Global Warming...New Report...and it ain't happy news

Emissions from electricity and transportation are projected to fall over time, a new report finds, but industry remains a major climate challenge.



To tackle dangerous global warming, countries have started to clean up their power plants and cars. But emissions from heavy industry — like cement, steel or chemical factories — have been harder to curb and are now on pace to become by far the world’s largest source of planet-warming pollution.

That’s one big takeaway from a new, detailed forecast of global greenhouse gas emissions published Thursday by the Rhodium Group, a research firm. Overall, the report estimates that the world is currently on track to heat up roughly 2.8 degrees Celsius, or 5 degrees Fahrenheit, above preindustrial levels by 2100. Many world leaders and scientists consider that much warming to be perilous.

Trying to predict emissions so far out in the future is inherently difficult, but the forecast offers a rough guide to where countries appear poised to make progress on climate change in the years ahead — and where they are still struggling.



Globally, greenhouse gas emissions are expected to soar to record highs this year. However, there are signs that planet-warming pollution from two major sectors — electricity and transportation — could start declining in the not-so-distant future.

In the electricity sector, which accounts for one-quarter of greenhouse gases today, countries may be on the verge of a breakthrough. Solar and wind power are growing so fast that some experts now expect global demand for fossil-fueled electricity to peak this decade. That process has already started in the United States and Europe, where coal-fired power is plummeting, and China could soon follow.

arbon-dioxide emissions from transportation are also projected to fall by midcentury because of the rapid spread of electric vehicles, which now make up one in five new car sales globally. In places like Africa and Asia, smaller electric motorcycles, mopeds and rickshaws are already displacing nearly one million barrels of oil per day.

Still, the report notes, neither electricity nor transportation appears to be on track to get all the way to zero emissions — which is what scientists say is ultimately needed to halt climate change.

That’s because most countries still rely on coal or natural gas to back up wind and solar power, and there are aren’t yet obvious solutions for decarbonizing long-distance trucks, airplanes and ships. Until nations solve those challenges — perhaps with new types of batteries, advanced nuclear reactors or clean hydrogen fuels — they will remain partly dependent on fossil fuels like oil and gas.

“Eventually we reach the limits of what we can do with technologies widely available today,” said Kate Larsen, a partner at the Rhodium Group. That, in turn, could cause emissions to start rising again later this century if electricity and travel demand continue to grow.

To make its forecasts, the Rhodium Group considered a wide range of estimates for economic growth, oil and gas prices, the costs of clean energy and policy trends. The forecasts for the latter half of the century are particularly uncertain because it’s tough to predict how technologies, economies, politics and demographics will change.

There are also countless buildings around the world that burn coal, oil or natural gas for heating and cooking. Those emissions are projected to fall modestly over the next few decades, in part because of efficiency improvements and a shift to cleaner electric technologies like heat pumps, the report said. But without stronger action, such as a push to retrofit older homes and buildings, emissions are unlikely to fall to zero.



Industry — which includes production of iron, steel, cement, chemicals, oil and gas — remains one of the hardest sectors to clean up. It also often gets overlooked in climate discussions. But industrial emissions are currently expected to soar in the decades ahead.

They come from a vast array of sources. Many factories burn coal or natural gas to produce huge amounts of heat needed to create steam, temper glass or turn iron into steel. Cement makers emit carbon dioxide as part of the process of transforming limestone into cement. The chemical industry uses fossil fuels as a raw material for its products.

In theory, there are technologies that can cut emissions. Industrial heat pumps or thermal batteries could help factories generate heat from renewable electricity. Cement makers could capture and bury their carbon dioxide. Steel makers could use clean hydrogen instead of coal. But many of those solutions are expensive and in their infancy.

“There aren’t many clear winners that have emerged just yet,” said Morgan Bazilian, a professor of public policy at the Colorado School of Mines. Some governments have also been hesitant to crack down on industrial emissions out of concern that factories and jobs could shift abroad to places with looser environmental rules.

Without cleaner alternatives, industry is projected to become the world’s biggest climate change problem by far. In the Rhodium Group’s forecast, cement manufacturing alone is expected to produce twice as many emissions for the rest of the century as all of the world’s cars combined.

The biggest growth in industrial emissions is expected to come from emerging markets such as India, China, Southeast Asia and Africa. Yet many of the most promising early attempts to decarbonize cement or steel are happening in wealthier places like the United States and Europe.

“There’s a massive mismatch there,” said Anna Nilsson, a climate policy analyst at the NewClimate Institute who recently helped write a comprehensive report on the world’s progress in cutting emissions from industry and other sectors. “There’s a huge need not just to develop cleaner technologies but also to make sure that they can be used everywhere.”

The Rhodium Group analysis also projects a rise in emissions from agriculture, particularly in places with significant population growth like Africa, India, Brazil and Southeast Asia, where forests continue to be cleared away for farmland. As societies grow wealthier, they also tend to eat more meat, which has a high climate impact.

One of the best strategies for reducing agricultural emissions, experts say, would be to increase crop yields — that is, grow more food on less land. One recent report found that improvements in crop technology and farming practices are making farms more productive, but the changes aren’t happening fast enough. And many nations are falling behind on a recent pledge to reverse and halt deforestation by 2030.

The Rhodium Group’s temperature forecast is broadly in line with other analyses, including those from the International Energy Agency and Climate Action Tracker. But it differs in other ways, like taking a more detailed, long term view of emissions and assuming that climate policies will continue to evolve in line with historical trends.

In the future, however, countries could take much more aggressive action than they have in the past, said Joel Jaeger, a senior researcher at the World Resources Institute who was not involved in the report.

“The fossil fuel industry might look at these current policy projections and think that oil and gas demand will still be high all the way out in 2100,” Mr. Jaeger wrote in an email. “But if countries put in place new policies to meet the Paris Agreement and their net-zero pledges, that’s absolutely not the case.”

As the world’s leaders gather this week at a major summit to discuss ways to address the effects of global warming, one of the greatest obstacles they face is disinformation.

Among the biggest sources of false or misleading information about the world’s weather, according to a report released this week: influential nations, including Russia and China, whose diplomats will be attending. Others include the companies that extract fossil fuels and the online provocateurs who make money by sharing claims that global warming is a hoax.

They spread diverse and frequently debunked falsehoods: Humans are not responsible for climate change; recent wildfires were enabled by arson rather than hotter and drier conditions; the world is cooling; oil and gas giants are leading the charge toward carbon neutrality; and warnings about the environment are an excuse for authoritarian elites to destabilize the developing world and force everyone into lockdown and onto a diet of insects and lab-grown food.

Their efforts have already significantly eroded the public pressure and political will needed to prevent a dire future for the planet, experts said.

“What has dramatically shifted is how central to public life mis- and disinformation about climate has become,” said Jennie King, an author of a new report by Climate Action Against Disinformation, an international coalition of more than 50 environmental advocacy groups.

The unfounded claims, the coalition warned in its report, have increased conspiracy theories, social divisions and harassment. The report noted an “alarming mobilization to violence” against those associated with climate change work, including Spanish meteorologists who reported on extreme spring weather and then faced ominous threats and accusations that they were “murderers.”

The campaign against meaningful action to curb emissions is powered by an ecosystem with “weird informal allegiances and overlaps” among countries, corporations and people — all with disparate agendas and motivations but united in their desire to discredit the climate change threat, Ms. King said.

“It’s actually about the normalization of disinformation, rather than just the sheer volume,” said Ms. King, who is running the coalition’s intelligence unit at the summit. “That’s what concerns me the most — how high-traction and how emotionally resonant this kind of content seems to be.”

Researchers expect disinformation and misleading characterizations of the summit’s goals to spike as delegates meet in the United Arab Emirates for the summit, which is known as COP28. Already this week, unsupported conspiracy theories circulated on social media claiming that governments were using climate change as a pretext to seize land from farmers and cause deliberate food shortages.

The United Arab Emirates is a top oil exporter known less for its climate commitments than for the voracious resource consumption of its most populous city, Dubai. This summer, a disinformation expert in Qatar discovered at least 100 fake social media accounts defending the summit’s location and its president, the Emirati oil executive Sultan al-Jaber. An internal document revealed this week that the Emirates planned to use its hosting role to pursue oil and gas deals around the world.

Social media content promoting outright climate denial increased before last year’s summit, which was held in Egypt, researchers said. Such posts have continued this year to rack up views and citations from top politicians and pundits. The content has sometimes riled up followers; a report this spring from the watchdog group Global Witness found that 73 percent of climate scientists regularly featured in the media had experienced online harassment or abuse as a result of their work.

Climate activists like Greta Thunberg were targeted by Chinese state media, which falsely accused her of calling for an end to the use of chopsticks and denounced her as a “Swedish princess” after she pushed for more emissions reductions from China. RT, a Russian state television network, derided Ms. Thunberg in March as “Dr. Climate Gollum” after she received an honorary Ph.D. from the University of Helsinki.

The E.U. Disinfo Lab, a nonprofit group studying disinformation, said in a report this year that it had found dozens of active websites in Europe and the United States that exclusively focused on climate disinformation — a “striking” departure from most other disinformation websites, which tend to compile a hodgepodge of questionable topics.

Climate Action Against Disinformation found that, in every month since COP27, the hashtag #climatescam generated more retweets and likes than #climatecrisis and #climateemergency on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. The hashtag appeared in widely circulated posts that falsely blamed arson committed by migrants for wildfires or repeated debunked claims that television broadcasters were manipulating weather maps.

Researchers attributed much of #climatescam’s traction to a small group of influential accounts, which they said tended to be far more vocal about climate denial on X than on platforms like Facebook and Instagram. One account, which researchers said had originated as an anti-vaccine forum on Telegram before shifting to climate denial on X this year, had only a few hundred followers when it shared its first #climatescam post in March; it now has more than 250,000.

Some of the sites pushing climate disinformation made money from ads — a revenue stream that researchers said was enabled by more than 150 advertising exchanges owned by some of the largest tech companies. The marketplaces, which largely use automated auctions to buy and sell online ads, placed ads on at least 15 websites known for hosting climate denial content, according to the report. Doing so flouted policies set up by many of the exchanges to block climate denial content and other disinformation from being monetized.

Ads for McDonald’s and L.L. Bean appeared next to one opinion column this fall that described “an overbearing ‘climate change’ agenda” as “implementing socialism under the guise of saving the planet” by “tyrannical central planners around the globe.”

Some climate disinformation was spread by countries like Russia and China, which often target such content to parts of the world where they seek to wield influence at the expense of the United States and the rest of the West. The report found that Russian state media had framed emission-reduction plans as a form of “Western imperialism” engineered to undermine the development of the so-called global south, or the southern part of the world, which includes some of the poorest and least industrialized countries. (Experts say global warming is a financial threat to developing nations, which are more vulnerable to climate change shocks despite contributing a disproportionately small share of greenhouse gas emissions.)

Russia’s propaganda around climate change, which routinely downplays the phenomenon as exaggerated or even positive, has become increasingly entangled in geopolitics. The country framed economic sanctions against it after it invaded Ukraine as evidence of the importance of its fossil fuel exports in maintaining global energy security. Climate disinformation also figured in a campaign in Brazil that promoted the views of Aleksandr Dugin, a prominent proponent of Russia’s imperial ambitions, according to the U.S. State Department’s Global Engagement Center.

Researchers from Climate Action Against Disinformation found, however, that Russian climate disinformation was opportunistic and, thus, inconsistent. The report noted that “fossil fuel investments in Africa were condemned as attempts to steal the continent’s resources when linked to Western countries, but hailed as championing economic development when related to Russia.”

In China, disinformation about climate change has had a long history, according to a study in May by Annie Lab, a fact-checking project at the University of Hong Kong. For years, calls to fight climate change were portrayed in China as a tool used by the West to stunt China’s economic growth, rather than as an attempt to address a global problem.

Even after China accepted the need for international action, agreeing for the first time at COP15 in Copenhagen in 2009 to set goals for reducing emissions, misinformation and disinformation on the issue remained rife in Chinese media, the lab wrote.

Climate Action Against Disinformation also said China’s state oil giant, the China National Petroleum Corporation, was among the international energy companies making misleading claims about their environmental practices, a strategy known as “greenwashing.” The company’s ads, which often targeted countries in Asia and Africa, sometimes used an increasingly popular tactic that researchers call “nature-rinsing”: employing images of landscapes and scenery in its marketing to create a false and more forgiving association between nature and fossil fuels.

One Facebook advertisement from this year, which researchers said had cost $120 to $595 to place and reached one million viewers, featured emojis of blossoms, a worker in a hard hat and a green heart.

“With the arrival of spring, let’s enjoy the beautiful flower fields covering the oil field!” the ad said.

Leading scientists worldwide delivered a striking dose of reality to the United Nations on Sunday: it’s “becoming inevitable” that countries will miss the ambitious target they set eight years ago for limiting the warming of the Earth.

The ominous estimate points to the growing likelihood that global warming will shoot past 1.5 degrees Celsius before the end of this century, inflicting what scientists describe as an overwhelming toll from intensifying storms, drought and heat on people and the economy. It also injects an urgent message into global climate talks in Dubai, where the debate over ramping down fossil fuels is set to flare over the next two weeks.

Surpassing the temperature threshold — even temporarily — would be a major blow to the international Paris climate agreement from 2015, which called for nations to keep global temperatures well within 2 degrees Celsius of their preindustrial levels, and within 1.5 degrees if at all possible. The findings come amid climate talks that for the first time are focused on taking stock of whether almost 200 nations are meeting that goal. Early indications offer a bleak picture.

The 1.5-degree target has become a rallying point for nations attending the COP28 climate talks, despite rising certainty among scientists that the world will spill over that threshold, potentially within a decade. Temperatures have already risen between 1.1 and 1.3 degrees.

It may be possible to bring global temperatures back down again, using still-unproven technological means to draw carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. But at least some overshoot is probably unavoidable, scientists said in the new report to the U.N.

The looming shadow of overshoot is one of 10 stark warnings the researchers presented Sunday in an annual report on top climate science insights from the past year. Launched in 2017, the series is coordinated by scientific organizations Future Earth and Earth League, alongside the World Climate Research Programme, whose scientific work helps inform national climate commitments worldwide. The report is presented each year to the U.N. during its annual climate conference.

This year’s report includes a variety of findings.

Mountain glaciers are swiftly shrinking. Natural landscapes, like forests and wetlands, may soak up less carbon dioxide as the planet warms, causing more pollution to linger in the atmosphere. Compound climate events — multiple extreme weather disasters happening at the same time or in rapid succession — are a growing threat.

The report also includes insights on the links between climate change and biodiversity loss, the role that food systems can play in reducing carbon emissions, the plight of global populations that lack resources to relocate in the face of worsening climate impacts, and the importance of just and equitable climate adaptation efforts.

But its findings on the 1.5-degree target are among its starkest conclusions.

Nations have not reduced greenhouse gas emissions quickly enough to stay on track, the report finds. The world can emit only a certain amount of carbon before the 1.5-degree target slips out of reach, and recent studies suggest that threshold will arrive in about six years if humans keep burning carbon at their current rates.

Avoiding overshoot could still be technically possible — but that would require “truly radical transformations,” the report cautions. The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world’s top authority on climate science, says global emissions must fall by a whopping 42 percent within the next six years to keep the target alive. And they must spiral down to net zero by midcentury.

Even then success would be “only a maybe,” said Nico Wunderling, a scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany and one of the report’s authors.

Many scientists have long concluded privately that the world will at least temporarily miss that target. But that likelihood has only recently begun to surface in high-profile reports.

“It was already kind of an elephant standing in the room that we may actually not hold 1.5 degrees without an overshoot,” Wunderling said.

Many experts now say the best case scenario is if nations can limit overshoot as much as possible — ideally capping it at fractions of a degree — and bring temperatures back down as swiftly as possible.

The consequences of global warming worsen with every incremental amount the planet warms, scientists say. And some climate impacts can’t be reversed once they’re set in motion, like sea level rise or plant and animal extinctions.

That means 1.5 degrees should remain a centerpiece of the Paris Agreement, Wunderling said. Keeping that target in focus can motivate world nations to limit overshoot as much as possible.

“Minimizing the magnitude of overshoot, but also the duration of overshoot, is what the best case scenario really is,” Wunderling said.

That means global efforts to remove carbon dioxide from the sky must rapidly expand, the report adds. These methods can include everything from natural strategies, like planting forests, to constructing giant carbon-guzzling machines that suck the pollution directly out of the air — assuming the technology can be advanced to work at a large enough scale.

The IPCC has concluded that at least some carbon removal is essential to achieving net zero emissions by midcentury. Some sectors of the economy likely can’t get off fossil fuels that quickly, and their greenhouse gas emissions would have to be offset by pulling equal amounts of carbon dioxide out of the air.

Eventually, some experts hope humans can also use carbon dioxide removal to lower global temperatures to safer levels. That means drawing out more carbon than goes into the atmosphere.

Carbon dioxide removal isn’t a substitute for rapidly and immediately reducing emissions, the report warns. But it does need to swiftly scale up in order to limit overshoot as much as possible.

Meanwhile, rapidly phasing out fossil fuels is also key to limiting overshoot.

The emissions associated with existing fossil fuel infrastructure alone would already put the Paris targets out of reach, the report finds. Yet governments, companies and investors continue to build more fossil fuel projects.

“Consequently, governments and financial institutions need to actively plan for and implement a fossil fuel phase-out while accelerating the phase-in of renewable energy, aiming for a comprehensive and coordinated energy transition,” the report states.

This year’s climate conference is expected to feature a major debate between countries calling for a phase-out of all fossil fuels versus countries that want to soften the language to a “phase-down.”

The weaker language could result in slower global efforts to reduce emissions, some experts argue. It could open up the possibility that nations continue to burn fossil fuels, relying on the promise of carbon capture or carbon removal technology to clean up afterward, said Ploy Achakulwisut, a researcher with the Stockholm Environment Institute Asia and one of the report’s authors, in an email.

Another author, Gregor Semieniuk, an assistant research professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, referred to COP28 when he said, “These documents shape narratives that then, in turn, shape investment decisions and markets to some extent.”

Weaker language doesn’t necessarily commit the world to missing the Paris targets, he noted. The world could still proceed with strong enough mitigation efforts and climate financing to phase out fossil fuels.

“But it matters for sentiments and discussions, and therefore I think ‘phase out’ is pushed for by those who take this really seriously,” he added.

Historically, U.N. climate talks have avoided mentions of fossil fuels in their final decisions. Fossil fuels appeared in a decision text for the first time in 2021, at the conference in Glasgow, Scotland, when nations agreed to phase down — not phase out — coal.

Last year’s conference in Egypt reiterated that commitment, despite a push from many countries to adopt a phaseout of all fossil fuels. But the rapid approach of the 1.5-degree threshold calls for higher ambitions, the new report suggests.

“Raising the ambition and quality of the commitment language around fossil fuel phase-out would be an important first step towards achieving a 1.5C-aligned, rapid, well-managed, and equitable energy transition,” Achakulwisut said.

Sixty nations committed on Tuesday to improve the efficiency of new air-conditioners by 50 percent and reduce greenhouse gas emissions related to those cooling machines by almost 70 percent, the latest in a flurry of global promises that aim to tackle climate change.

The voluntary pledge made at the U.N. climate talks in Dubai was led by the conference hosts, the United Arab Emirates, and confronts a daunting future facing a warming planet: As global temperatures rise, more people will turn to air-conditioners to ward off the heat.

But additional air-conditioning in buildings and other spaces, which is also driven by rising incomes, population growth and urbanization, means that the world could use more than double the electricity it does now to stay cool, leading to more planet-warming emissions, according to research released by the United Nations on Tuesday.

“Extreme heat is now the deadliest weather event in my country at least, but this is true in many other places,” said John Kerry, President Biden’s climate envoy, who joined representatives from other nations in Dubai to discuss the pledge.

He added that finding ways to cool down in climate-friendly ways was critical. “We want to lay out a pathway to reduce cooling-related emissions across all sectors and increase the access to sustainable cooling.”

The surge in electricity use in turn threatens to drive up the very greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming, heating the planet to even more dangerous extremes. Special refrigerant gases used in air-conditioners and refrigerators, when leaked into the atmosphere, are also potent greenhouse gases.

If current trends hold, 10 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions in 2050 could come from air-conditioning and other efforts to keep cool, the U.N. report said.

“The cooling sector must grow to protect everyone from rising temperatures,” said Inger Andersen, executive director of the United Nations Environment Program. “But this growth must not come at the cost of the energy transition and more intense climate impacts.”

Many new advancements and actions — including adopting “passive” cooling technology like improved insulation and reflective surfaces — can help keep the world cooler without significantly increasing energy use, Ms. Andersen said. Bolstering energy efficiency, as well as phasing down climate-warming refrigerant gases, can also help rein in cooling-related emissions, the report said.

There’s no question the world needs more cooling. An analysis published this year by a consortium of nonprofits, governments and corporations estimated that 1.2 billion people in 77 countries are at high risk of poor health and livelihoods because of a lack of access to cooling.

Many of the world’s most vulnerable people have limited or no access to modern cooling technology, like air-conditioners and refrigerators, at home, at school or at work, the new U.N. report said. Lack of refrigeration also reduces the incomes of millions of farmers and drives food loss, and hinders universal vaccine access.

At the same time, global mean temperatures are rising. This year is “virtually certain” to be the hottest year in recorded history, the World Meteorological Organization announced last week. The past nine years have been the hottest nine in 174 years of recorded scientific observations.

As the planet warms, installed capacity of cooling equipment worldwide will triple by 2050 under current policies, the report estimated. And even with increasingly energy-efficient technology, electricity use will more than double.

That threatens to strain electricity grids, particularly in developing economies. By 2050, 67 percent of cooling capacity will be in developing countries, up from less than 50 percent now, the report said.

Much of the potential for reducing emissions lies in the world’s richest economies, according to the report. Adopting building energy codes that explicitly incorporate “passive” cooling, like designs that increase natural shade and ventilation, are particularly effective.

Those passive cooling measures — coupled with faster improvements in energy efficiency and a more stringent phaseout of high-polluting refrigerants, called hydrofluorocarbons — could reduce projected 2050 emissions by more than 60 percent, the authors estimated.

In addition, a rapid transition toward renewable sources of energy like wind and solar to power air-conditioners could further draw down cooling-related emissions.

Influential industry trade groups, thinktanks and public relations agencies with a track record in climate denialism and misleading the public have been given access to the UN climate talks in Dubai, the Guardian can reveal.

Corporate Accountability, a transparency watchdog, has found that UN organizers greenlighted access to groups that have obstructed fossil fuel regulations and other climate action, giving them the same or greater access to the international negotiations as Indigenous communities, human rights groups and climate justice organizations.

Organizations and individuals invited by country-delegations also have access to closed-room negotiations from which civil society and grassroots groups are locked out.

The new data, derived from official UN delegate lists, found at least 166 climate deniers and fossil fuel public relations professionals are at Cop28. The true number is probably significantly higher as only the most prominent bodies were included in the analysis. Some of the groups have been coming to the UN climate talks for years.

Cop28 is taking place at the end of the hottest year on record, as climate scientists warn that time is running out to phase out fossil fuels and avoid total climate catastrophe. The irreversible loss and damage in developing countries is estimated by some studies to be greater than $400bn annually – and expected to rise – so time is of the essence.

Yet the scale of oil and gas influence in Dubai is unprecedented, with more than 2,400 industry-affiliated lobbyists registered at Cop28 – four times as many in Sharm el-Sheikh last year.

“It’s obscene that climate denying organizations and fossil fuel companies’ PR agencies are welcome in these negotiations to spin, lie, and distort,” said David Tong, global industry campaign manager at Oil Change International. “It’s simply embarrassing that they are allowed to register for the United Nations climate change conference.”

“Fossil-fueled backed and funded organizations like API are given the same access as public-interest NGOs. With a seat at the table, they have the ability to influence decision makers charged with making policy decisions in the interest of people and the planet, not profit-makers fueling the climate crisis,” said Ashka Naik, director of research and policy at Corporate Accountability.

The World Health Organization prohibits tobacco companies and lobbyists from attending its summits, yet the UNFCCC (UN Framework Convention on Climate Change) has no conflict of interest policy allowing organizers to ban bad-faith actors from registering as observers.

The climate action obstructionists at Cop28 include the American Petroleum Institute (API), the largest fossil fuel trade group which for years has blocked efforts to pass domestic legislation limiting greenhouse gas emissions. Internal documents suggest that the API, which is attending as an accredited observer delegation like Greenpeace and Amnesty International, has been misleading the public on climate change since the 1980s.

Most oil, gas and coal in fields and mines operating now must stay in the ground to have a chance of keeping global heating below 1.5C. Yet API is behind Energy Citizens, an astroturfing front group that has coordinated climate denial and pro-fossil fuel campaigns aimed to look like grassroots movements. API has also financially backed the Heartland Institute, a free-market thinktank at the center of climate misinformation, and which in recent years has sent hundreds of thousands of climate denial textbooks to American public schools.

An API spokesperson said: “We welcome the opportunity to listen to world leaders and engage in discussions to promote climate solutions. API shares the urgency of confronting climate change together, and the natural gas and oil industry is committed to advancing a lower carbon future while meeting rising global demand for affordable, reliable and sustainable energy.”

The Competitive Enterprise Institute, a US libertarian thinktank which earlier this year called the IPCC’s final report a “far-left manifesto”, is also at Cop28 as an accredited observer delegation.

Myron Ebell, the CEI’s former energy and environment director and current senior fellow, was one of the main architects of the US withdrawal from the Paris agreement during the Trump administration. Ebell is not in Dubai but was accredited at multiple previous Cops, according to UN delegate lists. CEI did not respond to a request for comments.

Edison Electric Institute, a trade group for private electric companies in the US with a track record in spreading climate denialism dating to the 1990s. is another accredited observer delegation which has attended at least 14 Cops. EEI played a leading role in the formation of the Global Climate Coalition (GCC), an industry group that worked to cast doubt and spread disinformation on climate change. Earlier this year, the Guardian reported the EEI’s effort to block emissions reductions policies.

For the past two weeks, the world's best and brightest have been meeting in Dubai — under a glittering, color-changing dome built to resemble Islamic geometric art — as the petrostate hosts the United Nations' latest climate change conference.

And experts are calling bull. In interviews with The Guardian, climate scientists and advocates said the "solutions" offered at the COP28 conference, which include such goofiness as a panel on "responsible yachting," are "distractions" at best and "frightening" at worst.

Troublingly, the conference is presided over by Dubai's Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, who also runs the United Arab Emirates' national oil company in what seems very much like a massive conflict of interest.

Al Jaber sparked controversy last week when he publicly expressed pessimism about a gradual fossil fuel phase-out and said there was "no science" behind it, which is categorically false given that the vast majority of scientists — not to mention the UN's secretary-general — say that eliminating fossil fuel pollution is absolutely the biggest and most important way to turn back the tide on the worst of what climate change has in store.

Notably, oil companies in both the Middle East and stateside have invested heavily in carbon removal technologies, which are promising enough as a tool in what should be an arsenal to fight back against climate change, but are being touted as a catch-all solution that an increasing number of experts say is a waste.

"It’s frightening because they see this as a new business opportunity, a new way to make money and continue as before," climate researcher Pierre Friedlingstein told The Guardian.

Friedlingstein leads a project called the Global Carbon Budget out of the University of Exeter in England that looks, in part, into the efficacy of the sort of expensive carbon capture and removal projects touted by the oil barons and tech tycoons at COP28. Thus far, the results have been damning, with such technologies removing more than a million times less carbon than is currently being emitted.

"They will scale this up, and if they do it by a factor of 100 in the next 10 to 20 years, that would be amazing, but they won’t scale up by a factor of 1 million," Friedlingstein decried. "There is no alternative to reducing emissions massively. These technologies are a distraction, a way to pretend we are dealing with the issue, but we aren’t."

As The Guardian's reporting cites, a new report by the German non-governmental organization Climate Analytics has warned that an additional 86 billion tons of carbon could be released into the atmosphere if these technologies underperform after further investment, and a separate Oxford study found that it would cost a trillion dollars per year to build them out to scale.

While global leaders "can’t take anything off the table" to solve the climate conundrum, Steve Smith, the executive director of Oxford's Net Zero initiative, said that reducing emissions needs to be paramount.

"There’s not much scope for either/or," Smith told The Guardian. "It’s both/and. This technology isn’t a false solution — there’s no one solution.”

As such big names as Bill Gates and US climate envoy John Kerry continue pushing these persistently expensive fixes without committing to reduce reliance on fossil fuels, so too will climate change worsen — until the global community actually starts moving away from fossil fuels, which have been produced in higher measure than ever in recent years.

"We have housing insulation, we have electric vehicles, we have renewables, we have batteries," Friedlingstein said. "Scaling them up is not trivial, but we don’t need a magical new technology for the first 90 percent of this problem."

With carbon emissions set to reach record highs this year and global climate action falling short, it can be easy to slide into despair.

But according to a new study by the German think tank New Climate Institute, there are many reasons to remain hopeful.

The study looks at technological and societal progress in limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) as agreed in Paris in 2015 and highlights key global trends that suggest all is not lost.

Climate awareness is now mainstream
The authors wrote that understanding the causes and impacts of climate change has come a long way since the Paris Agreement was adopted.

Climate change has now become a mainstream issue and is discussed among a larger segment of the population. Media coverage has also increased but so too has climate misinformation and fake news.

Growing awareness has led to more climate protests, with young people leading global calls for urgent action in movements such as Fridays for Future, Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil and the Last Generation.

And people are taking to the courtroom as well as onto the streets. The report highlights a rising wave of climate litigation against states and companies. Plaintiffs are pushing for compliance with legislation to protect the environment and climate with some success. Germany passed legislation to accelerate greenhouse gas emissions cuts by 2030 after a 2021 Federal Constitutional Court ruling.

Advances in weather attribution science, which investigates the links between extreme weather and climate change, have helped bolster legal cases.

A net-zero economy is now on the table
Before the Paris Agreement, climate policies focused on reducing emissions in specific sectors, according to the authors. Today, achieving net-zero emissions across the entire economy is the goal for many countries, regions, and cities across the globe.

By the end of 2021, 90% of the global economy included some kind of net-zero target that was leading to discussions of full decarbonization.

"That was previously politically not acceptable," stated the report.

Increased ambition has not yet translated into global emissions reductions, but the authors wrote the world is on a better path than before.

Businesses and investors are responding to pressure
Sustainable investments were a niche endeavor over a decade ago and have "now become a standard model in the finance world," according to the report.

The threat of climate litigation against companies is heating up, too. Businesses and investors are increasingly responding to societal pressure for change and recognizing the growing risk climate change poses to their wealth.

The authors also noted that the risk of investing in fossil fuels that could potentially no longer be burned or in infrastructure that may soon become defunct is making banks more reluctant to finance new coal power plants.

Many companies are now publishing their climate risks partly on their own initiative or because of new laws. Of the 500 largest US companies listed by credit rating agency Standard & Poor's, more than 70% also disclose their emissions.

Still, according to the authors, oil and gas-based business models remain very lucrative and still dominate the market. Business models are shifting, but too slowly. Corporate lobbying is often hampering climate action.

Energy systems are transforming
Renewable energy costs have plummeted in the last decade at an even faster speed than predicted. They are now cheaper than new fossil fuels in 90% of the world and the cheapest source of bulk electricity generation.

Renewables such as solar and wind providing the core of global energy systems "is a new normal," according to the authors. Phasing out fossil fuels "is no longer a question of 'if' but 'when.'"

At the same time, the supply of renewable power is becoming increasingly decentralized, improving energy access for many private households. Investments in renewables are now five times greater than in fossil fuels.

While gaps in the deployment of wind, heat pumps and electrolyzers used to create hydrogen fuel still exist, the report stated that a "paradigm shift on multiple levels towards renewable energy has started that cannot be reversed."

Electrification of transport and heating
Electrification is playing an increasingly important role in transport and heating.

According to the study, electrically powered heat pumps are becoming the "key technology for decarbonization" of building heating systems. Europe saw a 38% increase in sales of heat pumps last year.

Electric car sales worldwide have also risen much faster than expected. By 2023, 18% of all new cars sold will likely be electric, according to the study. In some countries around the world, they are already standard. All major car manufacturers have pledged to go electric in the next few years. The European Union, Canada and Chile have also set deadlines for phasing out combustion engines.

Although, high prices and the need for more investment in charging infrastructure remain roadblocks, the electrification of vehicles has grown exponentially according to the report. That's particularly the case in rich industrialized countries and China, where more and more electric trucks and buses are hitting the road.

While far more action is needed to reach the Paris Agreement targets, the authors emphasized that the world can "draw strength" from a continued increase in awareness, knowledge and technical know-how in tackling the climate crisis.

More than 5% of global emissions are linked to conflict or militaries but countries continue to hide the true scale

Emissions from Israel’s war in Gaza have ‘immense’ effect on climate catastrophe

In early 2022, journalists began to ask us how Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine was affecting the climate crisis. While we could point to landscape fires, burning oil refineries and the thirst of diesel-hungry military vehicles, the emissions data they sought just wasn’t available. When it came to the reverberating consequences of Russia’s manipulation of Europe’s fossil fuel insecurity, or to the weakening of the international cooperation necessary for coordinated global climate action, our guesses were no better than theirs.

Two decades of international analysis and debate over the relationship between climate change and security has focused on how our rapidly destabilising climate could undermine the security of states. But it has largely ignored how national security choices, such as military spending or warfighting, can have an impact on the climate, and so undermine our collective security.

With climate breakdown under way and accelerating, it is imperative that we are able to understand and minimise the emissions from all societal activities, whether in peacetime or at war. But when it comes to military or conflict emissions, this remains a distant goal.

Russia’s war in Ukraine has seen the first attempt to comprehensively document the emissions from any conflict, and researchers have had to develop their methodologies from scratch. Their latest estimate puts the total as equivalent to the annual emissions of a country like Belgium. Ukraine is not a one-off, with a similar clamour for emissions data around Israel’s war against Hamas. While the devastating ongoing conflicts in Sudan or Myanmar are yet to see attention on their emissions, the trend is clear: the carbon cost of conflict needs to be understood, just as the humanitarian, economic or wider environmental costs do.

A proportion of those carbon costs come from military activities. For these, understanding is hampered by the longstanding culture of domestic environmental exceptionalism enjoyed by militaries, and how at the US’s insistence, this was translated into UN climate agreements. An exclusion to the 1997 Kyoto protocol became voluntary reporting under the 2015 Paris agreement. But when we began to collate and publish the emissions data that militaries report to the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change), we found that only a handful of countries publish even the bare minimum required by UN reporting guidelines. Many countries with large militaries publish nothing at all.

The best estimate we have is that militaries are responsible for 5.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions. If the global military were a country, this would place it fourth in terms of its emissions, between India and Russia. Militaries are highly fossil fuel dependent and, while net zero targets have opened up debates around military decarbonisation, effective decarbonisation is impossible without understanding the scale of emissions, and without the domestic and international policy frameworks to encourage it. At present, we have neither, while carbon-intensive global military spending has reached record levels.

Ultimately, the international policy framework means the UNFCCC. While some militaries have set vague emissions reduction goals, they are often short on scope and detail, and on accountability. For example, while Nato has drafted a methodology for counting emissions, it does not apply to its members, and it explicitly excludes emissions from Nato-led operations and missions, training and exercises.

Amplified by the ongoing destruction of Gaza, Cop28 saw unprecedented attention on the relationship between the climate crisis, peace and security. But while visible in side events and protests, military and conflict emissions were again absent from the formal agenda. Closing this military and conflict emissions gap will first require that governments acknowledge the outsize role that militaries play in global emissions, and the need for greater transparency. It will require that the climate movement build on the growing trend towards intersectionality in its advocacy, and not shy away from these subjects. And it will depend on expanding the community of researchers documenting military and conflict emissions, and on their data being used by organisations tracking and reporting on global emissions trends.

For decades military environmental exceptionalism and narrow interpretations of climate security have undermined our collective climate security, this has got to change.

Scientists are asking whether the planet’s warming is accelerating.



By Manuela Andreoni
Jan. 9, 2024, 2:29 p.m. ET

It’s confirmed: 2023 was the planet’s warmest year on record and perhaps in the last 100,000 years. By far.

Average temperatures were 1.48 degrees Celsius, or 2.66 Fahrenheit, above preindustrial levels, according to an announcement this morning by Copernicus, the European Union’s climate monitor. The previous record was in 2016.

Temperature records started being shattered in June. From then on, every month has been the warmest on record.

Climate scientists aren’t surprised that unabated emissions of greenhouse gases caused global warming to reach new highs, my colleagues Raymond Zhong and Keith Collins reported. If you’ve been reading this newsletter, you shouldn’t be surprised, either.

But they are still trying to understand whether 2023 foretells many more years in which heat records are not merely broken, but smashed. In other words, they are asking whether the numbers are a sign that the planet’s warming is accelerating.

Many factors


The consequences of all this additional heat played out around the world. Canada has its most destructive wildfire season on record, Antarctica had the smallest amount of sea ice ever measured and unrelenting heat battered several countries including Iran, China, Greece, the United States, Malawi and Chile.



Climate scientists are investigating several factors that may have helped make 2023 so remarkably hot, beyond the increase in greenhouse gas emissions.

There was the eruption of an underwater volcano near the island nation of Tonga, which spewed a lot of water vapor that helped trap more heat near the planet’s surface. Recent limits on sulfur pollution from ships may have curbed aerosol emissions that can reflect solar radiation back into space and cool the planet.

And El Niño, the cyclical climate pattern that is often linked with record-setting heat worldwide, began last year. (The second-warmest year on record, 2016, was also an El Niño year.)

A 100,000-year high
Carlo Buontempo, the director of Copernicus, said that average temperatures his team had documented were the highest in the climate organization’s records dating back to 1850. But evidence suggests, he added, that Earth hasn’t been this warm in at least 100,000 years.

“There were simply no cities, no books, agriculture or domesticated animals on this planet the last time the temperature was so high,” he said.

Buontempo’s comment reminded me of why nations agreed to make an effort to keep warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius, and well below 2 degrees Celsius, in the 2015 Paris Agreement. As my colleague Brad Plumer wrote in Vox at the time, researchers argued that it would be safer for humanity to stay within the temperature range in which humans originally developed.

Last year’s numbers came incredibly close to reaching the 1.5 degree threshold that has guided global efforts to curb climate change since 2015. Almost half the year was above that level, and researchers fear we may blow past that limit this year.

But that doesn’t mean the world has failed. At least, not yet.

First, the Paris Agreement set a long-term target, so the planet would need to stay above the 1.5 degree limit for several years in a row to officially exceed the target. So far, the planet has warmed between 1.1 and 1.3 degrees Celsius.

Second, 1.5 degrees is not a planetary tipping point. “There is no physical threshold that is crossed if we are at 1.51 degree Celsius instead of 1.49,” Gavin Schmidt, a climate scientist at NASA, told me.

But every fraction of a degree matters. Between 1.5 and 2 degrees Celsius of warming, coral reefs may disappear and the number of people suffering from extreme heat would more than double. Impacts will be worse the warmer the planet gets.

For the public debate, the biggest danger “is that people might feel that breaching the 1.5 degree Celsius level means that there is nothing to be done about climate change,” Schmidt said. “And that is absolutely wrong.”

A winter of weird weather



Global climate change can be seen in the dramatically rising temperatures of 2023. But it also unfolds as a story of extremes.

A series of powerful storms will wreak havoc across the United States today, bringing significant weather of nearly every variety to large parts of the Pacific Northwest, the Plains, Midwest, South and East Coast.

It can seem counterintuitive that on a warming planet, winter storms can produce so much snow. Just last week, we were telling you about the below-normal snowfall at the end of 2023. But these extreme fluctuations are actually a fairly logical consequence of climate change’s effects.

More extreme precipitation events, snow as well as rain, are “exactly what we expect in a warming world,” said Rick Thoman, a climate specialist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

As the planet warms, so do both the oceans and the atmosphere. Warmer oceans increase the amount of water that evaporates into the air, and warmer air can hold more water vapor, which it eventually releases as precipitation.

“The storm is so widespread that it’s impacting everyone in the Eastern U.S.,” said Judson Jones, a reporter and meteorologist at The Times. “And it’s arriving just 36 hours after a coastal storm dropped large amounts of snow in the Northeast.”

“Alone, this storm would bring a flooding risk, but the combination of melting snow and rain will exacerbate the flood risks,” he added.

There’s more to come. Another storm will strengthen and hit the East again on Friday and into Saturday. Then, temperatures are expected to drop and a more wintery storm is likely to hit the East early next week.

Here are some of the extreme weather expected in the United States:

• The eastern third of the U.S. will see widespread hazardous weather, mainly in the form of heavy rain capable of producing flooding, from the Florida Panhandle all the way up to southern Maine.

• Heavy rain will hit the New York area from late Tuesday into Wednesday, raising the risk of significant river flooding around New Jersey, the Lower Hudson Valley and parts of Connecticut.

• In southern New England, up to three inches of rain could cover ground that is already saturated, and in some places covered with snow. Strong winds up to 50 miles per hour are also a concern.

• Blizzard conditions will persist in the High Plains through the Upper Midwest with potentially more snow on the way by the end of the week. Portions of the region will see blizzard conditions with up to six inches of snow coupled with winds up to 40 m.p.h., or nearly 65 k.p.h., and gusts hitting 60 m.p.h.

• A potent cold front will continue to affect the Pacific Northwest, bringing several feet of heavy snow and blizzard conditions across the Cascades. Heavy snow will also continue to blanket the Northern Rockies.

How social media platforms and content producers profit by spreading new forms of climate denial

2023 was the hottest year on record, ever. Billions of people across the world experienced extreme heat, droughts, wildfires and major floods.

Climate deniers can no longer pretend climate change isn’t happening - so they’ve changed their strategy.

CCDH’s groundbreaking AI-powered research shows that New Climate Denial narratives that aim to undermine the climate movement, science and solutions, now constitute 70% of climate denial content on YouTube in 2023.

A lawsuit first instituted over 10 years ago, brought by an esteemed climate scientist over alleged defamation by a rightwing blogger and an analyst, goes to trial this week.

The 2012 court case was brought by the University of Pennsylvania earth and environmental scientist Michael Mann, who is alleging that online attacks on his work amount to defamation.

The litigation targets two writers: Rand Simberg, analyst at the rightwing thinktank Competitive Enterprise Institute, who published a piece comparing Mann to a convicted serial child molester, and the National Review blogger Mark Steyn, who in a blogpost favorably quoted Simberg and called Mann’s research “fraudulent”. (Mann originally went after both publishers as well, but in 2021 a court ruled that neither the Competitive Enterprise Institute nor National Review could be held responsible for the attacks.)

The case comes amid concerns that online abuse of climate scientists has increased in recent years while misinformation about the climate crisis is also on the rise.

The attacks on Mann came as part of a wider campaign against him by a network of climate skeptics connected to the fossil fuel billionaire Charles Koch, experts have said.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute, which claims to fight “climate alarmism”, has financial ties to the Charles Koch Foundation, while the National Review regularly publishes articles dismissing climate concern science as alarmist and has also accepted Koch-linked funding.

After the renowned scientist co-published the famous “hockey stick” graph in 1998, which showed unprecedented global warming in the last century, a slew of groups in the Koch network also bombarded Mann with freedom of information requests. A Republican congressman, who was backed by a Pac established by Koch, also served him with a subpoena.

Opening statements in the case will begin on Thursday and will be livestreamed, with the trial scheduled to run through at least 6 February, and its completion to be decided by a jury verdict.

Odyssey’s lawsuit had opened a window into an opaque legal system, one with the power to fatally undermine the abilities of countries to protect their own environments – just as the world teeters on the edge of climate and biodiversity breakdown.

Odyssey told the Guardian that seabed mining projects can “provide a clean, sustainable, and economical opportunity to source much-needed minerals”, and that the project “would employ extensive measures to limit environmental impacts”.

What’s happening in Baja California Sur is being watched closely in other parts of the world.

Nearly 5,000 miles away in the South Pacific, the government of the Cook Island has handed out an exploration licence to a company called CIC to investigate mining the seabed for potato-like nodules that contain cobalt and other metals used for the green economy.

Odyssey is an investor in CIC, and is paid for services it provides to CIC. The founder of CIC? Odyssey’s own Greg Stemm.

What’s happening in Baja California Sur is being watched closely in other parts of the world.

Nearly 5,000 miles away in the South Pacific, the government of the Cook Island has handed out an exploration licence to a company called CIC to investigate mining the seabed for potato-like nodules that contain cobalt and other metals used for the green economy.

Odyssey is an investor in CIC, and is paid for services it provides to CIC. The founder of CIC? Odyssey’s own Greg Stemm.

‘Smoking gun proof’: fossil fuel industry knew of climate danger as early as 1954, documents show