Climate Science Denial

The government knows the real climate threat. Why is it hiding it?

Spread the love

Article by Paul Rogers republished from OpenDemocracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence. 

A woman uses an umbrella to try to cope with the scorching heat in London on 8 July. Rasid Necati Aslim/Anadolu via Getty Images

For months, ministers have refused to publish a report on how climate crisis will affect the UK. Burnham must release it

The past two months have seen exceptionally hot weather across much of Western Europe, with even the UK witnessing record temperatures. Even now, England and Wales are well into their third heatwave this year, with some areas on their 13th consecutive day of temperatures above 30°C. 

More than 2,700 people are thought to have died as a result of the extreme heat in England and Wales, with scientists estimating that 440 people died during each of the three peak days of June’s record-breaking heatwave, when temperatures reached 37.7°C.

The situation was perhaps best summarised by the Met Office’s State of the UK Climate report for 2025, published last week: “What we used to think of as extreme, we increasingly see as normal.” 

Introducing the report, its lead author, climate information scientist Mike Kendon, notes that “2025 was the UK’s warmest year on record, the sixth time this record has been broken in the 21st century so far”. He adds: “The latest 10-year period (2016-2025) is 1.33°C warmer than the period from 1961-1990”.

In these elevated temperatures, wildfires are a particular concern. This week, local authorities across France cancelled many Bastille Day events to minimise fire risks, not least from firework displays, and in the UK there were fears about what are becoming known as “firewaves”. Less cold winters mean more vegetation earlier in the spring, which, when dried out by heatwaves like those seen this year, increases the risk of wildfires. Last Tuesday, emergency services dealt with 19 such fires, including two major incidents, according to the National Fire Chiefs Council.

Speaking to the Guardian, Maria Barbosa of the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology said: “What we are witnessing is climate change actively rewriting the vulnerability of the British landscape.” Perhaps the key element to draw out here is that this is not a change likely to affect us in the future; it is happening now.

Moreover, it relates to one of the surprising elements of the June heat: a public disconnect in the UK between acceptance of climate breakdown and relating this to carbon dioxide emissions from burning coal, oil or gas. People seemed unwilling or unable to make this link, even with the widespread personal experience of heat, the risk of wildfires and those reports of thousands of deaths.

One explanation is that many of our biggest media outlets often fail to point to the connection. 

Researchers at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit reviewed 2,500 news reports on the heatwaves from the nine main national daily newspapers, finding that nearly three-quarters made no mention of climate breakdown. The Financial Times was most likely to mention the climate crisis, doing so in 50 of its 78 articles on the heatwaves, while The Sun was least likely to do so – making the link in only four of its 69 articles. 

All too often, the reports gave the impression that the main challenge regarding the heatwaves will be adapting to the “new normal” of a hotter world, with plenty of coverage on changing our behaviour, converting buildings and being prepared for new health concerns.

But the challenge we face goes way beyond that. Adapting to a world where average temperatures are 2.5°C above current levels might be possible at considerable cost and human suffering, but unless we also cut carbon dioxide emissions, then we will have to keep on adapting to ever-higher temperatures. Concentrating on current adaptation alone is barely half the answer.

This is a known issue within government and is causing such concern that publicity is unwelcome, as shown by events relating to a study prepared by the Joint Intelligence Committee, which was officially described as a “national security assessment” and titled somewhat ominously: Global biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and national security.

The study was supposed to be launched at a landmark event on 9 October last year, but was held back, with one source telling The Guardian that insiders “feared it was being suppressed because the government was unwilling to face the issues raised.” 

After pressure from MPs, including the official environmental audit committee, and Freedom of Information requests to publish the report, the government eventually released a redacted 14-page version in January this year. It warns of a high probability that the UK’s national security, financial prosperity and food security will come under threat from the climate crisis and the subsequent collapse of vital ecosystems that support food production.

Even that makes for very sober reading. The report identifies nine “planetary boundaries” as the safe limits identified for human pressure on nine Earth system processes crucial to maintaining a stable planet, such as climate change, biosphere integrity and oceanic acidification. Six have already been crossed.

The report concludes that ecosystem degradation is occurring across all global regions and every critical ecosystem is on a “pathway to collapse”, which it helpfully defines as “irreversible loss of function beyond repair”.

The implications are huge. This is an official government study by the combined intelligence agencies, and even if redacted, it is unable to hide the crisis ahead. One conclusion is obvious: if this is the greatest threat to our security and the integrity of the global ecosystem, we should be redirecting money away from conventional military spending and towards human and environmental security.

A key requirement of Andy Burnham as incoming prime minister should be the immediate release of the full report, followed by a vigorous public debate on where we go from here.

Article by Paul Rogers republished from OpenDemocracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence. 

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.
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.
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.
Orcas comment on killer apes destroying the planet by continuing to burn fossil fuels.
Orcas comment on killer apes destroying the planet by continuing to burn fossil fuels.
Continue ReadingThe government knows the real climate threat. Why is it hiding it?

‘Unprecedented’ changes in UK climate are normalising extremes, report says

Spread the love

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jul/15/uk-climate-extreme-weather-2025-hottest-year-on-record

In Greater London, the number of days over 30C and nights over 18C more than quadrupled in the last decade, compared with 1961-1990. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Image

Annual State of the UK Climate analysis finds last four years in UK are in top five hottest on record

The UK’s climatic extremes are becoming increasingly normal, a report has found, with last year the hottest on record and further “unprecedented changes” likely to break the record again soon.

Data stretching back to 1884 shows the UK has never experienced a year as hot as 2025, according to the annual State of the UK Climate report, with temperatures pushed to dizzying heights by carbon pollution clogging the atmosphere.

Average temperatures have increased across most of the UK

The country experienced its warmest spring and summer on record last year, while England was hit by its driest spring in a century.

The report comes as the UK faces the third deadly heatwave to have scorched Europe over the last two months. On Tuesday, the Met Office said the UK had already recorded as many 30C (86F) days in 2026 as in the extraordinarily hot year of 1976.

“What we used to think of as extreme, we increasingly consider as normal,” said Mike Kendon, a scientist at the National Climate Information Centre and lead author of the report. “We are seeing unprecedented changes continuing … and every year adds to this body of evidence.”

…

Article continues at https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jul/15/uk-climate-extreme-weather-2025-hottest-year-on-record

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.
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.
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.
Orcas discuss Donald Trump and the killer apes' concept of democracy. Front Orca warns that Trump is crashing his country's economy and that everything he does he does for the fantastically wealthy.
Orcas discuss Donald Trump and the killer apes’ concept of democracy. Front Orca warns that Trump is crashing his country’s economy and that everything he does he does for the fantastically wealthy.
Continue Reading‘Unprecedented’ changes in UK climate are normalising extremes, report says

‘Climate free fall’: why the biggest risk to our economies is yet to be recognized

Spread the love

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-02154-8

A farming storage area is flooded in Taiwan — events such as this will become more frequent in an increasingly erratic climate. Credit: Cheng Chia Huang/Getty

Increasing instability of the ocean, ice and atmosphere threatens farming, finance and society. We all need to wake up to that fact.

I have studied climate tipping points1 for more than 20 years, and I’m increasingly concerned that scientists have overlooked the most dangerous aspect of these for societies. The potential collapse of major parts of the Earth system — from ice sheets to ocean circulations — will profoundly alter the warming planet and tip it irreversibly into a different state2. But the greatest risks might not lie at that endpoint.Is a monster web of ocean currents headed for collapse? The race is on to find out

How we get there — how the tipping unfolds — is more important, and there is an urgent need to understand the process. This is missing from current analyses because the scales in time and space it occurs on fall between those of climate and weather. Tipping analyses focus on huge climate changes, often globally, over decades. Weather events are fast and local. But look at the interplay between the two and it’s clear that the transition between one climate state and another is not smooth but extremely volatile.

Climate tipping, therefore, will manifest as a period of increasingly dramatic weather volatility, rather than a sharp shift in average conditions. A fluctuating climate will bring swings and crashes in crop yields, flash flooding and erratic storms. It will stress economies by disrupting supply chains and amplifying insurance losses. Societies are unprepared, because weather volatility related to tipping points is absent from risk assessments.

This problem is urgent. Earth subsystems, including oceans, the cryosphere and biosphere, already seem to be destabilizing. The planet is heading for climate free fall.

Climate is destabilizing

By definition3, tipping points are reached when a series of interlinked changes amplify one another until the whole system becomes unstable and shifts uncontrollably into a different state. Loss of sea ice at the poles, for example, reduces the amount of sunlight reflected into space, further heating Earth’s surface, which then accelerates ice loss. These vicious cycles of change define a tipping point, at which the climate cannot return to its former patterns.Are we all doomed? How to cope with the daunting uncertainties of climate change

Before that point, the climate system becomes increasingly unstable. It fluctuates considerably — a rise in variability is a well-established property of such ‘non-linear dynamical systems’ approaching a critical threshold4,5. That society will face these fluctuations and that they will intensify through the tipping transition hasn’t been realized by scientists and policymakers, so far.

Earth will experience an increasingly erratic climate: more and stronger fluctuations in flows of melt water, ocean circulations and the extent of sea ice. These changes will lead to more frequent and intense extremes in temperature, precipitation and storms — leading not only to more heatwaves and droughts, but also to more cold spells and floods.

The scale of the consequences might not be obvious at first — ice sheets and ocean currents are so large that their responses to warming are relatively slow and delayed. Once a critical temperature threshold for instability is crossed, it takes time for such systems to collapse, but the collapse is inevitable (see ‘Tipping into trouble’).

Conceptual line graph showing weather variability over time, from a stable pre-industrial climate to increasingly volatile future conditions as warming drives Earth-system tipping points. Solid, dashed and dotted sections indicate well-studied, poorly modelled and largely unstudied portions of the trajectory.
Source: A. Levermann

Ice sheets in West Antarctica6 and Greenland7 have already passed their tipping temperature. Arctic sea ice will do so in a few years. For the Atlantic Ocean, scientists simply don’t know8. The period between passing the tipping temperature and reaching the tipping point is when fluctuations increase dramatically.

Research into early warning of tipping points has identified increased climate variability as a signal of reduced stability and used it to estimate the time remaining before widespread tipping begins. But variability caused by instability as a mechanism of climate impact has been widely neglected.

Modern economies are adapted to relatively stable climatic baselines. Agricultural productivity, infrastructure design, insurance pricing and financial risk management all rely not only on expected mean conditions but also on the predictability of variability.

…

Article continues at https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-02154-8 & further requirements to see the whole article …

Power-mad orange gasbag Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.
Power-mad orange gasbag Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.
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.
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.
Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
Continue Reading‘Climate free fall’: why the biggest risk to our economies is yet to be recognized

Governments Knew the Risks of Global Warming as They Chose Fossil-Fueled Growth in the 1950s and ’60s

Spread the love

Article by Bob Berwyn republished from Inside Climate News under Creative Common License (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)

The construction at Venture Global’s LNG export facility in Port Sulphur, La., on Feb. 26, 2024. Credit: Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post via Getty Images

A new report suggests that some governments have ignored legal obligations to prevent climate harm for decades.

A new report strengthens the case that the United States and other major industrialized countries knew, long before they signed the 2015 Paris Agreement to limit global warming, that they could face legal obligations to reduce climate-damaging greenhouse gas emissions.

The “What Countries Knew” report, released Wednesday by the Center for International Environmental Law, traces when climate scientists first presented governments in the United States, Australia, Canada, Germany, Italy, Norway, the United Kingdom and the combined Soviet Union and Russia with research outlining the risks posed by the emissions from burning fossil fuels.

Those countries are responsible for about 40 percent of all emissions since the fossil fuel era began in the late 1800s. Summaries and transcripts from conferences cited in the report indicate that those governments and others were discussing the risks of rising global temperature, melting polar ice caps and sea-level rise as early as 1957, during the International Geophysical Year.

The warnings grew more urgent in the 1960s just as governments and economies of industrialized and industrializing countries placed nearly all their chips on fossil-fueled growth. In 1965, scientists warned U.S. President Lyndon Johnson that rising carbon dioxide could cause “marked changes” in climate. About the same time, researchers at Norway’s and Italy’s state-owned oil companies warned of potential climate impacts while governments encouraged them to expand. 

As the reports and warnings piled up, newsreel footage in Germany celebrated record coal hauls with images of miners grinning through sooty faces, and federally subsidized oil production in the U.S. meant prosperity and the freedom to “Put a Tiger in Your Tank” at an Esso gas station.

Lindsay Fenlock, a senior researcher with the Center for International Environmental Law and lead author of the report, said she was continually surprised by the breadth of international government awareness of climate impacts with a “threat of serious implications” as she combed through decades of materials archived from the pre-internet era. 

During the International Geophysical Year, about 70 countries collaborated to study Earth as an interconnected system and measure the growing effects of human activities on the planet, she said. The same year, a study by American scientists Roger Revelle and Hans Suess characterized the rising amount of CO2 in the air as an unprecedented and irreversible “large-scale geophysical experiment” unlike anything in human history.

Fenlock noted several other early international conferences that “had particularly striking conversations around what to do to combat climate change and move away from fossil fuel use.”  

A 1968 government-and-industry symposium in France included detailed discussions on alternatives to fossil fuels. In 1973, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria hosted talks about government responses to climate change. And when Fenlock retrieved old Canadian federal agency employee newsletters, she found that scientists had openly discussed climate change throughout the 1970s.

The report draws “important connections” between the history of government knowledge and the legal obligations outlined in the ICJ’s Advisory Opinion, said Michael Burger, executive director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University.

“It’s a warning shot, for those on the lookout for cases that may follow in the wake of the ICJ’s opinion,” he said.

Fenlock said the report wasn’t intended to be comprehensive, but it shows that governments often overlooked scientific evidence with life-and-death relevance.

“I think that just how much was known, and how soon, was pretty shocking,” she said. “But people don’t talk about it now.”

The report may reignite those conversations by framing the historical record in the context of international climate law, said Nikki Reisch, CIEL’s climate and energy program director. What governments knew, and how they responded or failed to respond, took on new legal significance after last year’s advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice, which found that states have longstanding legal obligations to prevent significant climate harm, and may be required to pay reparations when breaches of those obligations cause damage.

Reisch said tracing government knowledge could help determine whether a country’s greenhouse gas emissions violated international obligations to avoid environmental damage beyond its borders, and whether it could be held responsible for the resulting harm.

The report illustrates that the early scientific evidence “didn’t stay in a drawer or on a shelf,” she said. “It was being published, disseminated. Their information was communicated directly to government officials, sometimes at the highest levels and to the broader public. “All this information,” she said, “was in the hands of those who could have acted.”

Under a broad reading of international environmental legal principles, some countries could be held responsible for their share of climate damages caused by their emissions even before they understood the risks, she said. But pinpointing when governments became aware of those risks establishes a clearer threshold for legal liability. From that point onward, governments had the opportunity to change course, and those that instead continued or expanded fossil fuel use bear greater responsibility for resulting harms and for helping affected communities now, she added.

Reisch said governments should be judged by what was reasonable at the time, not by today’s standards. Once they had credible evidence that fossil fuels could cause serious harm, she said, they had a duty to stop expanding their use, develop alternatives and use the tools available to limit the damage.

Documenting widespread knowledge of the dangers undercuts attempts to dismiss governments’ historical responsibility, particularly because many continued to expand fossil fuel production and use and, in some cases, obstructed efforts to scale them back. The report alone does not establish liability, she said, but provides important evidence that could help hold governments accountable for resulting damages and require them to act with greater urgency.

The report’s legal significance can be seen in common-sense terms, added Michael Gerrard, the founder and faculty director of the Sabin Center.  

“If I know that the brakes on my car don’t work but I persist in driving, I have heightened culpability when I crash and injure someone,” he said.

Article by Bob Berwyn republished from Inside Climate News under Creative Common License (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)

Inside Climate News has regular newsletters and invites donations.

Neo-Fascist Climate Science Denier Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.
Neo-Fascist Climate Science Denier Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.
Nigel Farage urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him. He says that Reform UK has received millions and millions from the fossil fuel industry to promote climate denial and destroy the planet.
Nigel Farage urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him. 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.
Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
Continue ReadingGovernments Knew the Risks of Global Warming as They Chose Fossil-Fueled Growth in the 1950s and ’60s