Climat & Collapse

Exclusive: As wildfires rage, Frank Elderson says more work needed to assess risk from collapse of ecosystem services

Increasing instability of the ocean, ice and atmosphere threatens farming, finance and society. We all need to wake up to that fact.

The climate and nature crisis threatens all aspects of British life, from national security to the food supply. Despite the scale of the risks now facing the UK, there has been no comprehensive national emergency briefing delivered to the public by the Government.

Climate scientists warn of unprecedented Antarctic heatwave, with temperatures 20C above normal. Loss of sea ice threatens marine life and penguins.

The system of ocean current that moves heat in the Atlantic Ocean plays a key role in regulating climate. Today’s monitoring of it may be discontinued...

While the term “Anthropocene” is well established across scientific disciplines and social spheres, interpretations are diverse. Taking account of the 2024 rejection by a geological commission to accept the Anthropocene as a geological epoch and the related scientific debate, here we offer a future-oriented perspective from the viewpoint of Earth system science. We describe different pathways in the Anthropocene up to the year 3,000, systematically characterizing them according to impacts and causes. We discuss the enormous global consequences of anthropogenic pressures on the Earth system and quantify the corresponding long-term commitment to change. Regarding the causes, we conservatively explore best-case and middle-of-the road emission scenarios, in combination with climate sensitivities drawn from within the IPCC likely range. We also discuss implications for Earth system resilience that could result in what we call worst case scenarios for Anthropocene outcomes. We conclude that, beyond the slow pace of

Brutal El Nino, drought, war threatens food supply

Beneath the surface of the Pacific, a massive pool of heat is preparing to reshape global weather patterns. Time is running out to prepare for a climate shock of unprecedented scale. As 2026 unfolds, the Pacific Ocean is priming a catastrophic El Niño that threatens to cripple global food systems, trigger widespread economic instability, and shatter planetary temperature records.

The critical Atlantic current system appears significantly more likely to collapse than previously thought after new research found that climate models predicting the biggest slowdown are the most realistic. Scientists called the new finding “very concerning” as a collapse would have catastrophic consequences for Europe, Africa and the Americas.

Le philosophe de l'environnement Rupert Read dit à Ella Whelan la panéliste Moral Maze pourquoi nous ne pourrons peut-être plus profiter du même niveau de vie pour le bien de la planète et des générations futures.

States and financial bodies using modelling that ignores shocks from extreme weather and climate tipping points

Glacial earthquakes are a special type of earthquake generated in cold, icy regions. First discovered in the northern hemisphere more than 20 years ago, these quakes occur when huge chunks of ice fall from glaciers into the sea. Until now, only a very few have been found in the Antarctic. In a new study soon to be published in Geophysical Research Letters, I present evidence for hundreds of these quakes in Antarctica between 2010 and 2023, mostly at the ocean end of the Thwaites Glacier – the so-called Doomsday Glacier that could send sea levels rising rapidly if it were to collapse.

UN GEO report says ending this harm key to global transformation required ‘before collapse becomes inevitable’

I always say that models are not predictions; they are qualitative illustrations of what the future could be. But as the future gets closer to the present, models can start being seen as predictive tools. It is the weather/climate dichotomy, so aptly exploited to confuse matters by politically minded people in the discussion about climate. Right now, we are getting close to the point that we could forecast a collapse in the same way as we can forecast the trajectory of a tropical storm. So, you remember how “The Limits to Growth” generated a long term forecast in 1972. Here it is

Dr Luke Kemp is a Research Associate at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, University of Cambridge. He has a PhD in international relations from the ANU and previous experience as a senior economist at Vivid Economics. This episode explores catastrophic and extinction risk, why the topic is understudied, and how we can weigh out the catastrophic risks of climate change and solar geo-engineering.

“We’re losing 120 calories per person, per day, for every degree of global warming.” That stark data point from a 2025 Nature study signals more than a threat to food security, it points to a growing risk to global financial security. Food system instability exposes markets to cascading shocks: inflation, trade disruption, insurance losses and sovereign credit stress. Yet these risks remain largely unaccounted for in core financial systems.

Report by joint intelligence committee delayed, with concerns expressed that it may not be published

Scientists say ‘shocking’ discovery shows rapid cuts in carbon emissions are needed to avoid catastrophic fallout

The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) is an important tipping element in the climate system. There is a large uncertainty whether the AMOC will start to collapse during the century under future climate change, as this requires long climate model simulations which are not always available. Here, we analyze targeted climate model simulations done with the Community Earth System Model (CESM) with the aim to develop a physics-based indicator for the onset of an AMOC tipping event. This indicator is diagnosed from the surface buoyancy fluxes over the North Atlantic Ocean and is performing successfully under quasi-equilibrium freshwater forcing, freshwater pulse forcing, climate change scenarios, and for different climate models. An analysis consisting of 25 different climate models shows that the AMOC could begin to collapse by 2063 (from 2026 to 2095, to percentiles) under an intermediate emission scenario (SSP2-4.5), or by 2055 (from 2023 to 2076, to percentiles) under a high-end emission scenar

A team of researchers in California drew notoriety last year with an aborted experiment on a retired aircraft carrier that sought to test a machine for creating clouds.   But behind the scenes, they were planning a much larger and potentially riskier study of salt-water-spraying equipment that could eventually be used to dim the sun’s rays — a multimillion-dollar project aimed at producing clouds over a stretch of ocean larger than Puerto Rico.