Flux continu

Wat heeft 89,9% van de Belgen met elkaar gemeen? Ze eisen meer klimaatactie van de Belgische overheid. Wie schuilt precies achter dat percentage? MO* zocht het uit.

In How We Sold Our Future: The Failure to Fight Climate Change serveert Jens Beckert ons een analyse van de klimaatcrisis als een kom havermout: voedzaam, degelijk en zonder poespas.

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 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.

It looked like snow under water: white, endless, and still. The reef, my friend Lisbeth said, was “the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen.” For a second, I almost agreed. Then, I stared at it for a long time before replying. She wasn’t wrong about its beauty. But she was also showing me death. Bleached coral isn’t a kind of coral. It’s the moment just after the funeral, what’s left when life is gone. A cathedral of bone-white skeletons stretching over an empire of calcified death. From above, it glows like marble. Up close, it’s a graveyard.

Researchers have discovered dozens of new methane seeps littering the ocean floor in the Ross Sea coastal region of Antarctica, raising concerns of an unknown positive climate feedback loop that could accelerate global warming.

Ahead of the United Nations climate talks in Brazil, advocacy groups are pushing for companies and governments to set meaningful emissions targets to lower emissions from livestock.

A climate-focused report out of Europe throws serious shade at plug-in hybrid electric (PHEV) cars, pointing out that they emit nearly as much carbon dioxide emissions as combustion engine-powered vehicles. In fact, it highlights how real-world emissions from supposedly greener PHEVs has increased over the years above officially recorded figures to nearly five times. Yikes! The findings come from the European Federation for Transport and Environment (T&E), a clutch of non-government organizations focused on sustainable transport policy across the continent. The report has been published ahead of a review of automotive CO2 emission standards, which would see Europe continue to sell plug-in hybrid electric vehicles beyond 2035, when they're set to be phased out in order to meet EU climate targets.

Five of the seven breached planetary boundaries are linked to food systems. By transforming production and adopting a “planetary health diet,” we can halve food-related climate emissions and prevent millions of deaths, according to the 2025 EAT-Lancet Commission.

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

We are an international group of researchers and practitioners interested in the emerging fields of post-growth and ecological macroeconomics. Our aim is to advance economic theory, methodology and policy in order to adequately address some of the biggest challenges of our time: climate change, rising inequality, and financial instability.

Why Environmental Writing Isn’t Resonating As Much Anymore Active hope, not optimism. And why facts alone no longer move people. Environmental pieces aren’t landing like they used to. Writers, researchers, and activists are noticing the shift: climate content that once sparked engagement now fades into the background. The question isn’t whether people care about the planet — it’s that many readers are moving past narratives of awareness and individual action (or at least I think they should!). They want to understand power. They want to understand systems. They want hope rooted in collective transformation, not optimism sold as personal therapy. We Know the Planet Is Dying. So Now What?

We make meaningful climate action faster and easier by mobilizing the global tech community to track greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions with unprecedented detail.

Four key parts of the Earth’s climate system are destabilising, according to a new study with contributions from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). Researchers analysed the interconnections of four major tipping elements: the Greenland ice sheet, the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC), the Amazon rainforest and the South American monsoon system. All four show signs of diminished resilience, raising the risk of abrupt and potentially irreversible changes.

How does one talk about climate change when armed conflicts are spiralling out of control?

The main report provides an integrated narrative, examining the central and vital role that the climate and natural environment play in ensuring health, resilience and prosperity for people, anchored in the EU’s vision for a sustainable Europe by 2050.

The planet is nearing dangerous limits. Yet progress on clean energy shows what’s possible. With political will, cooperation can still avert the worst of the climate crisis

EU officials warn climate breakdown and wildlife loss ‘are ruining ecosystems that underpin the economy’ […] The European way of life is being jeopardised by environmental degradation, a report has found, with EU officials warning against weakening green rules. The continent has made “important progress” in cutting planet-heating pollution, according to the European Environment Agency, but the death of wildlife and breakdown of the climate are ruining ecosystems that underpin the economy.

Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has described her plan to “maximise extraction” of the UK’s oil and gas from the North Sea as a “common sense” energy policy. Politicians are using language like this increasingly often – calling themselves “pragmatic” on climate change and invoking “common sense”. It sounds reasonable, reassuring, and grownup – the opposite of “hysterical” campaigners or “unrealistic” targets.

Earth’s average temperature rose more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels in 2024 for the first time – a critical threshold in the climate crisis. At the same time, major armed conflicts continue to rage in Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan and elsewhere. What should be increasingly clear is that war now needs to be understood as unfolding in the shadow of climate breakdown. The relationship between war and climate change is complex. But here are three reasons why the climate crisis must reshape how we think about war.

Predictably, soon, most young people will reject extremist views. This will be none too soon because it is the essential step leading to global political leadership that appreciates the threat posed by climate’s delayed response to human-made changes of Earth’s atmosphere. Then the annual fraud of goals for future “net zero” emissions announced at United Nations COP (Conference of Parties) meetings might be replaced by realistic climate policies. It is important, by that time, that we have better knowledge of the degree and rate at which human-made forcing of the climate system must be decreased to avoid irreversible, unacceptable consequences.

"What we are seeing is compelling evidence that the climate crisis is not just an environmental emergency, it is potentially a neurological one."

Our modelling of European fish species shows a patchwork of winners and losers as sea temperatures rise.

– how climate scientists and the IPCC still won’t tell the truth about accelerating climate change.

Planet Earth is living on borrowed time, a new global report reveals. The world must stop burning fossil fuels now and take urgent steps to reduce global warming.

Farming seaweed, changing ocean chemistry, breeding corals and restoring mangroves could help fight climate change – if assessed and managed responsibly.

Climate.gov, which went dark this summer, to be revived by volunteers as climate.us with expanded missionEarlier this summer, access to climate.gov – one of the most widely used portals of climate information on the internet – was thwarted by the Trump administration, and its production team was fired in the process.

Avant l’été, un site gouvernemental américain d’information sur le climat a été invisibilisé par l’administration Trump. Depuis, d’anciens employés fédéraux travaillent bénévolement pour ressusciter son contenu.

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

The planet is edging close to irreversible change, according to the most comprehensive probability analysis yet of climate “tipping points.”

This article examines the technocentric bias that characterizes climate mitigation literature, focusing on the reports of the IPCC's Working Group III. This bias stems from structural features of the scientific field that prioritizes innovation, leading to the overrepresentation of technological solutions in climate research. Funding mechanisms further reinforce this tendency by incentivizing collaboration with industrial R&D, creating a self-reinforcing loop in which scientific authority and industrial interests converge. The IPCC's institutional positioning—as a policy-relevant yet politically cautious body—amplifies this dynamic by favoring allegedly “cost-effective” technological pathways that lack practical feasibility.

The long read: Churning quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere at the rate we are going could lead the planet to another Great Dying

Some experts tee up public comment on EPA report calling fossil fuel concerns overblown, as others fast-track review

As corporate interest in ocean carbon removal grows, researchers from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution are testing the safety and effectiveness of one such technique in the Gulf of Maine.

Record heat, massive fires, deadly floods... August has barely begun, but the summer of 2025 is already marked by a cascade of destructive and deadly weather in the Northern Hemisphere.

The report, which is being used to justify the rollback of a huge number of climate regulations, is full of misinformation—with many claims based on long-debunked research. The report, which is being used to justify the rollback of a huge number of climate regulations, is full of misinformation—with many claims based on long-debunked research.

US President Donald Trump's administration is revising past editions of the nation's premier climate report—its latest move to undermine the scientific consensus on human-caused global warming.

Passing 1.5ºC is now inevitable. Overshoot scenarios tell us that we can relatively safely pass this level but then bring temperatures back down again, but how realistic are they, and how safe?

The White House has instructed NASA employees to terminate two major, climate change-focused satellite missions. As NPR reports, Trump officials reached out to the space agency to draw up plans for terminating the two missions, called the Orbiting Carbon Observatories. They've been collecting widely-used data, providing both oil and gas companies and farmers with detailed information about the distribution of carbon dioxide and how it can affect crop health.

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.

Climate sensitivity is substantially higher than IPCC’s best estimate (3°C for doubled CO2), a conclusion we reach with greater than 99 percent confidence. We also show that global climate forcing by aerosols became stronger (increasingly negative) during 1970-2005, unlike IPCC’s best estimate of aerosol forcing. High confidence in these conclusions is based on a broad analysis approach. IPCC’s underestimates of climate sensitivity and aerosol cooling follow from their disproportionate emphasis on global climate modeling, an approach that will not yield timely, reliable, policy advice.

Rising temperatures are causing water to evaporate and driving humans to extract more groundwater, which is moving freshwater from the land to the seas and creating a "continental drying" trend..

The Trump administration is releasing its proposal to undo the “endangerment finding,” the long-standing rationale and legal imperative for regulating greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act

The constant deluge of bad news about rising global temperatures and their impacts can make it feel like the world is ending. Is it?

Exclusive: Increasingly extreme weather a threat to production and supply chains in Britain and elsewhere

Bad climate news is everywhere. Africa is being hit particularly hard by climate change and extreme weather, impacting lives and livelihoods. We are living in a world that is warming at the fastest rate since records began. Yet, governments have been slow to act.

Healthy environment a human right, UN court says in landmark climate ruling

António Guterres says ‘sun is rising on a clean energy age’ as 90% of renewable power projects cheaper than fossil fuels

I am writing this message to the millions of people who have been involved in the climate movement over the past several years. This movement has been an incredible force, thanks to your courage, passion and commitment. It has created a new public consciousness and a powerful sense of popular will. These are major achievements. And yet it is clear that we have now reached an impasse and a new path is needed.

2024 was the hottest year on record [1], with global temperatures exceeding 1.5 °C above preindustrial climate conditions for the first time and records broken across large parts of Earth’s surface. Among the widespread impacts of exceptional heat, rising food prices are beginning to play a prominent role in public perception, now the second most frequently cited impact of climate change experienced globally, following only extreme heat itself [2]. Recent econometric analysis confirms that abnormally high temperatures directly cause higher food prices, as impacts on agricultural production [3] translate into supply shortages and food price inflation [4, 5]. These analyses track changes in overall price aggregates which are typically slow-moving, but specific food goods can also experience much stronger short-term price spikes in response to extreme heat.

C’est une tendance qui ne faiblit pas sur les réseaux sociaux. Face à la crise écologique, des centaines de jeunes témoignent de leur pessimisme quant à notre capacité à redresser la barre : on les appelle les "climate doomers". Résultat d’une éco-anxiété grandissante, ce phénomène participe à freiner l’action climatique.

in January, a group of present and former Republican state officials gathered at a posh resort in Sea Island, Georgia, together with conservative leaders, for a two-day lesson in how to dismantle corporate America’s most ambitious response to climate change. At the Cloister, with its golf courses, tennis courts, and beaches, ESG was denounced as a sinister force undermining free markets and democracy.

For decades, the surface of the polar Southern Ocean (south of 50°S) has been freshening—an expected response to a warming climate. This freshening enhanced upper-ocean stratification, reducing the upward transport of subsurface heat and possibly contributing to sea ice expansion. It also limited the formation of open-ocean polynyas. Using satellite observations, we reveal a marked increase in surface salinity across the circumpolar Southern Ocean since 2015. This shift has weakened upper-ocean stratification, coinciding with a dramatic decline in Antarctic sea ice coverage. Additionally, rising salinity facilitated the reemergence of the Maud Rise polynya in the Weddell Sea, a phenomenon last observed in the mid-1970s.

Heat caused 2,300 deaths across 12 cities, of which 1,500 were down to climate crisis, scientists say

Satellite data processing algorithms developed by ICM-CSIC have played a crucial role in detecting this significant shift in the Southern Hemisphere, which could accelerate the effects of climate change.

Research in Chile suggests climate crisis makes eruptions more likely and explosive, and warns of Antarctica risk

Heatwaves can lead to considerable impacts on societal and natural systems. Accurate simulation of their response to warming is important for adaptation to potential climate futures. Here, we quantify changes of extreme temperatures worldwide over recent decades. We find an emergence of hotspots where the hottest temperatures are warming significantly faster than more moderate temperatures. In these regions, trends are largely underestimated in climate model simulations. Globally aggregated, we find that models struggle with both ends of the trend distribution, with positive trends being underestimated most, while moderate trends are well reproduced. Our findings highlight the need to better understand and model extreme heat and to rapidly mitigate greenhouse gas emissions to avoid further harm.

“We have failed to shift the narrative and we are still caught up in the same legal, economic and political systems,” said David Suzuki in an exclusive interview with iPolitics. “For me, what we’ve got to do now is hunker down.”

Rapporteur calls for defossilization of economies and urgent reparations to avert ‘catastrophic’ rights and climate harms

Between 80% and 89% of the world’s people want their governments to do more about climate change. This fact is the central tenet of the 89% Project for climate journalism. Timed to coincide with Earth Day and Earth Week, the project launched in April, 2025, and will culminate in another week of focused stories in October, just before the next COP meeting in Brazil.

For more than three decades, Brazilian climate scientist Carlos Nobre has warned that deforestation of the Amazon could push this globally important ecosystem past the point of no return. Working first at Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research and more recently at the University of São Paulo, he is a global authority on tropical forests and how they could be restored.

Economic assumptions about risks of the climate crisis are no longer relevant, says the communications expert Genevieve Guenther

Real world measurements of how much extra heat the Earth is trapping are well beyond most climate models. That’s a real problem.

Climate models that give a low warming from increases in greenhouse gases do not match satellite measurements. Future warming will likely be worse than thought unless society acts, according to a new study published in Science.

The world has been too optimistic about the risk to humanity and planet – but devastation can still be avoided, says Timothy Lenton

the rapid rises in global military spending threaten climate action, undermining our collective security. In a new joint paper we explore how everything from direct emissions to diverted climate finance are threatening SDG 13 on Climate action.

Militaries are huge energy users whose greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) make a significant contribution to the climate crisis. However, countries do not systematically record and report their military emissions so the real share of this source of emissions remains unclear. The Conflict and Environment Observatory (CEOBS) and Scientists for Global Responsibility estimate that everyday military activity could be responsible for around 5.5% of global emissions, meaning that if the world’s militaries were a country, they would be the fourth largest emitter in the world.6 Furthermore, as military spending increases and the rest of society decarbonises, that proportion is set to rise.

Climate misinformation campaigns have shifted tactics, a comprehensive new analysis shows.

A German court has delivered a landmark ruling in a climate lawsuit brought by Peruvian farmer, Saúl Luciano Lliuya, against German energy giant RWE. The German Higher Regional Court of Hamm has ruled that, in principle, companies can be held liable to people halfway around the world for their contribution to the impacts and risks of climate change . While the Court ultimately dismissed Mr Lliuya’s claim, its reasoning represents a significant breakthrough for climate litigation globally. Below we explain what the Court decided, why it matters, and what it might mean in a New Zealand context with Smith v Fonterra still moving through the courts.

Stefan Rahmstorf, Professor of Physics os the Ocean at the University of Potsdam since 2000, presents a colloquium on the risks associated with the destabilization of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) and its potential consequences for the global climate.

Heat waves are getting more dangerous with climate change — and we may still be underestimating them

Identifying the socio-economic drivers behind greenhouse gas emissions is crucial to design mitigation policies. Existing studies predominantly analyze short-term CO2 emissions from fossil fuels, neglecting long-term trends and other GHGs. We examine the drivers of all greenhouse gas emissions between 1820–2050 globally and regionally. The Industrial Revolution triggered sustained emission growth worldwide—initially through fossil fuel use in industrialized economies but also as a result of agricultural expansion and deforestation. Globally, technological innovation and energy mix changes prevented 31 (17–42) Gt CO2e emissions over two centuries. Yet these gains were dwarfed by 81 (64–97) Gt CO2e resulting from economic expansion, with regional drivers diverging sharply: population growth dominated in Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa, while rising affluence was the main driver of emissions elsewhere. Meeting climate targets now requires the carbon intensity of GDP to decline 3 times faster than the global

An international group of researchers has produced a third update to key indicators of the state of the climate system set out in the IPCC AR6 assessment, building on previous editions in 2023 and 2024. Forster et al. (2025) assess emissions, concentrations, temperatures, energy transfers, radiation balances, and the role of human activity and conclude that, while natural climate variability also played a role, the record observed temperatures in 2024 were dominated by human activity and the remaining carbon budget for 1.5° C is smaller than ever.

False claims obstructing climate action, say researchers, amid calls for climate lies to be criminalised

Even if agricultural practices adapt in response to higher temperatures, five of the world's six main staple crops will suffer severe losses due to climate change. Global corn yields are projected to fall by about 12 or 28 per cent by the end of the century

Les financements aux industries du pétrole et du gaz repartent de plus belle. Le rapport Banking on climate chaos, signé par huit ONG, estime à près de 900 milliards de dollars les financements octroyés en 2024 par 65 banques aux industriels du secteur, en augmentation de 23%. Le backlash contre la finance durable n’est pas étranger à ce nouvel appétit de la finance pour les hydrocarbures.

In a rapidly changing climate, evidence-based decision-making benefits from up-to-date and timely information. Here we compile monitoring datasets (published at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15639576; Smith et al., 2025a) to produce updated estimates for key indicators of the state of the climate system: net emissions of greenhouse gases and short-lived climate forcers, greenhouse gas concentrations, radiative forcing, the Earth's energy imbalance, surface temperature changes, warming attributed to human activities, the remaining carbon budget, and estimates of global temperature extremes. This year, we additionally include indicators for sea-level rise and land precipitation change. We follow methods as closely as possible to those used in the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) Working Group One report.

Breaching threshold would ramp up catastrophic weather events, further increasing human suffering

SO2 declines have contributed ~25% of recent warming and driven recent acceleration. The impact of additional SO2 emissions on cloud formation diminishes as emissions increase, meaning that reductions in SO2 over areas with low background sulphate concentrations, such as the ocean, could result in a proportionately larger warming effect than in highly polluted areas, such as south Asia.

Exclusive: Climate.gov, which supports public education on climate science, will soon no longer publish new contentA major US government website supporting public education on climate science looks likely to be shuttered after almost all of its staff were fired, the Guardian has learned.