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Critics say brash, bombastic Fox News host out of his depth to guide US military through murky new Middle East conflict

Residents report terror of smoke-filled city, from potentially toxic rain, air and water to food scarcity and difficulty of escape

The US was an oligarchy well before Trump’s first term. Recognizing this reality is essential to building a true democracy

Seven Ukrainians arrested and money-laundering investigation launched in latest spat between Kyiv and Budapest

Researchers identify sharp rise to about 0.35C every decade, after excluding natural fluctuations such as El Niño

Fears US-Israeli onslaught could lead regime to push for bomb or embolden other groups to steal uranium stockpile

Olivier De Schutter says new economic agenda needed to tackle crises of rising inequality and ecological collapse

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

Depleting THAAD and Patriot interceptor inventories threaten US extended deterrence, Gulf energy security, and the regional power balance amid sustained Iranian ballistic missile and drone assaults.

In one of the most comprehensive empirical studies to date of AI strategic reasoning, Professor Kenneth Payne of King’s College London examined how large language models navigate simulated nuclear crises. Across 21 scenarios, the models displayed sophisticated escalation logic consistent with classical strategic theory – yet nuclear signalling occurred in 95% of games and no model ever chose outright concession. The findings challenge assumptions about AI restraint and offer new tools for defence analysis.

There is mounting experimental evidence that lifetime exposure to increasing atmospheric CO2 levels can negatively impact the normal physiology of organisms. Directly assessing this in humans is very difficult. We analysed serum bicarbonate (HCO3−), calcium (Ca) and phosphorus (P) from 1999 to 2020 as indirect proxies for atmospheric CO2 exposure. Over this period, average bicarbonate levels in this population show an increasing trend which parallels rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations. Both. If these trends continue, blood bicarbonate values could be at the limit of the accepted healthy range in half a century, and Ca and P will be at the limit of their healthy ranges by the end of this century. This has the potential to cause a range of adverse health effects.

The Gulf Stream is part of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). The AMOC is a tipping element and may collapse under changing forcing. However, the role of the Gulf Stream in such a tipping event is unknown. Here, we investigate the link between the AMOC and Gulf Stream using a high-resolution (0. 1°) stand-alone ocean simulation, in which the AMOC collapses under a slowly-increasing freshwater forcing. AMOC weakening gradually shifts the Gulf Stream near Cape Hatteras northward, followed by an abrupt northward displacement of 219 km within 2 years. This rapid shift occurs a few decades before the simulated AMOC collapse. Satellite altimetry shows a significant (1993–2024, p < 0.05) northward Gulf Stream trend near Cape Hatteras, which is also confirmed in subsurface temperature observations (1965–2024, p < 0.01). These findings provide indirect evidence for present-day AMOC weakening and demonstrate that abrupt Gulf Stream shifts can serve as early warning indicator for AMOC tipping.

A recent UK national security assessment on biodiversity and ecosystem collapse made headlines, not for its dire warnings, but for its omissions. It's part of a larger trend of governments keeping climate security reports from the public.

Even as weather extremes worsen, the voices calling for the rolling back of environmental rules have grown louder and more influential

The new joint policy brief offers a deep dive into the ways in which the social and solidarity economy can advance the objectives of the Roadmap by supporting the eradication of poverty beyond growth.

Science-based policies could successfully limit human-caused climate change, but when political parties are allowed to accept money from special interests, policies are distorted to the point of being ineffective. This is a solvable problem, but to clarify the situation and the needed actions, we need to first marshal the evidence. The draft Prologue of Sophie’s Planet is intended to help coherently organize the evidence. Here is Part III of V, with the final two paragraphs of Part II.

Extinction Rebellion says some members have been visited by agents claiming to be FBI amid Trump’s threats toward liberal groups

Welcome to the Global Climate Highlights 2025 report, compiled by the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S). The Global Climate Highlights 2025 report provides authoritative climate data and concise insight on a global scale about 2025's climate conditions, covering surface and sea surface temperature, heat stress, sea ice extent in the Arctic and Antarctic, among others.

As reported by the Guardian, scientists just published a warning that Earth is approaching a point of no return. A new study in the journal One Earth shows multiple climate systems — the Greenland ice sheet, the West Antarctic ice sheet, boreal permafrost, the Amazon rainforest — are all much closer to collapse than previously thought. “Research shows that several Earth system components may be closer to destabilising than once believed,” the researchers urged. “While the exact risk is uncertain, it is clear that current climate commitments are insufficient.”

A critical step on the path towards climate neutrality, the European Union’s 2040 target calls for a 90-per-cent reduction in emissions. Yet as far-reaching as this goal may seem, its provisions constitute a weakening of Europe’s climate ambitions under the Green Deal. By allowing costly and ineffective CO2 removal and storage technologies as a way of lowering emissions, the target risks deterring direct emission cuts and outsourcing pollution.

US President Donald Trump has announced the reversal of the so-called endangerment finding, a key Obama-era scientific ruling that underpins much of US environmental legislation. As a result of this, experts are predicting various environmental and economic impacts, though the decision by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is expected to be challenged in the courts from environmental groups.

Doyne Farmer says a super-simulator of the global economy would accelerate the transition to a green, clean world

China’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions fell by 1% in the final quarter of 2025, likely securing a decline of 0.3% for the full year as a whole.

Continued global heating could set irreversible course by triggering climate tipping points, but most people unaware

Today, we are close to the critical moment when conventional economic growth becomes impossible on a finite planet, constrained by two parallel factors: resource depletion and pollution. Tthe depletion of fossil fuels and other mineral commodities is placing heavy constraints on both industrial and agricultural production. We are not running out of anything yet, but the cost of extraction is increasing, just as the damage that extraction causes to the ecosystem. On the other side, pollution is appearing in more than one form. Chemical pollution is growing in terms of heavy metals, endocrine-disruptors, and other poisoning substances, while climate change can be seen as another form of pollution generated by the excess of CO2 in the atmosphere.

I know it’s almost impossible to turn your eyes away from the Trump show, but that’s the point. His antics, ever-grosser and more preposterous, are designed to keep him in our minds, to crowd out other issues. His insatiable craving for attention is a global-threat multiplier. You can’t help wondering whether there’s anything he wouldn’t do to dominate the headlines.

In Belem, Brazil’s leader, President Lula da Silva, opened the talks by denouncing obstructionists who “reject scientific evidence and attack institutions.” “They manipulate algorithms, sow hatred and spread fear,” he said, describing a surge in disinformation and propaganda aimed at blocking action to slow climate change. The summit, for the first time, put the issue on the agenda. A coalition of countries and international agencies issued a separate “Declaration on Information Integrity on Climate Change,” calling on governments to address climate disinformation, promote transparency and protect journalists, scientists and environmentalists.

By the end of this century, parts of Africa could face heatwaves for 250-300 days a year, which will make it difficult for people to survive.

Climate change is making it challenging to identify future host cities.

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.

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.

When a series of power outages hit Europe last year, the finger of blame was quickly – and falsely – pointed to an unlikely source: renewables. Blackouts are being used as a political tool to oppose the energy transition. But they can also become an opportunity for open discussions about energy infrastructure – a topic too often reserved only for technical audiences.

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

The first session of the Plenary of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Panel on Chemicals, Waste and Pollution (ISP-CWP P1) will be hosted by the Government of Switzerland, from 2 to 6 February 2026 at the Geneva International Conference Centre (CICG). The session will be preceded by regional and stakeholder meetings on 1 February 2026, at the same venue. The tentative schedule for the first session is available here. Please note that this schedule is subject to change.

As global soy giants walk away from a landmark pact, land grabbers move in to clear the forest for new crops.

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

l'observatoire US de la dérégulation environnementale

The Senate is on the verge of taking up a bill with the Orwellian title “Fix Our Forests Act.” It is designed to do the opposite, as Dan Galpern and I describe in an op-ed published yesterday in the Boston Globe, which is copied below with permission of the Globe. The bill would result in swaths of the public’s national forests becoming “categorical exclusion” zones open to logging exempt from any environmental review. Thus, the bill would override the purposes for which national forests were set up, including “outdoor recreation, range…watershed, and wildlife and fish purposes.” This sin is rationalized under the pretense that the Act will reduce wildfire risk and improve forest health by “thinning” the forest. This is nonsense, as our op-ed discusses.

Climate change could lead to half a million more deaths from malaria in Africa over the next 25 years, according to new research.

With warming set to pass the critical 1.5-degree limit, scientists are warning that the world is on course to trigger tipping points that would lead to cascading consequences — from the melting of ice sheets to the death of the Amazon rainforest — that could not be reversed.

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.

Dario Amodei questions if human systems are ready to handle the ‘almost unimaginable power’ that is ‘potentially imminent’

Testimony from medics, morgue and graveyard staff reveals huge state effort to conceal systematic killing of protesters

The world endured its costliest wildfire on record in 2025, its sixth-deadliest heat wave, and four floods or storms that caused at least 1,000 deaths.

The authors of a new book argue that the ocean cannot be saved by legislation alone. Paul Watson is one of the authors, along with academic Sarah Levy. Watson was an early member of Greenpeace, and founded the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, but is no longer linked to either organization. While he maintains he has never caused physical injury to anyone, he promotes "aggressive non-violent" direct action, and is currently wanted by the Japanese state.

The world has entered an era of “global water bankruptcy” that is harming billions of people, a UN report has declared. The overuse and pollution of water must be tackled urgently, the report’s lead author said, because no one knew when the whole system could collapse, with implications for peace and social cohesion. All life depends on water but the report found many societies had long been using water faster than it could be replenished annually in rivers and soils, as well as over-exploiting or destroying long-term stores of water in aquifers and wetlands.

Scientists expect 41% of the projected global population to face the extremes, with ‘no part of the world’ immune

Children’s developing lungs make them vulnerable to air pollution.

What if the real danger wasn’t the crises ahead… but the established illusion that we can solve them without changing the system that produces said crises? In this uncompromising and deeply eye-opening talk, renowned systems thinker and strategist Arthur Keller challenges one of the most comforting ideas of our time: the belief that “solutions exist” to the great planetary predicaments of our time. Climate action, energy transition, technical innovation… are all crucial, yet they’re somewhat off topic if they remain integrated within a system that inexorably turns nature into waste. Arthur reframes the situation with brutal clarity. Humanity is not facing an ecological crisis: it is nature that’s facing a human crisis. The problematic is no collection of isolated problems to tackle one by one: it is rather the symptom of a civilization operating beyond planetary limits. Decarbonizing energy without transforming the underlying system, he argues, is like treating cancer with painkillers. The disease keeps sprea

Breathing in air pollution like ozone and PM2.5 harms nearly every major system in the human body

The decline in the health of nature around the world poses a threat to the UK's security and prosperity, an intelligence committee has concluded in a long-awaited report. The document warns of "cascading risks" from the degradation of some of the planet's most important ecosystems, including conflict, migration and increased competition for resources.

Ecosystem destruction will increase food shortages, disorder and mass migration, with effects already being felt

Global biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and national security - A national security assessment

Like living beyond your financial means, using more water than nature can replenish can have catastrophic results.

Flagship report calls for fundamental reset of global water agenda as irreversible damage pushes many basins beyond recovery

As climate and geopolitics shocks bite, countries are rebuilding food buffers. The UK clings to neoliberal ideas while households pay the price