Valérie Masson-Delmotte

AMOC collapse would bring severe global climate repercussions, with Europe bearing the brunt of the consequences.

Scientists now fear that there is little more than five years left to prevent irreversible climate damage and stark changes to the Earth’s weather patterns from global carbon emissions, Minister for Climate Eamon Ryan has warned.

Et pourtant, l’habitabilité de notre planète en dépend. Le 6e rapport du GIEC est clair sur ce point : “Une politique climatique efficace doit s’appuyer sur la sobriété et l’équité”.

The Amazon rainforest is facing a barrage of pressures that might tip it into large-scale ecosystem collapse as soon as 2050, according to new research Wednesday warning of dire consequences for the region and the world. The Amazon, which holds more than 10 percent of the world's biodiversity, helps stabilize the global climate by storing the equivalent of around two decades of emissions of planet-warming carbon dioxide.

Humanity faces ‘devastating domino effects’ including mass displacement and financial ruin as planet warms

When Rishi Sunak granted 27 new North Sea licences this week, he wasn’t thinking about the survival of the living world, says Guardian columnist George Monbiot

the starkest warning yet that human activity is pushing Earth into a climate crisis that could threaten the lives of up to 6 billion people this century, stating candidly: “We are afraid of the uncharted territory that we have now entered.” Writing in the journal Biosciences, the coalition of 12 researchers, spanning North America, Europe and Asia, state in unusually stark language: “As scientists, we are increasingly being asked to tell the public the truth about the crises we face in simple and direct terms. The truth is that we are shocked by the ferocity of the extreme weather events in 2023.”

UK has led the way, with countries across the continent making mass arrests, passing draconian new laws and labelling activists as eco-terrorists

Face à l’urgence de la crise écologique, la capitale des Pays-Bas a lancé un plan de relance basé sur cette nouvelle pensée économique associant justice sociale et transition écologique. Un exemple à suivre.

Previously, anthropogenic ecological overshoot has been identified as a fundamental cause of the myriad symptoms we see around the globe today from biodiversity loss and ocean acidification to the disturbing rise in novel entities and climate change. In the present paper, we have examined this more deeply, and explore the behavioural drivers of overshoot, providing evidence that overshoot is itself a symptom of a deeper, more subversive modern crisis of human behaviour. We work to name and frame this crisis as ‘the Human Behavioural Crisis’ and propose the crisis be recognised globally as a critical intervention point for tackling ecological overshoot. We demonstrate how current interventions are largely physical, resource intensive, slow-moving and focused on addressing the symptoms of ecological overshoot (such as climate change) rather than the distal cause (maladaptive behaviours). We argue that even in the best-case scenarios, symptom-level interventions are unlikely to avoid catastrophe or achieve more

Human activity has caused species groups to go extinct 35 times faster than they have over the past 500 years

The UN Secretary-General’s Early Warnings for All Initiative (EW4All) is rapidly gaining ground. Action plans are being rolled out around the world to ensure that people know when dangerous weather is headed their way. Tajikistan has held a two-day national consultation, co-chaired by the Deputy Prime Minister and the UN Resident Coordinator in Tajikistan, and bringing together key stakeholders from state and international organizations, media and civil society. Ethiopia also held an inception workshop.

Population ecologist William Rees, with the University of British Columbia's School of Community and Regional Planning, is reminding denizens of Earth that the planet can only support so many people. In his paper published in the journal World, he points out that many models have been developed over the years that show that only a certain number of animals (such as rats) can live in a given environment—they all show that at some point, a population correction occurs.

Human-caused climate disruption and El Niño push temperature in mountains to 37C

Antarctica’s sea ice levels are plummeting as extreme weather events happen faster than scientists predicted

The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) is a major tipping element in the climate system and a future collapse would have severe impacts on the climate in the North Atlantic region. In recent years weakening in circulation has been reported, but assessments by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), based on the Climate Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) model simulations suggest that a full collapse is unlikely within the 21st century. Tipping to an undesired state in the climate is, however, a growing concern with increasing greenhouse gas concentrations. Predictions based on observations rely on detecting early-warning signals, primarily an increase in variance (loss of resilience) and increased autocorrelation (critical slowing down), which have recently been reported for the AMOC. Here we provide statistical significance and data-driven estimators for the time of tipping. We estimate a collapse of the AMOC to occur around mid-century under the current scenario of future emi

After hottest day ever, researchers say global heating may mean future of crop failures on land and ‘silent dying’ in the oceans

James Hansen, who testified to Congress on global heating in 1988, says world is approaching a ‘new climate frontier’

I'm an independent healthcare analyst with more than 24 years of experience analyzing healthcare and pharmaceuticals. Specifically, I analyze the value (costs and benefits) of biologics and pharmaceuticals, patient access to prescription drugs, the regulatory framework for drug development and reimbursement, and ethics with respect to the distribution of healthcare resources. I have approximately 110 publications in peer-reviewed journals, in addition to hundreds of articles in newspapers and periodicals. I have also presented my work at numerous trade, industry, and academic conferences. From 1999 to 2017 I was a research associate professor at the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development. Prior to my Tufts appointment, I was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, and I completed my PhD in economics at the University of Amsterdam. Before pursuing my PhD I was a management consultant at Accenture in The Hague, Netherlands. Currently, and for the past 6 years, I work on a freelance ba

Several nations plan to build new coal power plants, with China alone approving nearly 100 gigawatts. Each gigawatt is the equivalent of installing more than 3 million solar panels.

Humanity received a “final warning” Monday from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The bottom line of the Synthesis Report of the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report is to “act now, or it’s too late,” the Guardian wrote. The scale of the emergency screams out from almost every page — climate change is already displacing and killing millions of people globally — but the report also provides what UN Secretary-General António Guterres called a roadmap for defusing the “climate time bomb.”

IPCC report says only swift and drastic action can avert irrevocable damage to world

The excessive use of phosphorus is depleting reserves vital to global food production, while also adding to the climate crisis

Le discours ambiant nous fait croire que tous les problèmes pourront trouver des solutions dans des technologies meilleures et nouvelles. Un trompe-l'oeil qui masque que la sobriété est un impératif de survie.

The world is at risk of descending into a climate “doom loop”, a thinktank report has warned. It said simply coping with the escalating impacts of the climate crisis could draw resources and focus away from the efforts to slash carbon emissions, making the situation even worse.

An increase in the pace at which sea levels are rising threatens “a mass exodus of entire populations on a biblical scale”, the UN secretary general has warned. The climate crisis is causing sea levels to rise faster than for 3,000 years, bringing a “torrent of trouble” to almost a billion people, from London to Los Angeles and Bangkok to Buenos Aires, António Guterres said on Tuesday. Some nations could cease to exist, drowned under the waves, he said.

Norway’s sovereign wealth fund threatens to vote against boards on firms it holds investments with over lax climate and social targets

The coasts of Alaska are piled up with dead birds dying of starvation. Experts say that climate change is resulting in shifts in the food chain.

António Guterres says gap between developed world and poorer countries is biggest issue facing Cop27 talks

Key UN reports published in last two days warn urgent and collective action needed – as oil firms report astronomical profits The climate crisis has reached a “really bleak moment”, one of the world’s leading climate scientists has said, after a slew of major reports laid bare how close the planet is to catastrophe.

The EU is on track to break a promise to cut methane emissions by 30% by 2030 made due to a “policy vacuum” on livestock emissions, a report has warned.Most of Europe’s methane emissions come from agriculture – particularly livestock – but the EU has avoided using policy levers such as its €387bn common agricultural policy to directly tackle the problem

An international study on the future of insects under climate change scenarios has found the loss of insects will drastically reduce the ability of humankind to build a sustainable future. "A growing body of evidence shows many populations of insects are declining rapidly in many places. These declines are of profound concern, with terms like an emerging 'insect apocalypse' being increasingly used by the media and even some scientists to describe this phenomenon," Laurance said.

Ecosystems rely on interconnectedness — bees pollinate the flowers, predators eats prey, and so on. But these webs, though highly evolved, can be delicate. One link goes missing, and a ripple effect is felt throughout the entire system. As more species are lost, that balance becomes increasingly fragile, sometimes to the point of collapse.

Europe is in danger of highly damaging “very, very strong conflict and strife” this winter over high energy prices, and should make short-term return to fossil fuels to head off the threat of civil unrest, the vice-president of the European Commission has warned. Frans Timmermans, the second most senior official in the EU, said the threat of unrest this winter, a deliberate outcome of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, must take precedence over the climate crisis.

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Three former UN climate heads say gap between government promises and actions will change environment irreversibly

The world’s leading energy economist has warned against investing in large new oil and gas developments, which would have little impact on the current energy crisis and soaring fuel prices but spell devastation to the planet.

A new analysis of flash droughts finds that droughts coming on suddenly seem to be striking faster in the last two decades, with approximately 33–46 percent of flash droughts now emerging within just five days.

There's no time for complacency, according to Dr. Peter Carter, founder of the Climate Emergency Institute

February 28, 2022. Human-induced climate change is causing dangerous and widespread disruption in nature and affecting the lives of billions of people around the world, despite efforts to reduce the risks. People and ecosystems least able to cope are being hardest hit, said scientists in the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, released today.

Russia’s military offensive against Ukraine is an act of aggression that will make already worrisome tensions between Nato and Moscow even more dangerous. The west’s new cold war with Russia has turned hot. Vladimir Putin bears primary responsibility for this latest development, but Nato’s arrogant, tone‐​deaf policy toward Russia over the past quarter‐​century deserves a large share as well. Analysts committed to a US foreign policy of realism and restraint have warned for more than a quarter‐​century that continuing to expand the most powerful military alliance in history toward another major power would not end well. The war in Ukraine provides definitive confirmation that it did not.

The MET Office has warned the UK could be ravaged by armed militias because of worsening conditions caused by climate change.

New research sees two-thirds of mollusc types only found living by hydrothermal vents added to IUCN’s red list of endangered species

The United Nations secretary general, António Guterres, on Monday issued a blistering critique of the world’s failure to rein in global warming, calling on countries to return every year to review their climate targets — not every five years, as the Paris climate agreement spells out. “Even if the recent pledges were clear and credible — and there are serious questions about some of them — we are still careening towards climate catastrophe,” he said at the opening ceremony of COP26, the U.N. climate summit in Glasgow.

Many economic assessments of the climate crisis “grossly undervalue the lives of young people and future generations”, Prof Nicholas Stern warned on Tuesday, before the Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow.

Scientists have warned that hydrogen could be a significant “indirect” contributor to the greenhouse effect when it leaks through infrastructure and interacts with methane in the atmosphere.

With global warming intensifying the water cycle, floods and droughts are increasing, and many countries are unprepared.

Vital United Nations climate talks, billed as one of the last chances to stave off climate breakdown, will not produce the breakthrough needed to fulfil the aspiration of the Paris agreement, key players in the talks have conceded.

Europe’s 25 largest banks are still failing to present comprehensive plans that address both the climate crisis and biodiversity loss, putting their sustainability pledges in doubt, campaigners have warned.

The IPCC is unequivocal: we must take urgent action to curb global heating and prevent catastrophe. Will our policymakers and the Cop26 conference be up to the task?

Climate scientists have detected warning signs of the collapse of the Gulf Stream, one of the planet’s main potential tipping points. The research found “an almost complete loss of stability over the last century” of the currents that researchers call the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). The currents are already at their slowest point in at least 1,600 years, but the new analysis shows they may be nearing a shutdown.

The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), a major ocean current system transporting warm surface waters toward the northern Atlantic, has been suggested to exhibit two distinct modes of operation. A collapse from the currently attained strong to the weak mode would have severe impacts on the global climate system and further multi-stable Earth system components. Observations and recently suggested fingerprints of AMOC variability indicate a gradual weakening during the last decades, but estimates of the critical transition point remain uncertain.

There are some phrases that should stop you in your tracks. The warning of a future that holds "untold suffering" is one of them. That is exactly what scientists from around the world are cautioning will happen if we don't take the threat of climate change seriously. In a paper published Wednesday in the journal BioScience, more than 14,000 scientists from 153 countries signed their name to research that warns of an incoming climate emergency.

Around 13,000 researchers have called for urgent action to slow down the climate emergency as extreme weather patterns shock the world. They listed three core measures.

A Belgian climatologist surveys the wreckage of his hometown. Pierre Ozer has been expecting these floods for decades.

The effects of ‘weird weather’ were already being felt in the 1960s, but scientists linking fossil fuels with climate change were dismissed as prophets of doom

Climate scientists are increasingly concerned that global heating will trigger tipping points in Earth’s natural systems, which will lead to widespread and possibly irrevocable disaster, unless action is taken urgently. The impacts are likely to be much closer than most people realise, a a draft report from the world’s leading climate scientists suggests, and will fundamentally reshape life in the coming decades even if greenhouse gas emissions are brought under some control.

Analysis shows significant risk of cascading events even at 2C of heating, with severe long-term effects. The new research examined the interactions between ice sheets in West Antarctica, Greenland, the warm Atlantic Gulf Stream and the Amazon rainforest. The scientists carried out 3m computer simulations and found domino effects in a third of them, even when temperature rises were below 2C, the upper limit of the Paris agreement.

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This paper analyses how recent trends in heat waves impact heat warning systems. We performed a retrospective analysis of the challenges faced by the French heat prevention plan since 2004. We described trends based on the environmental and health data collected each summer by the French heat warning system and prevention plan. Major evolutions of the system were tracked based on the evaluations organized each autumn with the stakeholders of the prevention plan.

En tant que scientifiques et universitaires du monde entier, nous appelons les décideurs politiques à s’engager ouvertement face au risque de perturbation, voire d’effondrement, de nos sociétés. Cinq ans après l’accord de Paris sur le climat, nous n’avons pas réussi à réduire nos émissions de carbone, et nous devons maintenant en tirer les conséquences.

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Letter: Scientists and academics including Prof Gesa Weyhenmeyer and Prof Will Steffen argue that we must discuss the threat of societal disruption in order to prepare for it

Analysis shows 500 species on brink of extinction – as many as were lost over previous century

The accelerating thaw of Antarctica might drive sea levels up by more than five metres by 2300 unless governments act quickly to cut greenhouse gas emissions, a UN report said on Wednesday.

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Mise en garde des scientifiques du monde à l'humanité : deuxième avertissement William J. Ripple, Christopher Wolf, Mauro Galetti, Thomas M Newsome, Mohammed Alamgir, Eileen Crist, Mahmoud I. Mahmoud, William F. Laurance Et 15 364 scientifiques signataires de 184 pays (l’ensemble des signataires est listé en annexe S2)

From the Heart of the World - The Elder Brothers Warning is a documentary about the Kogi people who inhabit the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountain in northern Colombia. Direct descendants of the Tayrona people they survived Spanish Conquistadors - a feat no other tribe can claim. Long thought extinct, they reappeared from their mountain home to warn the world about the harmful damage it was causing.