Climate

In terms of Earth, we are a dangerous species

Robin McKie’s account of his 40 years as the Observer’s science editor is as deeply absorbing as it is a warning to humanity (“What I’ve learned after 40 years as the Observer’s science editor”, Focus). He takes us back nearly 50 years to British glaciologist John Mercer’s warning that continued use of fossil fuel could lead to a 2C temperature rise by the mid-21st century threatening, among other potential catastrophes, a 5m sea level rise.

His warnings, since echoed by swelling numbers of scientists, point out that climate change “threatens to displace hundreds of millions of people from their homelands”. Tragically, McKie reports, “large parts of society turn their heads and deliberately reject the truths that have been presented to them”. Our increasingly busy roads and airports illustrate this. His article needs to be read by government ministers, reported widely in the press and studied in schools.
Richard Vernon
Oxford

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With Peter Dutton’s views on climate change in the spotlight, the focus has turned onto whether there will be any policies to reduce emissions in the next decade

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The Coalition is refusing to say if it will introduce any policies to cut Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions in the next decade as it pledges to unwind most climate measures introduced under Labor.

Peter Dutton’s position on the climate crisis came under scrutiny last week after he gave contradictory answers on whether he accepted mainstream climate science. Asked during a leaders’ debate on the ABC whether extreme weather events were worsening, the opposition leader said: “I don’t know because I’m not a scientist”.

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Dropping a Labor goal of 82% of electricity coming from renewable generation by 2030 and slowing the rollout of solar and windfarms, in part by scrapping a “rewiring the nation” fund to build new transmission connections. Instead, it says the country would rely on more fossil fuels – coal and gas-fired power – until it could lift a ban on nuclear energy and build taxpayer-owned nuclear generators, mostly after 2040.

Abolishing fines for car companies that do not meet targets to cut the average emissions from the new cars they sell.

Not supporting Labor’s 2030 emissions reduction target. Former diplomats say lowering the target would put Australia in breach of commitments made in the 2015 Paris climate agreement.

Opposing a joint Australia-Pacific bid to host a major UN climate summit in Adelaide next year.

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The energy secretary has accused Reform UK’s leader of peddling dangerous falsehoods about renewable power

• Tories and Reform use the steel crisis to knock clean energy. They’re wrong: it will secure all our futures

Ed Miliband has torn into Nigel Farage and the Tories for peddling dangerous “nonsense and lies” by suggesting the UK’s net zero target is responsible for destroying Britain’s businesses, including its steel industry.

Cabinet ministers are determined to fight back against the way Reform UK and the Conservatives have unceremoniously lambasted the climate crisis agenda for what they believe are nakedly political reasons before important local elections next month.

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El presidente dijo que la medida tenía como objetivo convertir a Estados Unidos en el “líder mundial dominante en productos del mar”.

These estimates, drawn from the location data of three billion Facebook users, provide a view of human migration in extraordinary detail.

Wind power developer eyes legal remedies to order that blocks renewable energy projects and eliminates green job opportunities

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The buildout of renewable energy projects in downstate New York – the region that includes the Hudson valley and below – is often complicated. The space for these projects is limited, particularly in New York City, and they’re often expensive.

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Exclusive: Head of Fire Brigades Union calls for statutory body to set national standards amid fears for public safety

• National parks warn of ‘catastrophic’ risk this Easter

Wildfires across the UK during hot, dry springs and summers have exposed a “postcode lottery” of firefighting resources that must be addressed, the head of the Fire Brigades Union has said.

Steve Wright, the general secretary, said public safety was at risk, and called for a statutory body to ensure that each fire and rescue service had enough staff and appliances.

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Weeks of fires amid warm and dry spell have decimated ecosystems and threatened endangered species, say experts

• Wildfires expose ‘postcode lottery’ of firefighting resources

Britain’s national parks have warned of a “catastrophic” risk from wildfires this Easter after one of the driest early spring seasons on record.

Park rangers from the South Downs to the Highlands said the prolonged warm weather and breezy conditions had left large areas extremely dry despite recent rain.

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In an exclusive extract from Friederike Otto’s new book, she says climate disasters result from inequality as well as fossil fuel

My research as a climate scientist is in attribution science. Together with my team, I analyse extreme weather events and answer the questions of whether, and to what extent, human-induced climate change has altered their frequency, intensity and duration.

When I first began my research, most scientists claimed that these questions couldn’t be answered. There were technical reasons for this: for a long time, researchers had no weather models capable of mapping all climate-related processes in sufficient detail. But there were other reasons that had less to do with the research itself.

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The plight of American honeybees drew a journalist away from his usual beat covering energy.

Not since Tony Benn has a Labour minister been so assailed – and not just by the Tory press, but also by his own colleagues

Why exactly does Ed Miliband make so many people so angry? At 55, 20 years into his parliamentary career, with rare ministerial experience under both New Labour and Keir Starmer, and a reputation around Westminster and Whitehall as one of politics’ nicer, more knowledgeable characters, he could be a respected figure in a generally inexperienced government. Instead, he’s this unpopular administration’s most controversial member.

“An eco-zealot”, “a net-zero fanatic”, a “nauseating” hypocrite, “a cackling madman”, an “eco-Marxist”, “out of control”, “trashing Britain”, “a recruiting sergeant for the opposition”, the “most dangerous man in Britain” – Miliband provokes rightwing journalists and voters like no other minister. Possibly not since the onslaught in the 1970s on the socialist disruptor Tony Benn, whom Miliband later worked for as a teenager, has a Labour minister been so relentlessly targeted. Even the long-running and complex crisis in Britain’s steel industry has become an opportunity to blame him, despite him being secretary of state for energy security and net zero for fewer than 10 months.

Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist

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The president said the move was aimed at making the United States the world’s “dominant seafood leader.”

The shift to cleaner power needs resources from China. An export ban just cut off some supplies.

After a federal judge on Wednesday ordered the release of up to $650 million in frozen grants, an appeals court temporarily halted the payouts.

Do you remember the first time that climate change really entered your consciousness?

For me, it was the powerful Congressional testimony by the Director of NASA’s Goddard Space Institute, Dr. Jim Hansen, in 1988. What he was telling the world sounded unbelievable. But he was from NASA, one of our nation’s—and the world’s—premier science agencies, so I knew this was real. I was a distracted, big-haired teenager, frozen in my tracks. I’ve been working for climate solutions ever since.

Fast forward to today…

I know…

Our political crises are a lot to hold. But as part of the climate movement, you also know that climate change is the context in which all of these crises are unfolding. You know that if we are successful in slowing down or stopping the Trump administration’s authoritarian roll and restoring democracy, we still have this colossal global climate problem to contend with. What you may not know—what is just now becoming clear through leaked documents covered in the press—is that the administration is preparing to bring climate science in the United States to its knees. This illegal overreach will make the work of contending with climate change so much harder for many years to come.

We have to stop them.

The insatiable anti-science Trump agenda

The infamously anti-science Trump administration, back in February, requested reorganization plans from each federal agency by April 14th. The planned cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), according to news reports, are not the equivalent of trimming but of sawing a whole tree down to the ground. Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR), for example, is at risk of elimination, a move that would gut NOAA’s ability to pursue climate change research itself and to support, as it currently does, countless research efforts across the US and around the world.

As my colleague, Marc Alessi summarizes in his blog, the leaked memo “proposes closing all 16 Cooperative Research Institutes in 33 states, every one of the 10 research labs, all 6 regional climate centers, slashing the budget for the NASA Goddard Space Institute, and ending $70 million in grants to research universities. Thousands of seasoned scientists, early career scientists, and young scientists in graduate schools will lose funding.” As of this writing, the rich online resources of three of the Regional Climate Centers have already been taken down. The destruction is underway.

Also requested in February and presumably being finalized now are plans for “large-scale reductions in force (RIFs)”. Those firings of federal employees would come on top of the hundreds of NOAA staff who were fired last week—for the second time, this time permanently.

This is what I mean by bringing US climate science to its knees. And as my colleague, Rachel Cleetus, details in her blog, it is at the same time incredibly reckless and carefully premeditated by those behind Project 2025.

Climate science tracks and unpacks the dangerous trends that will harm people’s lives and livelihoods, and already are. It shows, for example, that both the strength and rapid intensification of hurricanes are increasing, that the intensity and duration of drought and extreme precipitation are increasing, that sea level rise and coastal flooding are increasing, and that wildfires are increasing in frequency and size. If we look back just a handful of months, from Hurricane Helene to the L.A. wildfires, the devastation our changing climate is causing in people’s lives is clear. The proposed cuts would ravage our ability to understand and meet these evolving threats.

The entire global climate science community relies on NOAA scientific expertise and the science it produces. A passing anti-science administration, hell-bent on destruction across our federal government, has no right to make these legacy scientific resources disappear. They belong to us. NOAA belongs to the millions of people warned and kept safe by our National Weather Service, to the diverse economic sectors informed by its annual, seasonal, and monthly outlooks, and to the thousands of communities dependent on good information to invest and plan for the future. This anti-science agenda is anti-people and it must be stopped.

Federal climate science IS climate science

After my 1988 wake-up call, many indelible moments of new climate awareness followed—so many bearing the fingerprints of NOAA and NASA science. For millions of us in the climate movement, it was the first time we saw the “Keeling Curve”, the iconic chart illustrating the steady rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels since 1958, as recorded at NOAA’s Mauna Loa Observatory. (The observatory’s support office is on a DOGE list of federal leases slated for cancellation.)

This NOAA graph shows the full record of monthly mean carbon dioxide measured at Mauna Loa Observatory, Hawaii. The carbon dioxide data on Mauna Loa constitute the longest record of direct measurements of CO2 in the atmosphere.https://www.noaa.gov/news-release/during-year-of-extremes-carbon-dioxide-levels-surge-faster-than-ever

For many, seeing the “hockey stick” chart or NOAA’s global historical temperature anomaly record sent shockwaves of recognition through us: we are in unprecedented territory.

This NOAA graph shows yearly surface temperature from 1880–2024 compared to the 20th-century average (1901-2000). Blue bars indicate cooler-than-average years; red bars show warmer-than-average years. https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-global-temperature

NOAA’s sea level rise projections similarly transformed our collective sense of the future of our coastal communities and the inevitability of large-scale human migration: seismic change lies ahead.

This NOAA graph shows observed sea level from 2000-2018, with future sea level through 2100 for six future pathways. http://climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-global-sea-level 

Just yesterday, new climate research was released using NOAA’s long-term historical record of carbon dioxide levels to show a dramatic recent spike in CO2. While the scientific community needs to determine what this means for our climate, it is a terrible trend—and a vital one for us to see, track and understand. These measurements are part of the work of the Global Monitoring Laboratory—one of the laboratories proposed to be closed by these cuts.

This NOAA graph shows annual mean carbon dioxide growth rates based on globally averaged marine surface data. https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/gl_gr.html

Speaking of laboratories, NOAA’s  Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) is targeted for closure. GFDL developed the world’s first global climate model and remains at the forefront of climate research. Its loss would represent a serious wound to climate science, globally.

It is no accident that these watershed moments in public awareness of the climate crisis (alongside climate disasters of historic proportions like Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy) came courtesy of our federal agencies. This is a central purpose of government: marshalling collective resources for the public good. This is our federal science at work—as we want and need it to work—advancing and innovating over time to bring our changing climate into focus in service of the public’s well-being, today and into the future.

Climate science serves people

Our federal climate science isn’t just big picture trends and long-term projections. It also provides us with the localized, near-term data, information and expertise we need to perceive current changes at granular, community and neighborhood levels and to anticipate unavoidable impacts for which we must prepare.

Put bluntly, NOAA science saves lives and money. Improved hurricane forecasting by institutions like those currently slated for closure is estimated to have yielded nearly $5 billion in avoided damages for each major US-landfalling hurricane, not to mention the many lives saved, while the cost of letting those institutions do their job is a fraction of that. With climate change driving more dangerous and costly hurricane seasons, this is bad math.

The pillars of NOAA’s mission include “1. To understand and predict changes in climate, weather, ocean and coasts. And 2. To share that knowledge and information with others.” As it quips on its website, climate is what you expect, weather is what you get. Its work is based on the understanding that climate and weather are inseparable, that each year, climate change manifests in more extreme weather events, and that we must understand these changes in order to meet them.

We’re still making sense of the implications of these cuts for everyday people, but as my colleague writes, they could lead to a significant decrease in hurricane forcasting accuracy, since the proposed cuts would end support for NOAA’s hurricane hunter missions; elimination of important climate monitoring and decision support for farmers with the loss of the NOAA Regional Climate Centers; and coastal communities left without the National Ocean Service and the critical information it provides, e.g., on flood risk from extreme weather events. 

NOAA and NASA are able to respond to the mounting threat of climate change because of many decades of taxpayer investment in their work. Americans value the services we receive from this science and use them every day. No one but the Trump administration, Elon Musk, and the creators of Project 2025 is asking for the dismantling of the public US scientific enterprise. But like barbarians at the gate, the administration is ignorant and/or uncaring about the painstakingly-constructed, globally-prized scientific asset that NOAA and NASA represent. They only seem intent on sacking and claiming the spoils, apparently to make a small dent in the cost of tax breaks for billionares and to pave the way for greater profits for big corporations.

Make it hurt until they make NOAA whole

So, Climate Movement, I know we don’t feel like a “climate” movement right now, and that’s as it should be. Too many urgent fronts to fight them on. But we’re still here. And this assault on climate science requires the greatest response we can marshal. If they succeed, we will be badly delayed in building the climate future we need by having to rebuild the climate science past they stole.

The Trump administration claims a “mandate” to justify the destruction, but a strong majority of the American public is concerned about climate change. Amidst the coming, inevitably-bruising summer—or “Danger Season“—of climate extremes, frustration will rise over the administration’s crushing of both federal climate science and disaster preparedness efforts. Layered on top of this will be the volatility, harm and added vulnerability people will be facing from the administration’s countless other egregious actions, from cuts to housing and cooling assistance to ever-expanding rights violations.

Congress has an opportunity to stop this madness and we need to make them. Members should hear encouragement to be bolder or face constituent anger at every turn until they stand up for NOAA, climate science, and the public good.

The people, especially those of us with privilege, have an opportunity to stop it, too. The streets, local media, town halls, the market place should fill with our bodies and our voices calling for the restoration of these vital agencies and programs—as well as rights and freedoms and the rule of law, however misaligned those are with the Trump agenda. It’s time to be bold and go hard. They can’t take it from us if we refuse to let it go.

Nearly a quarter of shareholders vote against the chair, Helge Lund, as green protesters are blocked from entering

BP suffered an investor rebellion on Thursday after facing shareholders for the first time since abandoning its climate strategy at a meeting marred by protest.

About a quarter of shareholders voted against the chair, Helge Lund, at the company’s annual meeting in Sunbury-on-Thames, on the edges of London, which attracted protest from several green campaign groups.

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Liberals in the US make up about 15% of the prepping scene and their numbers are growing. Their fears differ from their better-known rightwing counterparts – as do their methods

One afternoon in February, hoping to survive the apocalypse or at least avoid finding myself among its earliest victims, I logged on to an online course entitled Ruggedize Your Life: The Basics.

Some of my classmates had activated their cameras. I scrolled through the little windows, noting the alarmed faces, downcast in cold laptop light. There were dozens of us on the call, including a geophysicist, an actor, a retired financial adviser and a civil engineer. We all looked worried, and rightly so. The issue formerly known as climate change was now a polycrisis called climate collapse. H1N1 was busily jumping from birds to cows to people. And with each passing day, as Donald Trump went about gleefully dismantling state capacity, the promise of a competent government response to the next hurricane, wildfire, flood, pandemic, drought, mudslide, heatwave, financial meltdown, hailstorm or other calamity receded further from view.

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Remember the board game Risk? I used to play it with a neighbor who always moved most of his armies to one spot on the world map to project overwhelming force, only to lose the battalions he left exposed. The strategy of protecting your positions was lost on him—he thought he could win through sheer intimidation.  

Two recent events show that President Trump is falling prey to a similar weakness. Instead of addressing the many ways climate change threatens the country’s financial stability, his administration is pulling back safeguards in order to reward his Big Oil donors. 

Delivering for fossil fuel donors 

On March 28, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)—an independent federal agency that protects investors by watching Wall Street—abandoned a rule it passed just last year requiring companies to examine how climate change impacts their operations and disclose their findings. The rule received overwhelming support from investors, who said they needed such information to assess risks to companies’ business models. 

Three days later, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), one of the three independent agencies responsible for regulating banks, withdrew from a collaboration among the agencies to create guidelines on climate-related financial risk. The guidelines, issued in October 2023, would help banks with more than $100 billion in assets manage the ways in which climate change affects bonds, mortgages, and other financial products. Both the rule and guidance were significantly weakened by corporate lobbying but still represented an acknowledgement of the financial threat climate change poses. 

The SEC rule and OCC principles grew from a longstanding demand by investors that was accelerated by a Biden Administration executive order directing regulators to assess the US financial system’s exposure to risks resulting from climate change. Trump revoked that order on his first day in office, along with several others related to climate change, public health, and the environment. He would later issue another order stripping away power from independent agencies like the SEC and OCC, both of which were established to make sure companies and banks don’t take too much risk with the public’s money. Both agencies are currently led by acting officials appointed by Trump. 

The rollbacks didn’t come out of left field.—they’re  a return on the fossil fuel industry’s major investment in Trump’s reelection campaign. The SEC rule and Biden executive order were explicitly named as targets for elimination in a 2024 briefing book for the board of the American Exploration and Production Council, an oil and gas trade association representing the country’s largest oil and gas companies. Trump’s executive orders also advance industry interests by making it easier to increase fossil fuel production while blocking clean energy development.  

The fossil fuel industry has aggressively fought efforts to track and regulate climate-related financial risk. Industry representatives such as the American Petroleum Institute and U.S. Chamber of Commerce tried to stop the SEC rule with lawsuits, which are now combined into a single suit currently before an appeals court in Missouri (the SEC’s recent move withdrew agency defense of the rule, but state attorneys general continue to defend it). One of the plaintiffs in the lawsuits against the SEC rule is Liberty Energy, the company founded by Chris Wright, who Trump appointed secretary of the Department of Energy. Last year, ExxonMobil filed a lawsuit against investors pressing the company for increased disclosures.  

Risky business 

What does climate-related financial risk actually mean? Though the answer might seem implicit, it’s helpful to remember that banks, investment funds, insurance companies, and other financial industry players are in the business of assessing risk. The financial industry employs legions of analysts to crunch numbers that will hopefully prevent them from losing money. If you’ve ever taken out a mortgage or other type of loan, you know how much work is required to prove that lending to you is a safe bet.  

Climate change poses what risk experts call “systemic risk,” meaning it affects so many parts of the financial system that any negative event could set off a cascading series of crises, thereby destabilizing the entire system. Mark Carney, a former governor of the Bank of England who was recently elected Canadian prime minister, laid out three principal types of risk that climate change poses to financial stability in a 2015 speech to insurance executives.   

The first is physical risk, meaning devaluation of physical assets like buildings or oil rigs due to climate-related hazards like hurricanes or wildfires. The second is liability risk, also called legal or litigation risk, meaning losses from legal action by parties harmed by climate change who seek compensation. The third is transition risk, or losses to fossil fuel-intensive industries resulting from the world’s transition to renewable energy sources. These can manifest as decreased demand for products like gasoline, or policy changes that limit the amount of carbon emissions a company can emit, to give just two examples.  

As some of the world’s highest emitters of the carbon emissions that cause climate change, fossil fuel companies face heightened levels of these risks compared to other industries. Oil and gas companies are particularly vulnerable to physical risks to infrastructure located in extreme weather zones like coastlines or oceans; transition risks related to falling demand for their products; and liability risk. Several dozen lawsuits against fossil fuel corporations have been filed in the United States alone by states, counties, cities, and tribes seeking accountability for fraud, climate damages, or racketeering. While these cases do not seek to regulate emissions directly, they represent a significant financial and reputational threat through introduces risk through potential judgments, discovery of internal documents, and the broader scrutiny of industry practices. 

Using science for risk resilience 

In his 2015 speech, Carney said risk “will only increase as the science and evidence of climate change hardens.” Ten years later, that hard evidence has continued to mount. A well-established field known as attribution science is strengthening evidence of climate change-related risk to companies, investors, communities, and the economy. Attribution science can explain how climate change makes a heatwave hotter or a hurricane-related downpour more intense. This kind of event attribution helps assess changing risks to assets, infrastructure, and insurance.  

Another branch of attribution science focuses on emissions sources, quantifying how emissions from specific companies contribute to global warming and related impacts over time. 

A new UCS study, building on a robust body of UCS-led research, shows that nearly half of the increase in present-day temperature and one-third of present-day sea level rise can be traced to emissions from just 122 fossil fuel producers and cement manufacturers.   

Think of all the damage wrought by rising seas, warming oceans, and hurricanes, and it becomes clear why so many are calling for greater accountability from oil and gas companies—much like the public reckoning that followed with the tobacco and asbestos industries. 

Roll the Dice, Pay the Price

These political shenanigans are just attempts to deny a reality that Wall Street already knows: Climate risk is financial risk. Just this year, banks and insurance companies released a slew of reports chronicling how climate change will impact the financial world. For real-time evidence, investors need look no further than the current insurance crisis. As my colleague Rachel Cleetus recently wrote, this crisis “was entirely foreseeable, and largely preventable…climate scientists have been sounding the alarm for decades, and yet the market and policymakers have reacted with short-term strategies because those are the timeframes for determining shareholder value, profits and elections.” 

Trump’s rollbacks reflect more of this cynical, short-term thinking. But companies across industries must look beyond politics and face the reality of climate-related risk disclosure, both from within the US (rules in states including California) and abroad (regulations in Japan and the EU).

The key to winning the game Risk is fortifying your positions against all attackers. But where a board game depends a good deal on a roll of the dice, we can and must take charge of our future by accounting for the risks we face. By removing mechanisms to hold companies accountable, the Trump administration is playing political games with our financial future as well as the planet’s.  

Illegally diverted rivers, seawater and poorly managed building projects have polluted the Ciénaga Grande de Santa Marta. But the Unesco site has a vital role to play in fighting climate change

From the porch of her family home in Nueva Venecia, Magdalena, Yeidis Rodríguez Suárez watches the sunset. The view takes in the still waters of the Ciénaga Grande de Santa Marta wetlands. Pelicans dip their beaks into the lagoon, ripples breaking the glassy surface. Distant mangroves turn from green to deep purple in the dying light.

The 428,000-hectare (1,600 sq mile) expanse of lagoons, mangroves and marshes in Colombia has been a Unesco biosphere reserve since 2000. Yet, for Rodríguez, 27, the natural abundance is little more than an illusion.

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Plus, a capybara controversy in Argentina.