Temperatures in the Antarctic climbed above 15C this month, shattering the previous winter heat record for the usually frozen region and raising concerns about the speed of climate breakdown.
The new winter peak temperature was logged by the Argentinian Esperanza base on the Trinity peninsula on 6 June amid a protracted heatwave, when the maximum daily temperature exceeded zero degrees for three consecutive weeks.
Scientists said the high of 15.4C broke the previous record set at the same station in 1998 by 2C. “This is absolutely crazy,” said Raúl Cordero, an Ecuadorian climate professor at the University of Groningen. “It is also about 20C above normal for this time of the year. That is a huge anomaly.”
Unusually strong warm winds from the north blew across much of the Antarctic peninsula. One Chilean weather station, Boonen Rivera, registered temperatures of close to 13C, Cordero said.
On King George Island, 100 miles (160km) from Esperanza, researchers said the landscape had changed from mostly white to brown, grey and green after temperatures hit 4.6C on 6 June.
“Last weekend was very strange. The temperatures here went very high so everything outside melted,” said Luis Muñoz, a Chilean glaciologist. “Usually there is 20cm of snow and a lot of ice on the ground at this time.”
Muñoz said he and a colleague, Natalia Mestre, climbed to the 500-metre peak of the nearby Collins glacier last Wednesday and were surprised to find rain melting the ice. “There was a direct impact on the glacier, which should be receiving snow now. It should not be suffering ablation at this time of the year. This is obviously not good for the glacier.”
The Antarctic region is coming under increasing human pressure, directly in the form of resource exploration and tourism and indirectly through the burning of fossil fuels, which is heating the planet.
Scientists warn that some of the region’s biggest glaciers, such as Thwaites and Pine Island, are approaching or may even have passed a tipping point that could push up global sea levels by four metres. Antarctic ice melt has also been found to slow global ocean circulation.
Cordero said a single winter of heatwaves, no matter how amazing, would not by itself make a huge difference to sea levels, but it signified more alarming long-term trends. “This heatwave happened because of extremely strong westerlies,” he said. “This has been happening with increasing frequency since the 1980s, and that is known to be related to climate change.”
Climate models suggest a small nuclear war in the tropics would do even more damage to the ozone layer than a larger nuclear war in more northerly latitudes, increasing exposure to dangerous ultraviolet radiation all over the world
A nuclear war would not only trigger a nuclear winter, but also severely damage the ozone layer, making recovery even harder. Now, a study has shown that a relatively small nuclear war between India and Pakistan could do just as much damage to the ozone layer as a larger nuclear war between the US and Russia.
“We want to emphasise that even a small-scale nuclear war can produce far-reaching global side effects beyond the conflict regions,” says Zhihong Zhuo at the University of Quebec in Montreal.
A nuclear war would devastate the areas where bombs or warheads explode, with the explosions, heat and radiation potentially killing many millions directly. The explosions and fires would be so large that huge quantities of smoke would be pumped into the atmosphere, blocking sunlight and causing global temperatures to plummet – a nuclear winter.
“There’s strong surface cooling in the first several years,” says Zhuo, who presented her team’s results at a meeting of the European Geosciences Union in Vienna last month.
Recovery from a nuclear winter would be delayed by damage to the ozone layer in the stratosphere that blocks harmful ultraviolet light – volcanic eruptions and even large wildfires can also damage the ozone layer. High UV levels can harm plants as well as animals, meaning lower yields from farming even as temperatures recover.
Recent studies with advanced climate models suggest the extent of ozone damage after a nuclear war has been underestimated. So, concerned by the many conflicts around the world, Kuo and her colleagues decided to look at the possible consequences if one went nuclear. Drawing on estimates from previous studies, they modelled an India-Pakistan nuclear war that would release 5 million tonnes of soot into the atmosphere and a US-Russia war releasing 16 million tonnes. Unlike previous studies, they also took into account other pollutants such as organic carbon.
Their climate model suggests that air circulation patterns in the tropics would allow the pollutants from an India-Pakistan war to rise higher into the atmosphere, stay there longer and spread more widely around the world.
“The upward transport is stronger for the tropical cases,” Kuo says. So although the quantities of pollutants are smaller than from a US-Russia war, the effects on the ozone layer are actually greater.
The damage to the ozone layer would be greatest over the poles, similar to the situation caused by ozone-damaging pollutants known as CFCs. But there could be an increase in UV levels of up to 30 per cent even in tropical areas, the model suggests, with serious impacts on the health of people and wildlife.
‘Megafires’ in California, Canada, South Korea and Europe in 2025, but changes to farming slowed spread in parts of Africa.
“Devastating” wildfires ripped across the wealthier parts of the world in 2025, a study has found, even as globally, the area ravaged by flames fell.
Catastrophic blazes claimed lives, homes and jobs last year in California, Canada, Europe and South Korea. But the 335m hectares burned was the second-lowest since 2002, the review found, largely owing to the expansion of African farms that have fragmented landscapes and hampered the spread of large savannah fires.
The disasters in 2025 included a Scottish “megafire” that torched more than 100,000 hectares – contributing to the UK breaking its record for burned area – and the Palisades and Eaton fires in Los Angeles, which were among the most destructive in US history.
Fires accounted for more than 38% of insured losses from weather disasters in 2025, the study found.
“2025 shows that a ‘quiet’ fire year globally can still be devastating,” said Matthew Jones, a climate scientist at the University of East Anglia and lead author of the study. “We are seeing a growing disconnect between total area burned and real-world impacts.”
Changes in land use mean wildfires burn less of the planet than they have historically done, but global heating is creating conditions allowing them to spread, increasing the danger at what researchers call the wildland-urban interface, where people are most at risk.
Adverse weather, inflamed by carbon pollution, turned some of last year’s fires into explosive infernos.
In southern California and South Korea, the researchers found, high winds and dry vegetation pushed fires through densely populated areas, causing “exceptional mortality, mass evacuations, and major infrastructure losses”. In the Mediterranean, meanwhile, drought and extreme heat drove severe blazes, from Portugal to Turkey.
“These conditions do not cause the fires, but in the event of a fire, we have material that is more flammable than usual – because it is drier – and wind conditions that fan the flames,” said David Garcia, an applied mathematician at the University of Alicante, who was not involved in the study. “This makes large fires more likely to occur.”
An attribution study Garcia co-authored last year found the extreme weather fuelling the flames in Portugal and Spain last year was made 39 times more likely by climate breakdown. “If we continue to warm the planet, large-scale fires will continue to increase,” he said.
The overall reduction in global burned area led to a drop in carbon dioxide emissions to their third-lowest level on record.
In Canada, though, extreme wildfire emissions were recorded for the third year in a row. Since 2023, boreal forests in North America have emitted close to 4bn tonnes of CO2, exceeding the total emissions of the preceding 15-year period.
As well as heating the planet, the pollutants in wildfire smoke lead to huge numbers of people dying from breathing dirty air. The toxic particles spewed by Canadian wildfires in 2023 killed 82,000 people, according to a study published in September, with smoke even choking cities in the US, Europe and Africa.
Adrián Regos, a landscape ecologist at the Biological Mission of Galicia, Spain, who was not involved in the study, said last year’s events illustrated how a relatively small number of extreme fires could dominate the ecological, social and economic consequences of an entire fire season.
“The broader pattern highlighted by this study is consistent with what we are observing across southern Europe: while total burned area may fluctuate from year to year, climate change is increasing the likelihood of extreme fire-weather conditions, and fuel accumulation associated with rural abandonment is making many landscapes more vulnerable to large, fast-moving fires,” he said.
“The challenge is therefore not only reducing the number of fires, but increasing the resilience of landscapes and communities to extreme events.”
It’s been record hot in parts of Europe and Asia over the last week and this has provoked an outburst of three things that have become de rigeur whenever this happens:
Climate change scepticism
Exclusive focus on heat by legacy media
Divorced context
The first one is baked in to the conversation, you might say, if you were reaching for an appropriate metaphor. And normally I’d not be that bothered. But I’ve been seeing more of it across my social media, especially on Twitter/X, and the explanation I think is two-fold.
Firstly, and most obviously, Musk and Nikita Bier, the guy in control of the algorithm, boost right-wing accounts by policy, which means scepticism and denial at moments of climate extremes become more visible, given these positions tend to be rightist in nature. Secondly, despite my leftist politics, my anti-Zionism and pro-Palestine writings have attracted people who approach anti-Zionism from a more right-wing, pro-sovereignty, pro-nationalist perspective. These people, my intuition tells me, put climate change and Zionism in the same bracket – as a mainstream, elite-led “narrative” to be rejected. As such I’ve been seeing some of these accounts, who I agree with on Israel, Palestine, imperialism and Zionism, in my feed posting content and takes sceptical of climate change.
To me, this is not a coherent politics. Zionism and a heating planet grow from the same root. Imperialism is a fuel source for climate change, and anti-imperialism cannot be separated from ecological destruction. The Pentagon is the single biggest institutional emitter of greenhouse gases, burning more fossil fuels annually than entire countries like Portugal, Sweden and Denmark. An empire which projects global power and launches missiles thousands of miles from its shores to impose its violent will on the world could not survive without fossil fuels. Which is why, among many other reasons, Trump, and US empire historically, have loved oil so much.
In the first 15 months of the genocide in Gaza, Israel burnt more fossil fuels than Estonia and Costa Rica burn in a year combined.
Now it’s been more than two and a half years, the ecological cost to the atmosphere of genociding Gaza and mass murdering Palestinians will be equivalent to the pollution necessary to power the lives of tens of millions of people. But instead of using fossil fuels to provide the necessities of life, Zionism uses fossil fuels on a massive scale to end lives. Zionism kills Palestinians as a first order effect, and then boosts the heatwaves that cause death and suffering years later.
That brings me to number two.
A heating planet is just one outgrowth of the current global system, yet far too often legacy media ignores the vast scale of the ecological crisis to focus narrowly on climate change. And this is where an argument for climate as a narrative can be made, but it’s not the argument made by those who scorn it as a tool to provoke fear and impose control. If climate change is pushed as a narrative, it’s because an easy solution can be sold within the existing confines of globalised neoliberal capital. A transition to solar and wind, fuelled by mega-mining companies blasting the holes and digging up the minerals which are transported by the mega-shippers, the market lubricated by metals traders, with the profits captured by the energy giants.
Crucially, inthis telling of the crisis, nothing really has to change. On the contrary in fact. In this telling, capitalist growth policies become essential to combating climate change.
The root of climate change as a mainstream narrative is better understood then as seeded in and growing out of imperialist-capitalist relations, not conspiracist adjacent globalist plots.
Which brings me to complaint number three.
If the crisis is understood not just as a climate crisis but as a whole-system ecological crisis underpinned by the existing system of globalised neoliberal capital, no easy, sellable solutions can be proffered. If our ecological predicament is understood as encompassing greenhouses gases, plastic pollution, ocean acidification, nitrogen pollution, tropical forest destruction, ozone depletion and species extinction, the story of the crisis becomes far harder to tell as a soundbite. If ecological damage is assessed not just in terms of extreme heat but in terms of an integrated system under a multi-faceted assault, the breadth and scale of the problem quite obviously defies any singular, energy source-focused solution.
Taking the crisis as a whole would require a discussion which slays sacred capitalist cows, confronts elite power structures and concludes with the necessity to completely reshape not just energy systems, but many of the systems which drive our civilisation. It would require serious policies that reject global capital and move us towards sustainable, local systems that benefit communities not oligarchic structures and corporate entities, whether that be in energy, farming, tourism or trade.
Here’s the unifying kicker: a politics of true global sustainability would require the same kind of revolutionary thinking and action that would also end imperialism and Zionism.
In conclusion, yes, the world is heating up, and that’s because of the extraordinary increase in the rate at which carbon dioxide is being released from burning fossil fuels. And yes, this heating will have to stop or lots of people will die and the system will collapse. But fossil fuels can be used usefully or badly, and the externalities of their burning (the heat trapping pollution) can be more, or less, worth the cost of burning them.
Genocide, conquest and imperialism are vile and depraved ways to use any energy resource, let alone a non-renewable one that has planetary effects long into the future.
To be honest, I may have written this article for an audience that doesn’t exist. But I have been frustrated for a long time now with how ecological collapse has been so divorced from the majority of anti-imperial thought. I think that is also partly to do with a belief that imperialists weaponise climate change to demonise, for example, China’s use of coal or Venezuela’s use of its oil revenues (now of course captured by empire).
I understand this perspective, and imperialist media definitely does this.
But that isn’t a reason to pretend basic physics is wrong or to write off climate change as a conspiracy or a globalist plot.
It’s a reason to think more deeply about how and why climate change is presented to us as a problem in the way that it is, not a reason to doubt whether it is a problem at all.
Global heating has “fundamentally altered” the climate of Mecca and is exposing millions of hajj pilgrims to extreme and dangerous heat even in months outside summer, new analysis has found.
Carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels means scorching temperatures of 40C (104F) are now regularly experienced in May, the study showed. In past decades, such peaks would only have occurred in summer. The researchers said that hajj, the annual Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca, would take place amid dangerous heat almost all year round by the end of the century without a rapid transition away from fossil fuels.
Saudi Arabia, which hosts hajj, is the world’s second biggest oil producer and a long-term obstructer of climate action.
Average global temperatures are forecast to reach near-record levels in the next five years, with Arctic temperatures expected to warm faster than other regions, a report by the U.N. weather agency and the UK’s Met Office said on Thursday. The annual report, opens new tab which gives regional predictions for temperatures and rain predicts that annual global mean near-surface temperatures will range between 1.3°C and 1.9°C above the 1850-1900 pre-industrial period.
COMMENT. The above video does tackle the problem, but eventually in a rather limited way, even putting in an advertisement for nuclear power as a way to combat climate change!
The military-industrial complex is not merely burning the planet. It is funding the political opposition to anyone attempting to put out the fire.
Every modern war is also a chemical event, a water event, an atmospheric event — consequences that accumulate in soil and groundwater long after the last ceasefire is signed and the reconstruction contracts are issued to the same companies that manufactured the weapons.
As global military spending surges to record levels, the climate cost of war and rearmament remains largely uncounted, unreported and exempt from scrutiny, writes Wayne Hawkins.
HUMANITY HAS A PROBLEM. Actually, humanity has several, but let us focus on the one where we are simultaneously spending nearly $3 trillion a year preparing to destroy civilisation while solemnly promising to save it.
Welcome to the military-industrial complex’s quiet war on the atmosphere. Fought without declaration. Exempt from accounting. Winning convincingly.
The number nobody counts
Here is a figure worth sitting with. Scientists for Global Responsibility estimate that the global military sector produces around 2.75 billion tonnes of CO₂ every year. That is not from active wars. That is peacetime — bases humming, jets training, supply chains churning.
If the world’s militaries were a country, they would be the fourth-largest emitter on Earth, behind only the United States, China and India. They would also be the only “country” explicitly exempt from international climate reporting requirements. Convenient.
The year 2025 was a banner year for the defence industry. Global military spending hit a record $2.887 trillion — the 11th consecutive year of growth. Europe increased defence budgets by 14%. NATO, not to be outdone, set a new target of 5% of GDP by 2035. The United States, briefly the exception, has already approved over $1 trillion for 2026, with $1.5 trillion potentially on the way.
Meanwhile, at COP30 in Belém in November, delegates scrutinised aviation, agriculture, steel and cement for their climate contributions. War did not make the agenda. Presumably, the irony was noted and filed.
When the shooting starts, so does the scoreboard
The moment active conflict begins, the numbers stop being merely alarming and start becoming geological. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has generated an estimated 311million tonnes of CO₂ equivalent — comparable to the combined annual emissions of Belgium, New Zealand, Austria and Portugal. Not accumulated over decades — since February 2022.
The first 15 months of the war in Gaza produced more than 33 million tonnes. And these calculations do not fully capture the elegant brutality of modern warfare’s climate toolkit.
Russia’s strikes on Ukrainian electrical infrastructure have released sulfur hexafluoride – a greenhouse gas 24,000 times more potent than CO₂ – from high-voltage switching equipment. Civilian aircraft rerouting around the conflict zone has added an estimated 20 million extra tonnes of CO₂ equivalent. The planet did not get a vote on any of these design choices.
A 2025 Nature Communications study made the structural logic plain: rising global military spending is directly incompatible with limiting warming to 1.5–2°C. Military industries emit nearly twice the CO₂ per unit of economic output as civilian sectors. Every percentage-point increase in the share of military spending pushes emissions meaningfully upward — and expands fossil fuel-dependent industries that then lobby against the green transition.
The military-industrial complex is not merely burning the planet. It is funding the political opposition to anyone attempting to put out the fire.
The slow damage that outlasts the war
Then there is the legacy: the slow, generation-spanning damage that persists long after the press conferences and the peace agreements. In Gaza, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) has documented the loss of 97% of tree crops, 95% of shrubland and 82% of annual crops since 2023. Food production at scale is not possible. The aquifer supplying most of Gaza’s water is likely contaminated by collapsed sewage infrastructure.
Cases of acute watery diarrhoea have increased 36-fold. Acute jaundice syndrome has increased 384-fold. Sixty-one million tonnes of debris laced with unexploded ordnance, asbestos and chemical munition residue now blanket the territory.
In Ukraine, environmental damage from soil contamination, heavy metal ordnance residue, landmines and destroyed ecosystems is estimated at over $50 billion. Scientists describe it plainly as a toxic legacy for generations.
Every modern war is also a chemical event, a water event, an atmospheric event — consequences that accumulate in soil and groundwater long after the last ceasefire is signed and the reconstruction contracts are issued to the same companies that manufactured the weapons.
The accountability black hole
Here is the part that should end careers, but does not. A 2025 analysis by the Conflict and Environment Observatory found that military emissions reporting is not merely inadequate; it is actively getting worse.
The top three military spenders, the United States, China and Russia, are either failing to submit data to international bodies or providing figures so incomplete as to be decorative. The solution, apparently, to the largest measurement gap in climate policy is to measure less.
Military emissions were explicitly exempted from international climate accounting frameworks at Kyoto. Countries lobbied for that exemption. It has never been corrected. When the world’s most destructive industry gets to operate outside the ledger, the ledger is not an accounting document. It is a performance.
So here we are. Spending nearly $3 trillion a year on systems that are structurally incompatible with our own survival. Exempting those systems from the accountability frameworks we built specifically to address our survival. Doing so at the fastest rate of increase since the Cold War.
The defence industry calls this deterrence. Climate scientists call it a fuse.
Notably, the planet has not exempted us from the consequences.
Shifting winds placed a former nuclear reactor and rocket testing site in the path of the growing Sandy Fire. The region’s first major blaze of the season raised alarm from families aware of the site’s history and spotty cleanup.
Melissa Bumstead lives less than four miles from the site of possibly the worst nuclear meltdown in U.S. history besides the Three Mile Island accident. The Santa Susana Field Laboratory, or SSFL, is known locally as a problem site—with a pockmarked history amid a spotty cleanup. A blaze hitting the former nuclear reactor and rocket testing site, Bumstead is sure, would be a cataclysm.
Any aliens who have been monitoring radio and television transmissions streaming outwards into space from Planet Earth over the past few decades will likely be intrigued, bemused or simply horrified at humanity’s headlong drive towards climate catastrophe. No matter the urgent warnings from climate scientists, the power of billionaires, financial speculators and corporations maintains a death-like grip on governments around the world. Amid the occasional flurry of big business greenwashing and government rhetoric about ‘climate protection’ and ‘eco-friendly’ initiatives, billions of people are being held hostage by the forces that are dragging everyone to the edge of the climate abyss.
New warnings about climate change do, of course, occasionally appear in the press. But rarely, if ever, are there prominent and sustained front-page headlines and news-leading television coverage. Rarer still are impassioned editorials, high-profile presenters and commentators demanding the substantive, radical changes that are needed to avoid the most damaging predicted impacts of business as usual.
Earlier this month, the Royal Albert Hall hosted a 100th birthday party for naturalist David Attenborough, Britain’s most beloved broadcaster. Celebrities showered him with love and praise: Leonardo DiCaprio, Judi Dench, Olivia Colman, Emily Eavis, Chris Martin, Ben Fogle, Raye, Kate Winslet. And Paddington Bear. Attenborough sat in the royal box, alongside Prince William. King Charles delivered a handwritten message from Balmoral Castle via a ‘cavalcade of creature couriers’, including eagles, a red squirrel, a hedgehog, otters, ducks, a fox and deer, thanks to the wonders of CGI. All very nice; all very Disneyfied.
For many years now, Attenborough has been warning about the dangers of mass consumption, pollution, worldwide species loss and global warming. These subjects are clearly of great concern to him, although he started ringing the alarm bell very late.
But the evening gave a wide berth to such uncomfortable topics. ‘Life on Earth’? The climate crisis must be happening on a different planet entirely.
As Jonathan Liew, a Guardian sports journalist and columnist, pointed out:
‘This is, of course, the Attenborough with which our public discourse is most comfortable: depoliticised, universally adored, a man-sized Paddington Bear fit only for our veneration. Who teaches us about tree frogs and seal cubs and stick insects and asks for nothing in return.’
Of course, what Liew called ‘public discourse’ is the tightly constrained media space permitted by state and corporate power.
Liew continued:
‘And perhaps there are more difficult questions to negotiate here: the extent to which he has been a force for the meaningful and revolutionary change he seeks, and the extent to which his broad, inoffensive appeal has been more hindrance than help, allowing the powerful to feign concern for the planet while shirking the tough and bloody compromises required to secure it.’
To his credit, Attenborough has been eloquent and impassioned in recent years about the climate crisis. He addressed the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow in 2021, saying that:
‘We are already in trouble. The stability we all depend on is breaking. This story is one of inequality, as well as instability. Today, those who’ve done the least to cause this problem, are being the hardest hit. Ultimately, all of us will feel the impact, some of which are now unavoidable.’
But, even five years on, as the climate crisis worsens, the topic was deemed unmentionable by the organisers of Attenborough’s 100th birthday party.
‘Hothouse Earth’ And Collapsing Currents
In February, a new scientific report warned that runaway global warming is closer than had previously been thought. We are heading for the ‘point of no return’ after which we would be locked into a hellish ‘hothouse Earth’. Climate ‘tipping points’ would be triggered, producing rapid heating, which would lead to a domino effect of yet more tipping points and feedback loops. These include the melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, drastic dieback of the Amazon rainforest and the weakening, and possible shutdown, of the Atlantic ocean conveyor belt known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC).The scientists stated that:
‘Earth’s climate is now departing from the stable conditions that supported human civilization for millennia.’
The world has already experienced a global average temperature rise of over 1.3C since pre-industrial times and is likely to surpass the Paris Agreement ‘limit’ of long-term average heating of 1.5C in the next few years. Current government and business policies are pushing us towards 2-3C of global warming, if not more, by 2100.
But, if trigger points are breached and runaway global warming occurs, we are talking about much higher temperature rises, perhaps 10C or more. This would mean almost unimaginable catastrophic effects on the climate system, global agriculture and societal infrastructure; not to mention the extinction of humans. Scientists have warned that even a rise of 3-4C means that ‘the economy and society will cease to function as we know it’.
Bill McGuire, Professor Emeritus of Geophysical and Climate Hazards at University College London, put things in grim perspective via X:
‘We are already locked-in to a return to Pliocene [around 2.6 to 5.3 million years ago] conditions (3C hotter and (eventually) ~ 20m sea-level rise)
‘Keep going as we are, and hotter Miocene [5.3 to 23 million years ago] conditions will result
‘Beyond this a return to early Eocene [around 48 to 56 million years ago] hothouse beckons – and potential oblivion’
During the Eocene, the global average temperature was well over 10C higher than present. Oblivion would hit humanity long before such a temperature rise occurred.
Earlier this month, yet another deeply disturbing scientific studyrevealed that the risk of AMOC reaching a tipping point by 2100, after which its shutdown would be inevitable, is as high as 50 per cent. Previously, this was considered ‘a low likelihood event’ of around five per cent. But even this should be held in perspective. How many of us would board a plane knowing that there was a five per cent chance that it would crash?
AMOC, of which the Gulf Stream is the best-known component, is a vital carrier of warm water from the tropics to high latitudes in the North Atlantic, returning cold water southwards. It is a primary source of heat for western and northern Europe, leading to the temperate climate here. AMOC connects with other ocean current systems in a global network that transports heat, water, nutrients and carbon around the planet. Any disturbance to AMOC, far less its collapse, would have devastating global consequences for climate, agriculture, infrastructure and even for the habitability of Earth.
Professor Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, who has studied AMOC for 35 years, said:
‘This is an important and very concerning result. It shows that the “pessimistic” models, which show a strong weakening of the AMOC by 2100, are, unfortunately, the realistic ones, in that they agree better with observational data.’
He added:
‘I now am increasingly worried that we may well pass that AMOC shutdown tipping point, where it becomes inevitable, in the middle of this century, which is quite close.’
To emphasise: the tipping point may be much earlier than 2100; it could happen by 2050, or even sooner. The vital point here is that scientists increasingly agree that the ‘safe window’ to stabilise the current by halting emissions is closing far faster than previously thought. And the public likely does not even realise it.
Rahmstorf had previously said that a collapse must be avoided ‘at all costs’. Now he added:
‘I argued this when we thought the chance of an AMOC shutdown was maybe 5%, and even then we were saying that risk is too high, given the massive impacts. Now it looks like it’s more than 50%. The most dramatic and drastic climate changes we see in the last 100,000 years of Earth history have been when the AMOC switched to a different state.’
In an English-language video for the German DW news channel, Rahmstorf explained the importance of AMOC for European and global climate, and the significance of the latest alarming results. He warned that we should expect more climate extremes in heat, cold, drought, floods and storms.
If and when the AMOC collapses, the impact on agriculture in the northern hemisphere will be devastating. The drop in harvest yields for key crops could be as high as 50 per cent. Mass starvation is a very real possibility.
Climate Shocks
……………………………………………………………………………………………………. The fact that deeply disturbing findings about a likely collapse of a vital component of the climate system were not given wider, extensive and sustained coverage is a devastating indictment of ‘mainstream’ journalism.
……………………….Scientists are warning, as loudly as they possibly can, that the present economic system of rampant capitalism is destroying the very life-support systems that made Planet Earth a habitable environment for humans to evolve and flourish.
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. Look at the daily, hour-by-hour obsessing over the endless maneuvering within the Labour government; every single statement from ministers and their allies scrutinised by the Westminster bubble of political correspondents.
Imagine that, instead of focusing on short-term melodramas, leading news organisations rigorously probed politicians, day in and day out, about the climate crisis.
Imagine that news editors and journalists relentlessly challenged the government about current policies that are bringing us closer to the brink of climate chaos.
Imagine that reporters investigated and exposed the deep reluctance and state-corporate obstacles, including the establishment media, that are blocking alternatives to climate Armageddon.
Climate crisis has tripled the likelihood of extreme heat occurring, study finds. Temperatures reaching the high 40 degrees Celsius across India and Pakistan are no longer extreme weather events but a regular feature of the pre-monsoon season, scientists have warned.
The finding comes from a rapid attribution study by World Weather Attribution, an international scientific collaboration that analyses the role of the human-caused climate crisis in extreme weather events. The study, published on Thursday, examined a prolonged period of extreme heat that struck India and Pakistan between mid-April and early May, when daily maximum temperatures exceeded 46C in several cities, causing at least 37 heat-related deaths in India and 10 in Karachi, Pakistan.
For one day in late April, all of the world’s 50 hottest cities were in India as the country experienced an extraordinarily severe heatwave. Air-quality monitoring platform AQI said that there was “no modern precedent” for this occurrence and that it was “not normal”. “This is not a normal April,” the platform said. “And it demands a serious, data-grounded reckoning.”
These data come from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Mauna Loa Observatory, which may soon be shut down because of proposed government budget cuts. The amount of carbon dioxide detected in the atmosphere hit a record high in April. CO2 levels averaged about 431 parts per million (ppm) over that month, according to data collected at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii.
After a landmark climate meeting in Santa Marta, Colombia, where nearly 60 countries gathered to work out how to end the production and use of planet-heating fossil fuels, what have we learned? The single most important thing to come from the first Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels conference, in Santa Marta, has been a change of mood. Whereas the UN’s annual climate summits, or Cops, can often feel stuck and frustrating, with countries circling the same topics without resolution, nearly every delegate in Colombia felt liberated. In a world of climate denial and misinformation, Santa Marta was a shining example of science-led decision making. Hundreds of experts, academics and scientists inspired and informed the launch of three major initiatives on the energy transition.
Simultaneous exposure to toxic chemicals and climate change’s impacts likely generates an additive or synergistic effect that increases reproductive harm, and may contribute to the broad global drop in fertility, new peer-reviewed research finds. The review of scientific literature considers how endocrine-disrupting chemicals, often found in plastic, coupled with climate change’s effects, such as heat stress, are each linked to reductions in fertility and fecundity across global species – including in humans, wildlife and invertebrates.
Santa Marta (Colombia) (AFP) – Former Irish President Mary Robinson has had a front-row seat to historic change — and senses another turning point coming at a fossil fuel phaseout meeting in Colombia.
She casts the Santa Marta conference as a rare opportunity to break the “fossil fuel mindset” — and as the Iran war roils energy markets, it spotlights the risks of coal, oil and gas dependence, particularly for the poor she has long championed.
Speaking to AFP on Monday in Santa Marta ahead of the high-level talks on April 28-29, Robinson also described how listening to a calving glacier brought her to tears — and crystallized the urgency of the climate fight.
This interview with Robinson, a member of The Elders group of former heads of state founded by Nelson Mandela, has been edited for length and clarity.
A: “I do believe the COP (UN Conference of the Parties) is still very important and I hope that Santa Marta will be a complement to it and feed into the process.
“There are many other ways in which we need the COP. But we failed in Belem (at COP30) to get reference to phasing out fossil fuel because of the penetration of the fossil fuel lobbies. So that’s a reality.
“But when we planned Santa Marta we didn’t know we’d be in the worst crisis of oil and gas. The timing is important. Now is the time to change the mindset — get out of a fossil fuel mindset into a future-oriented clean energy, renewable energy.
“It’s the way we have to go, it’s the way we are going, but we need to go far much faster.”
A: “There are real possibilities. We really have never had the time and space before to do it. It’s not a negotiated conference — you don’t have to worry about negotiation.
“Countries have come thinking of what they are prepared do: governments, sub-national organizations, business generally, civil society, and the energy of the people summit. The dynamic is real.
“We’re on the brink of a new dynamic way forward of doers, coalitions of doers and it has to be the outcome of Santa Marta.”
“They are the very citizens who are suffering now from this conflict, which has choked off 20 percent of oil and gas. And it’s the poorest that suffer most from the rise in prices, the farmers can’t get the fertilizer, etc. This is not a reliable future. I think that’s a really important moment for Santa Marta.”
A: “We are coming close to real tipping points, and the scientists have been warning us for years. But they are worried that things are accelerating.
“Not enough of the planning of governments is grounded in the science. One of the things we’re calling for — and I’m very keen on this — is that governments should have chief planetary scientists. During COVID, lots of countries had chief medical officers, and we listened because we were scared. They had a lot of authority.
“We’re in the same position. We haven’t thought it through yet, but we are.”
A: “When you hear the science, it is scary. And we should be more scared.
“Part of it is aligning ourselves with nature. I had an experience of doing that. I was lucky enough to be on a scientific expedition in Greenland where we were told to just be on your own and listen to the glacier.
“I was listening to the sound of thunder — which was a major calving — and then sharp, smaller calving like rifle shots, I found myself crying. I was on my own, listening to nature and I was crying because I knew it wasn’t right, I knew what we were doing, we shouldn’t be doing.
“I was so grateful to that moment of really understanding that nature was talking to us and saying, stop this.
“And so it’s the urgency of the science, the opportunity at the moment, and the space that is provided by Santa Marta. We must avail of it, and we must build momentum.”
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