention, for example, has the exact same obligation to “punish and prevent” genocide.

“What I have heard is a concerted effort by major polluters seeking to avoid their responsibilities,” Joie Chowdhury, senior attorney at the Center for International Environmental Law, told The Associated Press. She said the conduct of major polluters responsible for the climate crisis and its catastrophic consequences is unlawful under multiple international laws.

Alongside the hearings, environmental groups held a series of events to promote climate justice. On Sunday, ahead of the hearing, Pacific Islands Students Fighting Climate Change — who first developed the idea of requesting an advisory opinion — together with World Youth for Climate Justice held an afternoon of speeches, music and discussions.

Kjelld Kroon, a climate activist who is involved in a lawsuit against the Dutch state for failing to protect his Caribbean island homeland of Bonaire, watched several days of the proceedings and said he wasn’t surprised that rich countries were opposed to more legal obligations. “This is how a lot of powerful countries in the Global North extract from the Global South,” he told the AP.

But Kroon said he found the presentations by many developing states powerful and said they gave him hope.

Any decision by the court would be unable to directly force wealthy nations into action to help struggling countries. Yet it would be more than just a symbol since it could serve as the basis for other legal actions, including domestic lawsuits.

“If I look at history, I am skeptical,” Kroon said. “But if I look towards the future, I am a little bit positive.”

Copernicus November 2024 was the 2^nd warmest November recorded

Jan. – Nov. 2024 was the warmest Jan. – Nov. recorded

Copernicus

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Almost all of earth became permanently drier since 1990: Report

More than 75 percent of the globe became permanently drier over the past three decades, according to a report from the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD).

The report, published Monday, found that about 77.6 percent of the globe became drier from 1990 to 2020, more than it did over the preceding three decades.

During this period, the parts of the earth classified as drylands expanded by about 1.66 million square miles, an area bigger than India. Such lands now comprise more than 40 percent of the globe, according to the UNCCD.

Nearly 8 percent of the planet crossed the line from the non-dryland to dryland classification in recent decades, many of which were once humid, and a further 3 percent of similar areas could cross that threshold by the end of the 21st century without a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, the group warned in its report.

UNCCD attributes much of the increasing aridity on human-caused climate change, which affects both temperature and rainfall.

‘We will not go quietly into the sea’: Hearings for world’s biggest climate case conclude at the ICJ

Vanuatu and other vulnerable states gave impassioned evidence - aided by a few European allies. Now they wait for the World Court's opinion.

A landmark legal case to establish countries’ climate responsibilities is wrapping up in The Hague today after two weeks of hearings.

Judges at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) heard from more than 100 countries and organisations between 2 to 13 December, making this the biggest ever legal case in terms of participation.

At its heart is an attempt by vulnerable countries to create a tighter framework of accountability that sets clear international legal obligations for climate action. The small Pacific island nation of Vanuatu has led efforts to secure an advisory opinion from the ICJ, which is now due next year.

“The two weeks of oral hearings at the International Court of Justice have highlighted a compelling legal case, led by the Global South,” says Arnold Kiel Loughman, Attorney General for the Pacific island state.

“We have argued, one statement after the other, that international environmental laws and fundamental human rights are applicable international legal obligations that must not be excluded from States responsibilities in the context of climate change.”

With so many countries speaking at the court, the case has provided an extraordinary insight into climate concerns, grievances and political positions from around the world.

Check the link for highlighted information

What have climate-vulnerable countries argued at the ICJ?

What have European countries said at the ICJ?

What is next for the ICJ’s climate case?

The ICJ is now taking time to consider all the submissions delivered over the past fortnight.

It will deliver an advisory opinion sometime in 2025.

While this opinion won’t be legally binding - and so can’t force nations to act - it will be both legally and politically significant.

It is likely to influence climate change lawsuits in courts all over the world - including those where SIDS are seeking compensation from developed nations for historic climate damage.

David Boyd, former UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and the Environment, expressed “hope that the judges will take a look at these first hand testimonies of people on the front lines of the climate crisis and realise just how heavy the court's responsibility is to clarify states' obligations to act with much greater urgency, much higher ambition.”

“All of us look forward to the ICJ’s coming Advisory Opinion and its potential to inspire global action,” says Loughman.

“In Vanuatu, we understand that a rising tide may lift all boats, as the Global North saying goes. But in Vanuatu, we need our boats lifted fast, before the sea-level rise permanently swamps our coasts.”

Zeke Hausfather @hausfath.bsky.social - March 2025 was the second warmest March on record in the ERA5 dataset, only behind the record set last year (2024). This is despite weak La Nina conditions in the tropical Pacific.

It was 1.6C above preindustrial levels, up slightly from February.: @hausfath.bsky.social on Bluesky

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Zack Labe @zacklabe.com - Monday ice update - #Arctic sea ice extent is currently the lowest on record (JAXA data)

• about 570,000 km² below the 2010s mean
• about 970,000 km² below the 2000s mean
• about 1,540,000 km² below the 1990s mean
• about 1,920,000 km² below the 1980s mean

@zacklabe.com on Bluesky

Same shit, different year’: Australia records hottest 12 months and warmest March on record

Australia has experienced its hottest 12-month period on record, ending with its hottest March on record, with last month seeing temperatures 2.41C above average, the Bureau of Meteorology has confirmed.

The bureau said its data going back to 1910 showed the 12 months ending in March 2025 averaged 1.61C above average – the hottest of any 12-month period, beating the previous 1.51C mark set from January to December 2019.

The 2.41C record for March easily beat the previous 2.03C mark set in 2019.

March also had the hottest overnight temperatures for that month, at 2.53C above the 30-year average between 1961 and 1990. March 2025 beat the previous 2.11C mark set in 2016.

Australia just had its warmest spring-summer on record in 2024-25, with the six months from September to February 1.98C above average. The previous record was 1.68C set in 2019-2020.

“It’s the same shit, different year,” ANU climate scientist Prof Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick said. “I am sure everyone is now getting fatigued that these records keep falling. It’s now incredibly predictable.”

Dr Simon Grainger, a senior climatologist at the bureau, said Australia also had its joint warmest start to any year at 2.08C above average, tied with the January to March period of 2019.

Europe records hottest March as global heat stays above 1.5C

Europe has recorded its hottest March since records began amid a streak of extraordinary global heat as the EU weighs up how far and fast to cut emissions by 2040.

New data released on Monday by the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C35) shows last month was not only Europe’s warmest March on record, but also the second-warmest March globally, behind only March 2024.

On average, global temperatures in March were 1.6C higher than pre-industrial levels, continuing a troubling pattern of breaching 1.5C.

Twenty of the last 21 months have crossed the 1.5C threshold, which scientists warn increases the risks of extreme weather and irreversible climate damage.

Last year was the hottest year on record worldwide, and 2025 is on track to continue that trend.

The main driver of climate change is greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels, C3S said, reflecting the global scientific consensus. Without significant cuts to emissions, temperatures are expected to keep rising.

Samantha Burgess, strategic lead at the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts, which runs C3S, said March also brought weather extremes across Europe, with “many areas experiencing their driest March on record and others their wettest March on record for at least the past 47 years”.

This kind of contrast – floods in some places, drought in others – is becoming more common in a warming world. The climate crisis fuels both droughts and extreme rainfall. Hotter air dries out soil faster but also holds more moisture, making storms more intense when they hit.

Activists are calling for governments to stop approving new fossil fuel projects and make polluting companies pay for the damage.

Rebecca Newsom, global political adviser for Greenpeace International’s Stop Drilling Start Paying campaign, said Europe risks “ever harsher heatwaves and wildfires later in the year”, and warned that “contrasting rainfall extremes across the European region alone pose an immediate challenge to our food systems and to the economy as a whole”.

“Europe’s citizens must not be left alone to pay for the chaos that dirty energy companies are fuelling,” she said.

“In recent months we have seen oil and gas corporations increasing their plans to emit even more greenhouse gases, while ditching their already meek climate commitments,” she added. “Europe’s governments should stop looking for more oil and gas and prevent these corporations from doing so by banning all new fossil fuel projects.”

She also called for new taxes on oil majors like Shell, TotalEnergies, Equinor, and ENI “to help communities at home and around the world rebuild from climate disasters and invest in climate solutions”.

In the Arctic, the extent of sea ice fell to its lowest March level in 47 years of satellite records following a string of record lows in the preceding months. This continues a worrying trend, as polar regions warm significantly faster than the global average.

NOAA – March 2025 was the 3^rd warmest March recorded.

Year to date (January to March) was the 2^nd warmest January to March recorded.


Monthly Average Mauna Loa CO2 - Trend

NOAA

Global warming is ‘exposing’ new coastlines and islands as Arctic glaciers shrink

Retreating glaciers created 2,500km of “new” coastline and 35 “new” islands in the Arctic between 2000 and 2020, according to a new study.

The research uses satellite images of more than 1,700 glaciers in Greenland, Alaska, the Canadian Arctic, Russian Arctic, Iceland and Svalbard.

The findings show that 85% of these glaciers retreated over 2000-20, revealing 123km of new coastline per year on average.

The study, published in Nature Climate Change, links the acceleration in glacier melt to warmer ocean and air temperatures.

The authors find that just 101 glaciers – less than 6% of the total – were responsible for more than half of the total additional coastline length.

For example, the retreat of the Zachariae Isstrom glacier in north-east Greenland revealed 81km of new coastline alone.

The study warns that the freshly revealed coastlines are more prone to landslides, which may, in turn, create “dangerous tsunamis” that pose risks to human life and infrastructure.

A scientist not involved in the study tells Carbon Brief that it remains “unclear” what the implications of the new coastlines will be for the people and ecosystems of the Arctic.

He suggests that they “may become home to important ecosystems that play a hitherto unquantified role in the global carbon cycle”.

Trump eyes huge climate research cuts at NOAA

The Trump administration is considering deep cuts to NOAA while seeking to end much of its climate change work, according to an internal document seen by Axios.

Why it matters: The proposal, if Congress enacts it, would squash some of the nation's premier climate change research programs.

• It also reveals how the administration may try to maneuver to realign agencies without going through Congress.

Driving the news: The "passback" document — an early part of the process for drawing up the president's annual budget — proposes to cut NOAA's overall budget by nearly $1.7 billion to $4.5 billion.

• It suggests eliminating the NOAA's Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research as a line office and cutting most of its budget to about $171 million.
• That would include cutting "all funding for climate, weather, and ocean Laboratories and Cooperative Institutes," says the document, which was provided by multiple sources and reviewed by Democratic staff on the House Science, Space and Technology Committee.

Between the lines: Eliminating those programs would jeopardize universities studying climate and earth systems in partnership with NOAA, one of the world's top climate change research agencies.

• It could shutter key research sites like the Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory and the Global Monitoring Laboratory.
• What's left of OAR — primarily tornado and weather research and ocean observation — would be reprogrammed to other offices.
• The effect would be to refocus NOAA on weather forecasting, but experts say that's tied intimately to climate research.

The Trump administration is eyeing similar science cuts at NASA, the Washington Post reported.

• Proposed cutbacks of NASA science by 47% "would halt the development of nearly every future science project at NASA, wasting billions of dollars of taxpayer funds already spent on these projects," the Planetary Society said in a Friday statement.

Yes, but: The NOAA document is labeled "pre-decisional" and is subject to change.

• It essentially shows what the White House Office of Management and Budget wants to do with NOAA and the Commerce Department.
• NOAA, Commerce and the White House didn't immediately respond to requests for comment.

The other side: House Science Ranking Member Zoe Lofgren said in a statement she will "do everything I can to stand in the way of this idiotic plan."

• "The White House seems to think that our science capabilities operate in vacuums from one another," she said. "That is not the case. It's a holistic system, and each piece of the agency is critical to strengthening the accuracy of weather forecasting and data, and then providing that data to the people who need it."

The president's budget is historically dead on arrival on the Hill, and whatever the administration ultimately proposes, lawmakers are likely to stave off at least some of the cuts.

• But the landscape is different in Trump 2.0, and Republicans in charge of Congress have been mostly unwilling to push back on proposed cuts publicly.
• The document also notes some areas in which "the Department should act now to align existing resources and activities to the direction of the Passback," including "unsustainable costs" in NOAA's satellite acquisition programs.

Zoom in: The document also proposes to roughly halve the budget of the National Ocean Service to $334 million.

• The National Marine Fisheries Service would get a more than $300 million cut.
• And it proposes to move the Space Weather Prediction Center from NOAA to the Department of Homeland Security.

Zeke Hausfather @hausfath.bsky.social

March 2025 was tied with March 2016 and March 2024 as the warmest on record in the Berkeley Earth dataset. It was 1.55C above preindustrial (1850-1900) levels.

@hausfath.bsky.social on Bluesky

Little more from yesterday’s link

Estimated Probability of 2025 annual average final rankings:

1st – 34%
2nd – 46%
3rd – 20%
4th or lower – < 1%

Zeke Hausfather @hausfath.bsky.social

With 19 days of the month now available in ERA5, its pretty clear that April 2025 will be the second warmest April on record, after 2024, at ~1.5C above preindustrial levels:

@hausfath.bsky.social on Bluesky