United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres speaks at the U.N. headquarters on February 22, 2023. (Photo: Lev Radin/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images)
“This is climate breakdown—in real time,” said United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres.
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said in a year-end message on Monday that “we have no time to lose” in the face of the worsening global climate crisis, which pushed temperatures to a record high this year and supercharged deadly extreme weather around the world.
“Today, I can officially report that we have just endured a decade of deadly heat,” Guterres said in a video message posted to social media. “The top 10 hottest years on record have happened in the last 10 years, including 2024.”
“This is climate breakdown in real time. We must exit this road to ruin,” he continued. “In 2025, countries must put the world on a safer path by dramatically slashing emissions and supporting the transition to a renewable future. It is essential—and it is possible.”
Guterres’ call to action came in the waning days of what scientists say is almost certain to be the hottest year on record and the first full year to breach the critical 1.5°C temperature threshold.
Celeste Saulo, secretary-general of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), echoed Guterres’ warning about the dire consequences of the status quo, saying in a statement Monday that “if we want a safer planet, we must act now.”
“It’s our responsibility. It’s a common responsibility, a global responsibility,” Saulo said. “Every fraction of a degree of warming matters, and increases climate extremes, impacts, and risks. Temperatures are only part of the picture. Climate change plays out before our eyes on an almost daily basis in the form of increased occurrence and impact of extreme weather events.”
Last month, with emissions continuing to surge as the rich nations most responsible for the climate emergency refuse to ditch fossil fuels, world leaders convened for a U.N. climate summit in Azerbaijan that was swarmed by oil and gas lobbyists. The key gathering ended with a deal that climate advocates described as a step backward in the necessary push to rein in fossil fuel emissions.
Climate-denier and fossil fuel booster Donald Trump’s looming return to office in the U.S.—the world’s largest historical emitter—has campaigners and scientists increasingly concerned about the future of existing global climate agreements such as the Paris accord, from which the president-elect has pledged to withdraw once again.
One recent analysis projected that a second Trump administration could unleash an additional 4 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent by 2030, which would inflict $900 billion in global climate damages and deal a devastating blow to efforts to forestall runaway warming.
Throughout 2024, Guterres used his role as head of the U.N. to sound the alarm about the world’s dangerous trajectory, saying in an October address that “there is a direct link between increasing emissions and increasingly frequent and intense climate disasters.”
“We’re playing with fire,” he said, “but there can be no more playing for time.”
Reform UK leader Nigel Farage speaking at the Heartland Institute’s 40th anniversary fundraiser in September 2024. Credit: Heartland Institute / YouTube
The Heartland Institute, which questions human-made climate change, has established a new branch in London.
The Heartland Institute – one of the organisations involved in the radical Project 2025 agenda for a second Donald Trump term – has been at the forefront of denying the scientific evidence for man-made climate change, and received at least $676,000 between 1998 and 2007 from U.S. oil major ExxonMobil.
Heartland is known “for its persistent questioning of climate science”, according to Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, and it has received tens of thousands in donations from foundations linked to the owners of Koch Industries – a fossil fuel behemoth and a leading sponsor of climate science denial.
A Union of Concerned Scientists report in 2007 alleged that nearly 40 percent of the total funds received by Heartland Institute from ExxonMobil since 1998 were designated for climate change projects.
In a press release announcing its new UK-EU branch, based in London, Heartland boasted that it is “the world’s most prominent think tank supporting skepticism about man-made climate change”.
Heartland Institute president James Taylor added that, “During recent years, a growing number of policymakers in the UK and continental Europe have requested Heartland establish a satellite office to provide resources to conservative policymakers throughout Europe”.
This has included Farage, who spoke at the Heartland Institute’s 40th anniversary fundraising event in September and called for the group to open an offshoot in Europe. “Give us your wisdom, give us your guidance, give us your discipline. I’d love to see Heartland on the other side of the pond,” he said.
Reform UK has called for the UK’s 2050 net zero emissions target to be scrapped, and Farage’s Heartland speech urged the U.S. to re-elect Trump and “drill baby drill” for more oil and gas.
DeSmog revealed in June that – between the 2019 election and the beginning of the 2024 campaign – Reform UK received 92 percent of its funding (£2.3 million) from oil and gas interests, highly polluting industries, and climate science deniers.
Heartland’s European branch will be run by Lois Perry, a climate science denier who has said it’s her “personal belief” that climate change “is happening” but “is not man made”. Perry followed in Farage’s footsteps earlier this year by becoming the leader of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), though stood down after just 34 days.
Perry formerly ran the anti-net zero pressure group CAR26, which has claimed that carbon dioxide is “essential to all life” and that its “welcome growth has greened our planet saving countless human and other lives”.
She told DeSmog that Heartland is “advocating for a balanced, evidence-based approach to climate policy, not the one-size-fits-all alarmism that seems to make headlines.”
Perry added: “As for my past with UKIP and CAR26, I wear those roles with pride. I’ve always been upfront about my views: climate change happens, but the hysteria around human causation is, frankly, a bit of a stretch. CO2 is indeed vital for life, turning our planet into a blooming, green paradise rather than a barren wasteland.”
In reality, authors working for the world’s foremost climate science body, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), have said that “it is a statement of fact, we cannot be any more certain; it is unequivocal and indisputable that humans are warming the planet”.
The IPCC has also stated that carbon dioxide “is responsible for most of global warming” since the late 19th century, which has increased the “severity and frequency of weather and climate extremes, like heat waves, heavy rains, and drought” – all of which “will put a disproportionate burden on low-income households and thus increase poverty levels.”
Farage and Project 2025
Farage’s views on climate change appear to reflect those of Perry and the Heartland Institute.
Although two thirds of his constituents are concerned about climate change, Farage stated in an interview with climate science denier Jordan Peterson in July that: “I do find it extraordinary that people call carbon dioxide a pollutant, because as I understand it, plants don’t grow without carbon dioxide.”
In his speech to the Heartland Institute in September, Farage also claimed that the UK’s efforts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions doesn’t “make any bloody difference at all”, due to the emissions produced by larger countries like China.
He also repeated the misleading claim that “man-made carbon dioxide is only about 3 percent of global, annual production of carbon dioxide”. In fact, human activity has raised the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide content by 50 percent in less than 200 years, according to NASA.
Farage has been attempting to cultivate ties between Reform UK and senior figures associated with Donald Trump, who has called climate change a “hoax” and is expected to once again pull the U.S. out of the flagship 2015 Paris Agreement.
Farage this week met with key Trump ally and donor Elon Musk, who invested at least $277 million in the Republican’s re-election campaign, and said that he would seek to “negotiate” a donation from Musk to Reform UK.
“The threat of U.S. interference in our democracy isn’t just contained to Elon Musk’s touted $100 million donation to Reform,” said Hannah Greer, Good Law Project campaigns manager. “Farage has now helped a fossil-fuel-funded American climate science denial think tank to set up shop in the UK.
During the recent presidential campaign, Democrats highlighted that Trump’s second term agenda was being drafted by another radical right-wing think tank, the Heritage Foundation, under the banner Project 2025.
The document proposes a range of radical anti-climate policies, including slashing restrictions on fossil fuel extraction, scrapping investment in renewable energy, and gutting the Environmental Protection Agency.
Project 2025 – heavily funded by just six family fortunes – has been accused of being “extreme” and “authoritarian” for setting out a plan to rapidly “reform” the U.S. government by shuttering bureaus and offices, overturning regulations, and replacing thousands of public sector employees with hand-picked political allies of Trump. The agenda also proposes radical tax cuts, and a crackdown on reproductive rights.
Farage has been heavily criticised for venturing regularly to the U.S. since his election in July, rather than spending time in his constituency of Clacton. The Reform UK leader has made six trips to the U.S. as an MP, often meeting with avowed climate deniers, despite his coastal constituency being at risk of flooding due to global warming.
Reform UK and the Heartland Institute were approached for comment.
Vice president elect JD Vance and Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch. Credit: JD Vance / X
The Conservative leader, who attacked “radical green absolutism” in a Washington DC speech, recently met with a host of influential anti-climate figures.
Speaking to an audience in Washington DC last week, Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch declared that the conservative desire to “protect the natural world” had been “hacked, replaced by a radical green absolutism”.
“Looking after our planet became an exclusive discussion about net zero and reducing emissions, and alongside it the growth of activist government to regulate it,” she said.
Badenoch was giving the keynote speech at the centre-right International Democracy Union (IDU) Forum on 5 December. According to her team, she was in the U.S. to build ties with the Republican Party following the election of Donald Trump as the next president.
In keeping with her speech, the new friends that Badenoch spent time with during the trip – vice president elect JD Vance, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson, and Canadian Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre – have spread climate science denial and received funding from the fossil fuel industry.
Badenoch describes herself as a “net zero sceptic” and has suggested that the UK’s 2050 target for achieving net zero emissions would “bankrupt the country”. As DeSmog has reported, her political advisors have attacked the UK’s climate goals, and her campaign for Tory leader was backed by Neil Record, chair of Net Zero Watch, an arm of the Global Warming Policy Foundation climate denial group.
Her ministers Priti Patel and Robert Jenrick have ties to the Heritage Foundation, the U.S. think tank behind the Project 2025 blueprint for a second Trump term, which proposes the rollback of climate policies and environmental protections.
Here’s what you need to know about Badenoch’s new anti-green allies.
JD Vance
Badenoch reportedly had an hour-long dinner with vice president elect JD Vance, during which they “renewed their friendship”.
Vance has a history of dismissing human-caused climate change. In 2021, he told the American Leadership Forum, a U.S. Christian group: “I’m skeptical of the idea that climate change is caused purely by man”. He added: “It’s been changing, as others pointed out, it’s been changing for millennia.”
During this year’s U.S. presidential election, Vance repeatedly attacked the Biden administration’s climate policies as “the Green new scam”.
Former venture capitalist Vance received a total of $352,000 (around £276,000) from the fossil fuel industry between 2019 and 2024, according to campaign finance database OpenSecrets.
Ron DeSantis
The Tory leader also met with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who ran to be the Republican nominee for president this year.
DeSantis, who endorsed Badenoch to be Conservative leader, has described climate change as a “religion” and has passed laws to curb action to tackle it.
In October, when asked about the role of climate change in two hurricanes off the Florida Gulf Coast, DeSantis said: “I don’t subscribe to your religion.”
Hurricanes are fuelled by warmer waters, meaning that more devastating hurricanes are directly linked to rising temperatures. Consequently, as the Florida Climate Center has pointed out: “A larger proportion of storms have reached major hurricane strength in recent years, along with an increase in rapid intensification events.”
DeSantis went on to defend the continued extraction of fossil fuels, saying climate action would involve: “Taxing [people] to smithereens, stopping oil and gas, making people pay dramatically more for energy; we would collapse as a country.”
Earlier this year, DeSantis signed a bill into law that would delete references to climate change from all state legislation. In May he posted on X in support of the bill: “Florida rejects the designs of the left to weaken our energy grid [and] pursue a radical climate agenda”.
Mike Johnson
Badenoch also reportedly met with Mike Johnson, the Republican speaker of the House of Representatives.
In 2017, Johnson told a public meeting with constituents: “I am not a big proponent of the climate change data because I have seen data on the other side.”
He added: “The climate is changing, but the question is, is climate changing because of natural cycles in the atmosphere over the span of history, or is it changing because we drive SUVs? I don’t believe in the latter. I don’t think that’s the primary driver.”
In reality, authors working for the world’s foremost climate science body, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), have said that “it is a statement of fact, we cannot be any more certain; it is unequivocal and indisputable that humans are warming the planet”.
The IPCC has also stated that carbon dioxide “is responsible for most of global warming” since the late 19th century, which has increased the “severity and frequency of weather and climate extremes, like heat waves, heavy rains, and drought” – all of which “will put a disproportionate burden on low-income households and thus increase poverty levels.”
Johnson has repeatedly voted against action to tackle rising temperatures, including laws that would require oil and gas companies to disclose the climate risks of their activities, while supporting cuts to the federal Environmental Protection Agency.
He has also received around $240,000 (more than £118,000) in campaign donations from the oil and gas industry, according to OpenSecrets.
Pierre Poilievre
Badenoch’s North American trip also saw her visit Toronto, where she met with Pierre Poilievre, leader of the Canadian Conservative Party.
Declaring that conservative leaders in Canada and the UK were “uniting over shared values”, Badenoch posted on X calling Poilievre “an impressive and thoughtful figure” and “a new friend and ally”.
As DeSmog reported in March, Poilievre has voted against climate and environmental legislation nearly 400 times during his parliamentary career.
Poilievre has also campaigned against a carbon tax in Canada, and has supported Canadian oil and gas extraction, calling it “the most ethical and environmentally sound in the world”.
The Free Press
Badenoch also recorded a podcast with The Free Press, a conservative platform which has published attacks on climate science and action.
In 2022, it ran an article by climate crisis denier Michael Shellenberger arguing that the West’s “green delusions”, and its attempts to transition away from fossil fuels, had “empowered” Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin.
In September 2023, the platform published an article by U.S. scientist Patrick Brown, who heads a climate unit at Shellenberger’s Breakthrough Institute, claiming he had been pressured by Nature magazine to make a paper on wildfires fit a climate change “narrative” – claims rejected by the magazine and other scientists.
A view of Brooks Range as seen from the Dalton Highway on May 10, 2024 in North Slope Borough, Alaska. (Photo: Lance King/Getty Images)
“This is yet one more sign, predicted by scientists, of the consequences of inadequately reducing fossil fuel pollution,” said one scientist.
Permafrost in the Arctic has stored carbon dioxide for millennia, but the annual Arctic Report Card released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reveals a concerning shift linked to planetary heating and a rising number of wildfires in the icy region: The tundra is now emitting more carbon than it is storing.
The report card revealed that over the last year, the tundra’s temperature rose to its second-highest level on record, causing the frozen soil to melt.
The melting of the permafrost activates microbes in the soil which decompose the trapped carbon, causing it to be released into the atmosphere as planet-heating carbon dioxide and methane.
The release of fossil fuels from the permafrost is also being caused by increased Arctic wildfires, which have emitted an average of 207 million tons of carbon per year since 2003.
“Our observations now show that the Arctic tundra, which is experiencing warming and increased wildfire, is now emitting more carbon than it stores, which will worsen climate change impacts,” said Rick Spinrad, administrator of NOAA. “This is yet one more sign, predicted by scientists, of the consequences of inadequately reducing fossil fuel pollution.”
Sue Natali, a scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Massachusetts and one of 97 international scientists who contributed to the Arctic Report Card, told NPR that 1.5 trillion tons of carbon are still being stored in the tundra—suggesting that the continued warming of the permafrost could make it a huge source of planet-heating greenhouse gas emissions.
Along with the “Arctic tundra transformation from carbon sink to carbon source,” NOAA reported declines in caribou herds and increasing winter precipitation.
The report card showed that the autumn of 2023 and summer of 2024 saw the second- and third-warmest temperatures on record across the Arctic, and a heatwave in August 2024 set an all-time record for daily temperatures in several communities in northern Alaska and Canada.
The last nine years have been the nine warmest on record in the Arctic region.
“Many of the Arctic’s vital signs that we track are either setting or flirting with record-high or record-low values nearly every year,” said Gerald (J.J.) Frost, a senior scientist with Alaska Biological Research, Inc. and a veteran Arctic Report Card author. “This is an indication that recent extreme years are the result of long-term, persistent changes, and not the result of variability in the climate system.”
Brenda Ekwurzel, a climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, emphasized that the continuous release of fossil fuel emissions from oil and gas extraction and other pollution has caused the Arctic to warm at a faster rate than the Earth as a whole over the past 11 years.
“These combined changes are contributing to worsening wildfires and thawing permafrost to an extent so historic that it caused the Arctic to be a net carbon source after millennia serving as a net carbon storage region,” said Ekwurzel. “If this becomes a consistent trend, it will further increase climate change globally.”
The Arctic Report Card was released weeks before President-elect Donald Trump is set to take office. Trump has pledged to slash climate regulations introduced by the Biden administration and to increase oil and gas production. He has mused that sea-level rise will create “more oceanfront property” and has called the climate crisis a “hoax,” while his nominee for energy secretary, Chris Wright, the CEO of the fracking company Liberty Energy, has claimed that climate warming is good for the planet.
“These sobering impacts in the Arctic are one more manifestation of how policymakers in the United States and around the world are continuing to prioritize the profits of fossil fuel polluters over the well-being of people and the planet and putting the goals of the Paris climate agreement in peril,” said Ekwurzel. “All countries, but especially wealthy, high-emitting nations, need to drastically reduce heat-trapping emissions at a rapid pace in accord with the latest science and aid in efforts of climate-vulnerable communities to prepare for what’s to come and help lower-resourced countries working to decrease emissions too.”
Experienced climbers scale a rock face near the historic Dumbarton castle in Glasgow, releasing a banner that reads “Climate on a Cliff Edge.” One activist, dressed as a globe, symbolically looms near the edge, while another plays the bagpipes on the shores below. | Photo courtesy of Extinction Rebellion and Mark Richards
