Volunteers and firefighters work to extinguish a forest fire burning in the mountains of the rural area of Epuyen, in the Patagonian region of Chubut province, Argentina, on February 1, 2026. (Photo by Gonzalo Keogan/AFP via Getty Images)
“This research makes clear that the Earth and climate system doesn’t stand still while we debate policy,” said a co-author of the new paper.
On the heels of the United Statessetting new summer heat records and United Nations scientists warning that at least a temporary overshoot of the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C target can no longer be avoided, researchers on Thursday published an alarming new study on climate feedback loops.
For years, experts have feared that humanity’s continued reliance on fossil fuels that heat the Earth could lead to several “positive” feedback loops—or changes to natural systems that amplify global warming. The scientists behind the new paper in the journal Environmental Research focused on carbon dioxide and methane emissions from inland freshwaters, permafrost thaw, wetlands, and wildfires.
“Continued warming from greenhouse gases emitted from human activities threatens to feed further warming as permafrost, wetlands, and wildfires destabilize and respond by releasing carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide,” said co-author Ben Poulter, warming-induced emissions program director at Spark Climate Solutions, in a statement.
“This study provides a critical look at the magnitude of the temperature response,” he explained, “and a call to action to accelerate the accounting and monitoring of warming-induced emissions to support pathways that phase out fossil emissions to stabilize the planet’s climate.”
Lead author and Spark research scientist Sam Abernethy noted that “what surprised us was the size of the feedback.”
“We found that natural systems could amplify global warming by 20-30%,” he said. In other words, these natural systems could add an estimated 0.2-0.4ºC of warming this century to any temperature rise tied to human activity.
“This hidden multiplier is missing from the models guiding climate policy, so those models are likely underestimating how much warming is coming—and overestimating how much carbon we can still afford to emit,” Abernethy added.
New study quantifies the potential warming effects of carbon climate feedbacks. "Warming Induced Emissions" are GHG emissions (in this case CO2 and CH4) that come from natural sources but are caused by anthropogenic warming (in other words, emissions that wouldn't have occurred… pic.twitter.com/zq9O9jWaWN
Permafrost is ground that remains fully frozen for at least two consecutive years, and the scientists who study it “have long warned that thawing soils would become a significant emissions source as the planet warms,” said co-author Christina Schädel, senior research scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center.
“This paper shows that permafrost thaw accounts for half of the anticipated warming-induced emissions,” she pointed out. “Warming-induced emissions are already in motion, and they scale with every fraction of a degree. Every little bit of warming we can avert today matters for what the climate looks like in the long term.”
Co-author Robert Jackson, a Stanford University professor and chair of the Global Carbon Project, similarly stressed that “the results are a wake-up call, and it’s imperative that they be included in the next generation of climate policies. Failure to do so will make meeting the world’s climate goals less and less likely.”
The paper’s publication came just two months away from the next United NationsClimate Change Conference (COP31) in Türkiye, where firefighters are currently battling deadly blazes that have fueled calls for the country’s government to fight for rapidly phasing out coal, gas, and oil on a global scale.
“This research makes clear that the Earth and climate system doesn’t stand still while we debate policy,” said Brian Buma, a co-author of the new study and senior climate scientist at Environmental Defense Fund.
“Emissions from permafrost, wetlands, and wildfire could meaningfully erode our remaining time to warming thresholds—and they are unaccounted for in most scenarios,” Buma reiterated. “This means rapid fossil fuel emissions reductions are even more urgent than current projections suggest.”
“The good news,” he added, “is that it’s in our hands—lower emissions now limit how severe these feedbacks become.”
Donald Trump urges you to be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.Nigel Farage urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him and his Deputy Richard Tice. He says that Reform UK has received £Millions and £Millions from the fossil fuel industry to promote climate denial and destroy the planet.Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
An aerial view of Devighat Bazaar in Nuwakot, Nepal, following the floods of 26 August 2026. Credit: ZUMA Press / Alamy Stock Photo
Can the event be attributed to climate change?
On the morning of 26 August, flash floods surged through a Himalayan border region of Nepal and the Chinese region of Tibet, killing more than 1,300 people, with thousands still missing.
In the days since the floods, scientists have examined satellite imagery, drone footage and seismic data in order to understand and explain the forces behind the event.
While initial theories pinned the flood on a glacial collapse, scientists now understand the event as a “multi-hazard cascade”, which began with a bedrock collapse.
Some climate sceptics have tried to use this to falsely claim that human-caused climate change had no impact on the event.
Yet, scientists havenoted that, while no formal attribution study has been carried out thus far, warming is making such ice-rock avalanches in the region more likely.
Researchers have highlighted how rapid warming is dramatically reshaping Asia’s high-mountain region – and identified rising temperatures, glacier retreat and permafrost thaw as factors that may have all contributed to the disaster.
Balendra Shah, Nepal’s prime minister, has called the floods a “serious signal that…the risks we must bear in the Himalayan region are increasing” due to climate change.
Here, Carbon Brief unpacks what scientists currently know about the causes of the catastrophic event and what they can – and cannot – say about the role of climate change.
A report published on 28 August by the HiRisk scientific consortium of high mountain experts detailed the events that led to the flash floods.
It said that events were set in motion on 26 August when a mass of bedrock, as well as the glacier ice on top of it, broke off a slope of Langtang-Lirung mountain in the Nepalese Himalaya, plunging from approximately 5,200 metres above sea level to the valley floor at 3,000 metres.
The landslide shook the ground hard enough that, at 8:37am Nepal local time, the US Geological Survey (USGS) initially reported a magnitude 4.4 earthquake. Later that day, it clarified the shaking was caused by glacier collapse and debris flow, equivalent to a magnitude 5.2 earthquake.
On the valley floor, the melting ice, water and debris slammed into the Lhende Khola river, a high-altitude river that runs along Nepal’s border with China.
Known downstream as the Bhote Koshi river in Nepal and the Poiqu or Poqu in China, the Lhende Khole feeds a network of rivers across Nepal and the Chinese region of Tibet, including the Trishuli river. (In China, the Lhende Khola is known as the Donglin Tsangpo.)
The designations employed and the presentation of the material on this map do not imply the expression of any opinion whatsoever on the part of Carbon Brief concerning the legal status of any country, territory, city or area or of its authorities, or concerning the delimitation of its frontiers or boundaries. Credit: Carbon Brief.
A large “debris” lake was briefly formed on the valley floor. When this lake burst, a wall of water and rock travelled downstream, killing more than a thousand people and destroying settlements, roads, bridges, hydropower plants and border posts across Nepal and Tibet.
HiRisk said that the floodwave travelled down rivers as fast as 30km an hour (around 19 miles per hour) and reached Mugling – a Nepalese town more than 130km downstream – at around 1pm local time.
A separate report from the Center for Land Surface Hazards in the US noted that the flood moved “exceptionally fast, was sediment-laden and extreme in scale”. For example, in the Nepalese municipality of Galchhi, the Trishuli river rose by nine metres in 30 minutes, it said.
He continued that a new “barrier lake” – estimated to hold a few million cubic metres of water – had developed in a location where two rivers meet in Tibet before crossing into Nepal. This lake burst on 28 August and the river rose again, he said.
On 4 September, the chief of Nepal’s National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority, told Reuters that property and infrastructure worth “at least” $2.5bn (£1.9bn) had been lost. Dharma Raj Upreti estimated the cost to build roads and temporary shelters, provide drinking water and restore power would be around $53m (£39m).
How did bedrock collapse trigger the flash floods?
In the immediate aftermath of the floods, initial reports suggested that the trigger was a collapsing glacier or earthquake in the high mountains of Nepal.
After confirming that a seismic tremor was as a result of falling rock and ice, the USGS said the trigger was likely a “glacial collapse and debris flow”. This was widelypickedupby the media.
Subsequently, satellite imagery revealed that an “enormous chunk of the mountainous bedrock” beneath the glacier had also given way, reported the New York Times.
“It was not a glacier that collapsed. It was the mountain below the glacier that collapsed and the glacier had no other chance but to go with it because it was sitting on top of it.
“The trigger for that is something that we are not 100% certain about, but, in the end, it very much looks like simply a mechanical failure of the rock material because of stressors that have built up over a long period of time.”
Failures of “bedrock” – the hard, solid rock that sits below looser rocks and soil – are an “increasingly common occurrence”, says Prof Bethan Davies, a professor of glaciology at Newcastle University. She tells Carbon Brief:
“These massive landslides occur in mountain regions, commonly following rapid deglacierisation [the melting away of a glacier]. Similar events happened in the Chamoli event in 2021 [in the Indian Himalaya] and in the Blatten landslide last year in Switzerland. They’ve also occurredrecently in Alaska.”
With a shift in focus from the failure of a glacier to the bedrock underneath, some climatescepticsseized on the development to falsely claim that climate change had not played any role in the disaster.
However, scientists have highlighted the likely contribution of rapid warming in the region. These factors include the thawing of permafrost and glacier retreat. (For more, seesectionsbelow).
Fundamentally, “this would have been a much less significant tragedy if it had been just a rock-slope failure”, notes Davies.
The initial landslide took a mixture of rock and ice into a valley that “contains buried ice” as well, she says, providing the water that “resulted in the hyperconcentrated flow, which took so many lives”.
How have temperatures risen in the affected region?
Global temperatures have risen by roughly 1.4C since the pre-industrial period. However, this increase is not uniform across the planet, with some regions warming faster than others.
A study published in Global and Planetary Change in June 2026 investigated changes in the Langtang catchment – a river basin in central Nepal, in which the Langtang-Lirung mountain is located, which eventually drains into the Ganges. Around one-quarter of the area is made up of glaciers.
The paper found that glacial areas of the catchment – found at 4,000 metres above sea level – warmed at 0.31C per decade over 1960-2023. This was “more than three times” the rate observed at a lower elevation weather station, the authors said.
Looking in more detail at the site of the glacial collapse, Dr Robert Rohde, chief scientist for Berkeley Earth, used ERA5 reanalysis data to show how temperature has changed at the 5,200-metre elevation site where the mass of ice and rock broke loose.
Rohde’s analysis found that June-to-August temperatures have been rising at the site of the glacier collapse since the year 1940, with 2026’s summer the fourth warmest on record, behind 2024, 2025 and 2022. This is shown in the graph below.
Average summer (June-August) temperature at the ice-rock avalanche site over 1940-2026. Data source: Rohde, Bluesky (2026)
Rohde also found that the days leading up to the disaster recorded the hottest August temperatures ever experienced at the site. This is shown in the graph below.
Daily average temperature, from 1 June-1 September, at the ice-rock avalanche site. 2026, 2025 and 2024 are shown in dark, mid and light blue. All other years from 1940-2023 are shown in grey. Source: Rohde, Bluesky (2026)
“Given the warming trend, this Nepali glacier had probably been thinning and weakening for years, or even decades. But it ultimately failed during the warmest week in one of its warmest years on record. It would be a hell of a coincidence if global warming wasn’t at least partially to blame.”
How have rising temperatures affected mountain stability?
Many experts have linked warming temperatures in the region to thawing permafrost – ground that has been frozen for at least two consecutive years, whose thickness ranges from less than one metre to more than a kilometre.
Steiner is part of a research team that has been using sensors to monitor permafrost in the region since 2014. He tells Carbon Brief that it is “pretty clear” the permafrost has been thawing “very actively” at elevations as high as 5,200 metres above sea level “for many years”. He adds:
“This means that the ground has, over the last decades, moved from being in a solid state into – at least, periodically during the warm season – patchy ground where some is frozen and some isn’t…
“If you have frozen ground next to non-frozen ground, you have dynamics happening between that because there are different densities and there’s movement happening, which is conducive to interventional failure – and that we know from many other cases.”
Davies also points to the “degradation” of perennially frozen ground as a factor in the disaster:
“This permafrost acts as a glue to hold together the rocks and, as it melts, the rock can become weakened.”
Permafrost thaw can also result in saturated ground, says Davies, which adds “pressure in the joints” of rock and can “facilitate” failure. She continues:
“Sources of the water include melting permafrost and meltwater from the overlying glacier. We know that this event happened during a period of warmth, but in the absence of heavy precipitation, pointing to ice melt as the source of water.”
A 2025 study of rock and ice avalanches in High Mountain Asia found that more than two-thirds started in areas “where permafrost is probable”.
How have glaciers retreated in the affected region?
Glaciers – frozen rivers of ice holding three-quarters of the global freshwater supply – are extremely vulnerable to climate change.
In the Himalaya, the rate of glacier retreat has doubled since the late 20th century, according to a 2019 study in Science Advances.
The Global and Planetary Change study found that glacier area loss rates in the Langtang catchment increased more than fourfold from 1964 to 2023 – with melting accelerating after 2000.
It added that glaciers in the region also experienced “fragmentation” and “widespread thinning” over this period.
The study noted that this loss “coincided with elevation dependent warming”.
The figure below provides an overview of glacier loss in the Langtang catchment over 1964-2023, with orange, red and dark red indicating areas of retreat.
In addition, green dots note points of glacier fragmentation, while blue dots show separation and pink show disconnection.
Glacier loss in the Langtang catchment over 1964-2023. Orange, red and dark red indicate areas of retreat. Green dots note points of glacier fragmentation, while blue dots show separation and pink show disconnection. Credit: Silwal et al. (2026)
In comments released by the University of Reading, Prof Maria Shahgedanova, a climate scientist researching climate impacts on mountain glaciers, said that the glacier involved in the floods had “retreated by approximately 450 metres between 1990 and 2020”.
She adds that this “potentially reduce[d] the mechanical support provided by the glacier to the underlying rock slope”.
Speaking to Carbon Brief, Davies reiterates that the retreat of the glacier is “potentially a contributing factor” to the bedrock collapse and subsequent disaster.
This is because the removal of the glacier from the lower slopes leaves the “upper rock slopes less stable”, she says.
The most recent assessment by the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development said that glaciers in the Hindu Kush Himalaya region are “rapidly shrinking” as a result of climate change. (This region extends 3,500km over Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, India, Myanmar, Nepal and Pakistan.)
It said this loss is threatening the safety of the nearly two billion people, including by increasing the risk of “glacial lake outburst floods” (GLOFs). A GLOF is a sudden and catastrophic release of meltwater from a glacial lake.
Although this disaster was not caused by a GLOF, it is known that climate change is making such events more likely.
However, many climate scientists have cautioned that it is too early to say precisely how climate change impacted the disaster.
Davies tells Carbon Brief:
“These events happen so quickly that the exact causes and drivers can take a little time to uncover, especially if the event was a surprise and there had been no monitoring system in place.”
When trying to determine the role human-caused climate change played in the intensity or likelihood of extreme weather, scientists turn to the field of “attribution science”.
To date, no formal rapid attribution study has been produced that attempts to quantify whether – and how – climate change contributed to the event.
Scientists have noted that climate attribution of ice-rock avalanches – which are typically driven by a variety of factors – remains limited, in part because of the lack of a long-term observational record of previous collapses in high mountain areas.
Meanwhile, the studies that do exist stop short of directly linking such disasters to climate change. For example, the authors of a 2021 study into the Chamoli ice-rock avalanche concluded that “we cannot attribute this individual disaster specifically to climate change”.
However, they added, the “possibly increasing frequency of high-mountain slope instabilities can likely be related to observed atmospheric warming and corresponding long-term changes in cryospheric conditions (glaciers and permafrost)”.
In the aftermath of the disaster, many researchers have similarly highlighted that climate change could not be singled out as the cause of the disaster, even if warming likely increased the probability of its occurrence.
On the Climate Brink substack, Carbon Brief’s climate science contributor Dr Zeke Hausfather noted that a “definitive single-event attribution” of the more recent disaster “may never be possible” due to the “messy causality of rock-ice avalanches”.
However, he added that both the existing scientific literature and “essentially every scientist working on these hazards point in the same direction” – namely, that warming is making such events more likely in the Himalaya.
Steiner tells Carbon Brief it might be possible to attribute different factors that played a role in the disasters to climate change – for instance, the recession of the glacier – but it would be more difficult to do so for the event as a whole.
Part of the reason for this, he says, is that rock failures in this region of the Himalaya have occurred for millennia, well before humans started altering the climate.
However, he continues:
“The physics of it is not something that has been made possible by climate change. This could have happened without it. But the chance of it happening – and the likelihood of it happening five years after a previous, similar event [in Chamoli] – we, as the scientific community, can be pretty confident about that [being increased because of a changing climate].
“This is because so many of the changes that we know are related to climate change can potentially drive the build-up to eventual failure.”
Ultimately, says Davies, a “careful attribution study is needed, but it is hard to argue that the rapidly warming climate is not having an effect in these regions”. She adds:
“A single event may have multiple drivers, but we are seeing an increase in these events and are likely to see more as the permafrost and glacier melt continues.”
This morning the Green Party leadership, Green MPs and Green peers co-signed a letter to the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, Miatta Fahnbulleh, to urge her not to approve the Jackdaw gas field in the North Sea, citing the fact that it will not reduce energy prices, protect jobs, or give the UK energy sovereignty.
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The full text of the letter is as follows:
Dear Miatta,
Do not approve Jackdaw gas field in the North Sea.
We are writing in response to alarming reports that you intend to give the go ahead to the Jackdaw gas field as soon as next week. As Green MPs and peers we cannot sit back and watch you proceed unchallenged with this act of climate vandalism.
Approving new drilling at Jackdaw will not take a penny off energy costs nor protect jobs. As you said last month, “if you care about affordability, North Sea does not solve that problem for you”, with UK bill-payers still facing the highest energy prices in three years this winter, as a result of our continued exposure to volatile global gas markets. Further, jobs in the North Sea have been in decline for two decades. Jackdaw would only create 27 direct full-time jobs, with the platform unstaffed for most of its operating life and much of the construction already having taken place in Norway. It is completely dishonest of your government to use the legitimate concerns of job security and the cost of living to falsely justify more fossil fuel extraction.
Approving Jackdaw will not give the UK energy sovereignty. Even under the most optimistic scenarios Jackdaw is projected to contribute just 2% of UK gas demand over its lifetime (Uplift, 2026). We know that the only way to achieve energy sovereignty is to get the UK off fossil fuels as fast as possible, by significantly scaling up renewable energy and electrification.
Approving new oil and gas will add fuel to the fire of the climate emergency. Last week, the UN Environment Programme warned that “immediate and sustained cuts to greenhouse gas emissions” were crucial to avoid the worst impacts of climate breakdown. Approving more fossil fuels, at a time when the UK has just experienced record-breaking and deathly heatwaves and wildfires, is a complete dereliction of responsibility.
Approving Jackdaw will line the pockets of shareholders. The operating company, Adura, a joint venture between Shell and Equinor, has been criticised for potentially allowing Shell to write off £1.3 billion in UK tax (Global Witness, 2025). Shell has also faced criticism that it paid little or no tax in this country over several years despite huge global profits. Instead of new drilling, we need to ensure that the existing tax instruments, like the windfall tax, actually bring in the revenue that was promised, and end the subsidies that multinational oil and gas companies have received at UK taxpayers’ expense.
We are therefore urging you to be straight with the public – and instead focus on measures that would actually bring down bills and create secure jobs, like scaling up cheaper home-grown renewables, rolling out a fully-funded national home insulation programme, fully decoupling the price of electricity from gas, and ending rampant profiteering by energy companies.
Your government promised change, not continuity. Approving Jackdaw, after the hottest summer on record, isn’t doing things differently. The new Prime Minister must not repeat Keir Starmer’s mistake of treating climate and nature as second order. Change starts with ruling out all new oil and gas.
Yours sincerely,
Carla Denyer MP Dr Ellie Chowns MP Adrian Ramsay MP Hannah Spencer MP Siân Berry MP Zack Polanski, Leader of the Green Party Mothin Ali, Deputy Leader of the Green Party Rachel Millward, Deputy Leader of the Green Party Anthony Slaughter, Wales Green Party Leader Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb
Greenpeace activists display a billboard during a protest outside Shell headquarters on July 27, 2023 in London. (Photo: Handout/Chris J. Ratcliffe for Greenpeace via Getty Images)
A wildfire burning near the coast of Syracuse in Sicily, Italy, toward the end of last month. Photograph: Stéphane Mahé/Reuters
WMO report details extreme weather events causing climatic feedback loop with serious health consequences
Big increases in wildfires and heatwaves supercharged by the climate crisis are hindering improvements to air quality around the world, UN experts have said.
Regions that had recorded a fall in pollution emitted by cars and industrial sites are facing new threats to air quality because of exposure to smoke from wildfires, according to a new report, while rising temperatures caused by intense heatwaves are causing a surge in ground-level ozone.
In turn, the pollution generated by these climate-linked events is itself contributing to climate breakdown, creating a feedback loop that risks dragging the world deeper into environmental catastrophe.
“Air quality and climate cannot be treated as separate subjects; they are deeply intertwined and have to be treated together,” said Lorenzo Labrador, a scientific officer of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), which issued the report.
Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.Donald Trump urges you to be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.Nigel Farage urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him and his Deputy Richard Tice. He says that Reform UK has received £Millions and £Millions from the fossil fuel industry to promote climate denial and destroy the planet.
The extreme heat of the summer weather in France has caused grapes to wilt and be scalded. Photograph: sportpoint/Alamy
Estimates suggest drop in production with vineyards also concerned ‘smoke taint’ from wildfires may affect quality
French vineyards hit by severe drought and heatwaves are expected to report a 30-year low in wine production after the country’s hottest ever recorded summer, according to the agriculture ministry.
Initial estimates suggest winemakers will produce just under 34m hectolitres from this year’s harvest: a drop of 6% on last year, and 17% less than the 2021-2025 average.
Agreste, the government’s farming food, forestry and fishing statistics body, said the drop was partly caused by a reduction in the number and size of vineyards, but mostly the result of extreme weather conditions.
“The summer was particularly hot and dry: soil drought has intensified throughout the country and heatwaves have caused localised sun scald, scorching, defoliation, and wilting of the grapes, reducing harvest volumes,” it reported.
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