Climate

Blazes devastate affluent Pacific Palisades with more than 30,000 people under evacuation orders

• California wildfires – latest updates

Fast-moving wildfires raging through Los Angeles have left Hollywood movie actors and reality TV stars fleeing their hillside mansions, as wind-whipped blazes devastated affluent neighbourhoods along the coast.

More than 30,000 people have been put under evacuation orders in LA, and a state of emergency has been declared as the infernos swept through the Pacific Palisades, a ritzy area near Malibu popular with celebrities.

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How a team of researchers is reducing skin temperature under clothes and energy bills with some forward fashion thinking

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This year is on track to be the hottest in recorded history. With rising temperatures and more intense and frequent heatwaves, keeping cool in summer will get harder. Air conditioning can only go so far, especially when extreme heat raises the risk of electricity outages.

Wearing light, loose-fitting clothing is well recognised health advice to beat the heat in sweltering temperatures, especially important given that heatwaves kill more people than any other extreme weather event.

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Hillside homes abandoned and 30,000 evacuated as infernos rip into north and west areas of Californian city

• Southern California wildfire – live

Residents of Los Angeles have fled wildfires engulfing the suburbs of the US’s second city, as firefighters struggled to contain the flames overnight amid fears they would worsen on Wednesday morning.

California officials have ordered more than 30,000 people to evacuate their homes as hillside infernos ripped through the coastal Pacific Palisades neighbourhood. People escaped by car and on foot.

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Exodus from target-setting group is attempt to head off ‘anti-woke’ attacks from rightwing politicians, say analysts

• Business live – latest updates

The six biggest banks in the US have all quit the global banking industry’s net zero target-setting group, with the imminent inauguration of Donald Trump as president expected to bring political backlash against climate action.

JP Morgan is the latest to withdraw from the UN-sponsored net zero banking alliance (NZBA), following Citigroup, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs. All six have left since the start of December.

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President-elect Donald Trump seems hell-bent on filling his cabinet with anti-science extremists, including climate science deniers. While these nominations are dangerous, what’s even more disturbing is the opening they create for fossil fuel corporations that have masterminded climate deception campaigns to regain social license. ExxonMobil, Shell, and trade associations like the American Petroleum Institute now profess to accept climate science—even as they exacerbate the crisis by continuing to expand fossil fuel production and kick the climate action can down the road with greenwashing and doublespeak.

In a cynical effort to please climate-conscious investors, ExxonMobil Chair and CEO Darren Woods may choose to keep climate science deniers like DOE nominee Chris Wright at arm’s length. But with global temperatures rising, the carbon budget dwindling, and climate-driven disasters affecting people and communities around the world, we cannot afford to accept ExxonMobil, Shell, or other major fossil fuel corporations as the lesser evil—or even worse, as integral to climate solutions.

Trump reignites overt climate denial

During his campaign, Trump sought $1 billion from oil and gas CEOs in exchange for a pledge to reverse environmental regulations and prevent new policies from being enacted. Since Trump’s election to a second term, fossil fuel industry interests have published their wish lists—and patrons have been rewarded with appointments to key posts in the administration. And we’ve already seen a resurgence of outright climate science denial.

Chris Wright, Trump’s nominee for Energy Secretary, has denied the well-established connection between climate change and extreme weather events. Liberty Energy, the fracking corporation he heads, describes its Environment, Social, and Governance (ESG) focus as delivering secure, reliable, affordable access to energy. Its ESG report downplays the urgency of the climate crisis and misrepresents the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This deliberate distortion of ESG builds on years of anti-ESG efforts by far-right activists including Vivek Ramaswamy, appointed by Trump to partner with fellow billionaire Elon Musk in weakening federal regulations and slashing government spending (notably, oil and gas subsidies are not on the chopping block).

Congressional allies pump up oil and gas

Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill, the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee has continued its attack on ESG investing, most recently in an unhinged report that rallies behind ExxonMobil against an alleged “cartel” of climate-conscious investors. The committee seems to be living in an alternate reality in which investors using market tools to influence corporate strategy is somehow illicit, while fossil fuel companies colluding to fix prices is not. The Judiciary Committee’s upside-down world is detached from reality, ignoring both record high US oil and gas production under the Biden administration and the fact that renewables continue to be cheaper than fossil energy.

Representative Jim Jordan’s Judiciary Committee embraces anti-climate positions that ExxonMobil itself long ago abandoned, alleging that commitments to reach net zero global warming emissions by 2050 are part of a “left-wing climate agenda.” Does ExxonMobil, the nation’s largest energy corporation, really need protection by a paternalistic Congress against powerful bullying investors? More likely, ExxonMobil recognizes that to compete in the global market, it must convince investors that it is taking action to reduce heat-trapping emissions and limit the worst effects of climate change. (As my colleague Dr. Carly Phillips has shown, ExxonMobil’s recent climate reports are misleading at best, dishonest at worst—textbook examples of greenwashing).

Major fossil fuel corporations lit the fuse decades ago

Climate change denial is no accident. It was plotted decades ago by the fossil fuel industry—for example, in an infamous 1998 memo by a task force of the American Petroleum Institute, which said that “Victory will be achieved when average citizens understand (recognize) ‘uncertainties’ in climate science.” As my UCS colleagues and I wrote in the Climate Deception Dossiers, this plan was eerily reminiscent of the tobacco industry’s strategy, succinctly described in an internal corporate memo as, “Doubt is our product…”

Source: UCS

The fossil fuel industry’s concerted disinformation campaign has been so successful that ExxonMobil, one of the ringleaders, can now claim to accept climate science while cronies like Chris Wright and Jim Jordan continue to stoke doubt.

Fossil fuel interests have been in Trump’s inner circle from the jump

In 2016, President Trump tapped ExxonMobil Chair and CEO Rex Tillerson as his Secretary of State. As I wrote at the time, Tillerson was an inappropriate and deeply troubling pick for the post, for countless reasons—here were five of the most distressing ones.

One of those reasons was the ways Tillerson doubted and downplayed climate change. And after his service in the Trump administration, the Wall Street Journal revealed new evidence that Tillerson had dismissed the Paris Agreement’s goal of keeping global temperature increase to well below 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels (and striving to limit it to 1.5 degrees Celsius) as “something magical.” Worse still, just months before the agreement was signed, Tillerson asked, “Who is to say 2.5 is not good enough?”

Climate scientists, backed by robust research, say so. The IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5° C found that surpassing 2 degrees C of warming would significantly increase the frequency and severity of climate impacts, including extreme weather events, biodiversity loss, and threats to human health and livelihoods. However, limiting warming to 1.5 degrees C, could substantially reduce these risks, highlighting the critical importance of ambitious global climate action.

In 2017, Tillerson said he disagreed with President Trump’s decision to withdraw the US from the Paris Agreement. He was fired from his position in the administration just nine months later.

ExxonMobil hides behind extremists

ExxonMobil is staking out a different position in the second Trump administration.

2024 wrapped up as the hottest year on record, with warming temporarily reaching 1.5 C. Unlike Tillerson or Trump, current ExxonMobil Chair and CEO Darren Woods professes to support the Paris Agreement. However, the corporation pushes technological “solutions” that can’t bend the emissions curve steeply downward in the critical period between now and 2030.

In December, ExxonMobil released its plan to 2030, which calls for an 18% increase in oil and gas production, thanks largely to growth in the Permian Basin (after last year’s acquisition of Pioneer) and offshore Guyana. Woods bragged about reducing ExxonMobil’s upstream (exploration and production) emissions intensity by 20% between 2016 and 2023—and says it is aiming to cut emissions intensity 40-50% by 2050.

However, upstream emissions intensity measures emissions per unit of production—and excludes emissions from burning oil and gas, which constitute roughly 85 percent of the heat-trapping emissions attributable to ExxonMobil. So, if production is increasing—as ExxonMobil’s is—absolute emissions will continue to climb even if upstream emissions intensity significantly decreases.

The corporation says it is pursuing “up to $30 billion in lower-emissions investment opportunities”—which for ExxonMobil means carbon capture and storage (CCS), hydrogen, and lithium. Among other projects, ExxonMobil’s Low Carbon Solutions business is developing a Texas plant to produce hydrogen from fossil gas (if the tax credit included in the Inflation Reduction Act survives) and a gas-fired power plant to support a data center. (Read more about how data centers’ rapidly growing energy use is changing electricity supply and demand—and what it means for energy infrastructure planning—in this blog by my UCS colleague Mike Jacobs).

Fossil fuel lobbyists grab seats at the table

ExxonMobil’s Woods was one of more than 1,770 fossil fuel industry lobbyists granted access to the annual UN climate negotiations (COP29) in Baku, Azerbaijan. The heads of Aramco, BP, and TotalEnergies were also registered to participate as guests of the host country.

Woods made headlines when he discouraged US President-elect Trump from withdrawing the United States from the Paris Agreement. Although some media outlets credited Woods with supporting climate policy and pushing back against Trump’s anti-climate agenda, what he actually said was, “The way you influence things is to participate, not to exit.” What I see in the oil and gas industry’s participation at COPs is not a commitment to climate action, but the determination—and access—to interfere with a fair, fast, and funded phaseout of fossil fuels by the international community.

What to watch out for in 2025

As 2025 begins, the challenges for climate advocates are at least threefold: 1) mobilizing fierce opposition and marginalizing climate science deniers who secure positions of power in Congress or the administration; 2) inoculating state, federal, and international policymakers against deception and greenwashing by ExxonMobil and other major fossil fuel corporations; and 3) defending and expanding the use of ESG investment strategies against bad-faith Congressional “oversight.”

With federal climate and clean energy policies likely to be stalled or rolled back, climate litigation is a key arena for progress in the United States. Preserving access to justice through the courts will be essential, in the face of veiled threats against climate-related litigation in Project 2025 and Trump’s promise to stop climate accountability litigation against the oil and gas industry.

The fossil fuel industry will attempt to cash in on its political influence in the United States by advancing deregulation, facilitating increased oil and gas production on federal lands and waters, expanding subsidies and other giveaways, blocking mandatory climate disclosure, evading liability for climate damages and corporate misconduct, and stoking political and legal attacks against activists and organizers. As President-elect Trump opens the floodgates to all kinds of disinformation—including climate science denial—some pro-fossil forces will fight climate and clean energy policies directly. But others will more stealthily seek to delay and undermine the transition away from fossil fuels, claiming to support climate action while defining “climate solutions” in their narrow short-term interests. These efforts to regain social license by those most responsible for the climate crisis are particularly insidious.

Both approaches—and the actors who employ them—endanger our health, environment, energy security, human rights, and democracy. Even as we steel ourselves to refute a barrage of lies from top officials in the Trump administration and Congress, we must resist compromising with leaders of an industry that has deceived the public and policymakers for decades, evaded accountability for the harm it has caused, continues to obstruct the urgent transition to renewable energy, and has not earned the public’s trust.

The tiny nation of Niue has raised £3m selling sponsorship of its marine protected area at just over £100 for a square kilometre

Niue, also known as the Rock of Polynesia, is one of the tiniest island states in the world. It takes a mere two hours to drive around it, giving views of its rugged limestone cliffs and occasional sandy coves. These coves give way to caves and chasms, once used for storage, burial sites and even as living spaces. But perhaps what visitors seek most are its crystal clear waters, home to spinner dolphins, eels, grey reef sharks, sea snakes and humpback whales.

Now the island is engaged in an innovative plan to try to conserve these vast and pristine territorial waters. The scheme, which has been running for a year, involves selling off sponsorship of the ocean surrounding the island to individuals or companies for NZ$250 (£116) a square kilometre. So far, it has raised NZ$7m, nearly halfway to its target.

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By the time Jon Oei’s family drove toward the ocean, it was dark and the power was out: ‘There were no lights, and everything was on fire’

• Live coverage: Pacific Palisades fire doubles in size
• Full report: windstorm fuels California wildfire

In the past few months, Jon Oei’s parents, who live in the highlands of the Pacific Palisades, have received multiple wildfire evacuation orders, the most recent in the early hours of New Year’s Eve, he said.

So on Tuesday, when a wildfire began not far from the family’s home, they did not immediately evacuate.

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A guide to the steps you can take before, during and after a fire as they grow more frequent and more intense

As the climate crisis makes wildfires in the American west more frequent, longer and more intense, preparedness can help residents across minimize damage and prevent loss.

Here are steps that can be taken before, during and after wildfires to protect yourself and others, compiled from government guides, fire association websites and weather service advisories.

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Fueled by major windstorm, Pacific Palisades fire touches museum site but officials say collection safe

• Follow live: Palisades blaze doubles in size to nearly 3,000 acres

A rapidly spreading wildfire in southern California reached the grounds of the Getty Villa museum north of Santa Monica on Tuesday, but officials said no structures had burned and the collection was safe.

The Pacific Palisades fire, fueled by a major windstorm and prompting mass evacuations in Los Angeles county, burned some trees and vegetation on site at the Getty Villa, but museum leaders said the galleries and archives were protected.

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A wildfire has erupted in Pacific Palisades, an affluent community north of Santa Monica, on Tuesday consuming more than 1,200 acres and destroying homes. A large swath of the region is under what officials have described as ‘extreme risk’ from a destructive storm. The city of Los Angeles has declared a state of emergency for the 'wind event'

• Wildfire destroys homes as strong winds hit southern California

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Fire quickly consumed hundreds of acres in the Pacific Palisades, an affluent community north of Santa Monica

A fast-moving wildfire erupted in Los Angeles county on Tuesday, quickly consuming more than 1,200 acres and destroying homes in an affluent community along the Pacific Ocean.

Whipped by unusually strong winds, the fire prompted frenzied evacuations through winding roads in the Pacific Palisades, an area north of Santa Monica, with residents fleeing on foot as flames approached.

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The president-elect said the United States needed the island, which is a semiautonomous part of Denmark, for national security reasons. But there are other possible interests.

A lucrative tax credit for renewable energy could be hard to kill because it applies to a technologies favored by Republicans, not just wind and solar.

The energy that will power the booming data-center industry could end up increasing emissions, at least in the short term.

Wind energy is one of the fastest growing and cheapest forms of electricity in the United States. The president-elect calls it “garbage.”

The lawsuit, an unusual strategy for the oil giant, comes after California’s attorney general sued Exxon last year alleging it misled the public about plastics recycling.

The year 2023 was by far the warmest in Earth’s recorded history, and perhaps in the past 100,000 years, shattering the previous record set in 2016 by 0.27°C (0.49°F). According to recent data from NOAA’s National Center for Environmental Information, 2024 is likely to be even warmer than 2023.  

Scientists are sounding the alarm because this warming is shockingly big—bigger than what we would have expected given the long-term warming trend from fossil fuel-caused climate change. But why were 2023 and 2024 so warm? 

The reason why 2016 was so warm was because of a strong El Niño event—a naturally-occurring cycle in the Earth’s climate system—which typically leads to a spike in Earth’s global-mean temperature. In that year, El Niño added to the increased warming caused by the build-up of heat-trapping emissions in the atmosphere, leading to that record-breaking heat. 

This is why 2023 and 2024 are so alarming: El Niño was only moderately strong (contributing a small amount of warming) in 2023 and was in a neutral state for most of 2024 (contributing almost no warming), so we cannot attribute the record-breaking warmth of  2023 and 2024 to El Niño like we did in 2016, and we definitely should not be shattering heat records under a neutral state El Niño. In other words, 2023 and 2024 have been much hotter than scientists’ predictions. 

What could be a potential explanation for the record-breaking warmth? This question was a focus at the 2024 annual American Geophysical Union (AGU) meeting in Washington, D.C., where 30,000-plus scientists gathered to present their latest research. The two leading theories to explain the record-breaking warmth are a reduction in tiny particles in the atmosphere called aerosols due to shipping fuel regulations that reduced sulfur oxide (SOx) emissions, or decreasing cloud cover. Before we get to those two likely culprits, let’s talk about albedo. 

What is albedo?

A concept that’s important in both of these theories is planetary albedo. Albedo is the total reflection of incoming solar radiation by Earth. This reflection is done partially by lighter-colored surfaces such as ice sheets and ice shelves, clouds, deserts, and also by aerosols. Think of walking outside on a sunny day after a snowstorm or in a desert; the sun’s rays are reflected by the light surface, making it harder to see. These solar rays are normally reflected out to space. 

The planet typically reflects about 30% of incoming solar radiation, but this number can change slightly depending on how much snow- or ice-cover there is, on the amount of cloud cover, or on how many aerosols are in the atmosphere (remember, these are tiny atmospheric particles that reflect light). Humans have a direct effect on albedo through emitting industrial aerosols such as sulfates, which accumulate in the atmosphere due to the burning of fossil fuels. 

You might be thinking, “if the burning of fossil fuels increases Earth’s albedo due to additional aerosols in the atmosphere, shouldn’t this offset any impact from the effects of increased heat-trapping emissions like carbon dioxide?” It’s a great question, but the warming effect from heat-trapping gases far outweighs the cooling effect from industrial aerosols. 

Reduction in aerosols leads to albedo decrease 

A popular theory that could explain why the past two years have been so warm has to do with a change in aerosol emissions due to new shipping fuel regulations aimed at helping to address pollution that harms health and the environment. In 2020, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) reduced the limit on the amount of sulfur in ships’ fuel oil, which then led to a reduction in sulphur dioxide and particulate matter emissions which form aerosols in the atmosphere.  

According to two recent studies, this reduction in aerosols may have led to a spike in the global-mean temperature. How? As industrial aerosols decreased due to this new regulation, particularly over the North Atlantic Ocean, the planetary albedo slightly decreased, which means that more incoming solar radiation was absorbed by the planet rather than reflected. 

However, another study found that the effect of additional industrial aerosols in the atmosphere would only affect global-mean temperature by a couple hundredths of a degree, rather than the 0.27°C observed in 2023. 

Of course, continuing to strengthen public health-based standards to cut harmful air pollution from burning fossil fuels, including sulphur dioxide and particulate matter, is essential and lifesaving. Further scientific work is underway to help advance our understanding of how and how much this contributes to changes in industrial aerosols and how that may be influencing the rate of warming. Meanwhile, sharply cutting our use of fossil fuels is the best way to limit carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, the primary driver of climate change.  

Diminishing cloud cover due to warming creates more warming 

A study released just last month, and another preprint of a study presented at AGU, provide a different explanation for the spike in global-mean temperature: clouds. In this case, the authors of both papers argue that a decrease in cloud cover led to the decrease in planetary albedo.  

Over the last few decades, there has been an observed decrease in total planetary cloud cover, especially over the North Atlantic Ocean off the Northeast US coast. Here, low-level cloud cover has decreased drastically, mostly related to an increase in ocean surface temperature.  

The decrease in low-level cloud cover due to warming ocean surfaces is particularly alarming because the process could be the manifestation of a feedback associated with global warming: as the oceans warm, low-level cloud cover decreases, which results in a lower planetary albedo and thus a faster warming world. 

Ocean surface temperatures in the North Atlantic could also be warming so much due to a weakening of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), which I blogged about in November. While ocean surface temperatures are increasing globally due to fossil fuel-caused climate change, they are warming even faster off the US Northeast coast, which could be the result of the AMOC slowing down and pooling warm water in the region. 

Important questions are still being sorted out 

Climate scientists are still trying to figure out what exactly made 2023 and 2024 so warm. We discussed some potential reasons that could explain the spike in warming, but the details haven’t been ironed out quite yet. 

What’s interesting is that the sudden warming could also be due to a combination of the two theories.

Did you know that in order for water droplets to form in the atmosphere to create clouds, they need a tiny particle to condense onto? These tiny particles are called cloud condensation nuclei (CCN), and one type of CCN is industrial aerosols such as sulfates. After the IMO lowered sulfur in shipping fuel oil, less sulfate aerosols in the atmosphere could have resulted in less CCN available for cloud droplets to form, resulting in a lower planetary albedo. 

To perhaps add another layer to everything, during my PhD research, I studied how different patterns of ocean surface temperature affect the rate of global warming. For example, if the West Pacific warms more than the rest of the world, then the planet will actually warm at a slower rate than if that warming was distributed evenly across the ocean’s surface. 

We found that the most likely ocean surface pattern of warming in the near future, which is currently developing, will result in a rapidly warming planet. This could very well be a piece of the puzzle as to why 2023 and 2024 were so warm. 

Scientists continue to sound the alarm 

The additional warming in 2023 and 2024 adds a layer of complexity to fossil fuel-caused climate change (and not the kind of complexity we want, given that the planet seems to be warming more rapidly than before). These two ideas from the science community are still being ironed out, and it will take some more time to understand exactly what caused this spike in global-mean temperature. 

One thing is for sure though: the planet is warming mainly due to increased heat-trapping emissions in Earth’s atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels. The only way to slow down warming is by reducing said emissions through a fast and fair transition to clean, renewable energy. 

With these two new monuments, Mr. Biden has protected more federal land and waters than any other president, about 674 million acres.

Waterways can protect biodiversity, help with water security and keep cities cooler, says Canal & River Trust

Protecting the UK’s canals is crucial for improving the nation’s resilience to climate change, campaigners have said.

A report by the Canal & River Trust charity found canals could play a “critical role” in biodiversity, decarbonisation and climate adaptation.

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With these two new monuments, Mr. Biden has protected more federal land and waters than any other president, about 674 million acres.