English references

Brutal El Nino, drought, war threatens food supply

Exxon warns oil inventories will hit dangerously low levels in weeks, forcing prices to shoot higher. […]

We infer that 2026 is likely to be the warmest year in the period of instrumental data, based on a physics-based approach with identifiable assumptions. This approach may help us learn something in 2026 about the mechanisms of climate change. The figures in this post and our other current papers will be continually updated on our website,2 when they remain relevant. We are also now on Substack3.

Around 153 BCE, Cato the Elder, one of Rome’s most prominent senators, began ending every single one of his speeches with the same words: “Carthago delenda est”, or “Carthage must be destroyed”.

We can’t know how long the war in the Middle East will last. Nor can we know who will “win” it, and in which terms. What we know is that the destruction already wreaked on things and people is immense, and it keeps escalating. The longer the war, the bleaker their perspectives in a region already plagued by all sorts of problems, including drought, soil degradation, ecosystem damage, scarce agricultural resources, declining fertility rates, and more.

Climate change is causing measurable harm globally1,2. Political and legal efforts seek to link these damages with specific emissions, including in discussions of loss and damage (L&D)3,4; however, no quantitative definition of L&D exists5,6, nor is there a framework to link past and future emissions from specific sources to monetized, location-specific damages. Here we develop such a framework, which is integrated with recent efforts to estimate the social cost of carbon7. Using empirical estimates of the non-linear relationship between temperature and aggregate economic output, we show that future damages from past emissions—one component of L&D—are at least an order of magnitude larger than historical damages from the same emissions. For instance, one tonne of CO2 emitted in 1990 caused US$180 in discounted global damages by 2020 ($40–530) and will cause an additional $1,840 through 2100 ($500–5,700). Thus, settling debts for past damages will not settle debts for past emissions. In other illustrative esti

El Niño could fuel extreme weather and raise temperatures to record highs this year, but how sure can we be that it will return?

The world seems headed into another El Nino, just 3 years after the last one. Such quick return normally would imply, at most, an El Nino of moderate strength, but we suggest that even a moderately strong El Nino may yield record global temperature already in 2026 and still greater temperature in 2027. The extreme warming will be a result mainly of high climate sensitivity and a recent increase of the net global climate forcing, not the result of an exceptional El Nino, per se. We find that the principal drive for global warming acceleration began in about 2015, which implies that 2°C global warming is likely to be reached in the 2030s, not at midcentury.

Newborn babies are particularly vulnerable to hot conditions. They have a limited ability to control their body temperature.

New year, new acronym! The newly established Intergovernmental Science-Policy Panel on Chemicals, Waste and Pollution (ISP-CWP) will meet in its first Plenary session from February 2-6 in Geneva, Switzerland. The Panel is designed to provide scientific assessments on chemicals, waste, and pollution to inform policymakers at national, regional, and international levels.

Exclusive: Ben Goldsmith will work on issues including fishing and green belt preservation to attract green Tories

Back in 2018, Yale economist William Nordhaus won the Nobel Prize for his work on his Dynamic Integrated Climate-Economy (DICE) model. The idea was to set up a picture of the global economy, add on some estimates of the economic costs of warming with a “damage function,” plus estimates of what climate policy would cost, and all adjusted with a discount term to account for how people value current production more than future production (according to economists, at least). That way you can calculate an “optimal” climate policy in the form of a carbon tax that would precisely compensate for warming damages without burdening the economy too much.

Children born in 2020 will face “unprecedented exposure” to extreme weather events even if warming is limited to 1.5C.

Delegates made minimal headway on timetable for replacing oil and gas or on firm commitments to reducing carbon emissions

Watchdog’s flagship report says rise in low-carbon electricity will make transition ‘inevitable’, despite Trump’s calls to carry on drilling

Decision by international court of justice hailed as a gamechanger for climate justice and accountability

We already have plenty of evidence of what happens when things better left to governments — which in this case might decide to never flip the switch at all — are ceded to private industry.

The uniquely vulnerable West Antarctic Ice Sheet holds enough water to raise global sea levels by 5 meters. But when that will happen — and how fast — is anything but settled.

Unless global heating is reduced to 1.2C ‘as fast as possible’, warm water coral reefs will not remain ‘at any meaningful scale’, a report by 160 scientists from 23 countries warns

Some narratives in international development hold that ending poverty and achieving good lives for all will require every country to reach the levels of GDP per capita that currently characterise high-income countries. However, this would require increasing total global output and resource use several times over, dramatically exacerbating ecological breakdown. Furthermore, universal convergence along these lines is unlikely within the imperialist structure of the existing world economy. Here we demonstrate that this dilemma can be resolved with a different approach, rooted in recent needs-based analyses of poverty and development. Strategies for development should not pursue capitalist growth and increased aggregate production as such, but should rather increase the specific forms of production that are necessary to improve capabilities and meet human needs at a high standard, while ensuring universal access to key goods and services through public provisioning and decommodification. At the same time, in high