Green MP, Adrian Ramsay, has responded to Ed Miliband’s speech at Labour conference, where he said that parties that deny the dangers posed by the climate crisis are a threat to national security. The foreign secretary went on to ask: “Let us therefore ask each and every party, where do you stand on tackling the climate crisis?
Adrian Ramsay said “Ed Miliband is right to highlight the threat that climate breakdown poses to our national security – though the government is still to release all the evidence UK intelligence agencies have provided on this.
“The Foreign Secretary also asked today where each and every party stands on tackling the climate crisis. Good question.
“The Green Party is unequivocal: no new drilling for oil and gas in the North Sea. No green light for a third runway at Heathrow. And we want to see massive investment in upgrading our homes, cleaning up our energy system, and improving transport to tackle the climate crisis and cut people’s bills.”
“So we ask Labour: where do you stand on these issues?”
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)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
Miliband at the UN security council on Wednesday. The UK’s foreign secretary later briefed fellow foreign ministers about the UK climate report. Photograph: Angela Weiss/AFP/Getty Images
El Niño poses critical threat to nations’ defences, says Ed Miliband in presentation to global foreign ministers
The UK has warned countries around the world that the climate and nature crises and the coming El Niño threaten their national security and defence, presenting foreign ministries with the findings of an explosive report suppressed under Keir Starmer.
Ed Miliband, the UK’s foreign secretary, made a presentation to the foreign ministers of the EU as well as Kenya and other countries on Wednesday night at a private meeting during the UN general assembly in New York, based on the report by the UK’s spy chiefs that found the collapse of natural systems around the world would lead to conflict, migration and food shortages.
Miliband told the meeting, the first such discussion among foreign ministers, that the coming El Niño, which has been supercharged by climate breakdown, would test the world’s food systems as never before.
“We face an El Niño that is already set to be the most intense in living memory,” he said. “This will intensify climate shocks that compound and cascade across borders, threatening food and water security, displacing communities, putting pressure on markets and scarring economies.”
…
With the backing of Andy Burnham, the UK prime minister, Miliband presented the research that found the collapse of global ecosystems such as in the Amazon and Congo rainforests, driven by the climate crisis and the destruction of nature, would have impacts on national security around the world.
Donald Trump urges you to ignore facts and reality and 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.
Leader of the Green Party Zack Polanski said: ‘Shell has spent decades making billions from fossil fuels while ordinary people around the world pay the price’
PM urged to make fossil fuel giants pay compensation for extreme weather
ANDY BURNHAM faced fresh calls today to make oil giants pay communities compensation for extreme weather as new research suggests Shell’s pollution is responsible for nearly a quarter of global heatwaves.
Analysis by campaigners suing the oil and gas giant at the High Court said that the firm’s pollution has made 24 per cent of the 213 global heatwaves reported between 2000 and 2023 at least 10,000 times more likely.
The Odette case campaign’s findings sparked calls by Green Party leader Zack Polanski, unions and fuel poverty campaigners for the Prime Minister to take a hard line on “climate vandalism” ahead of its annual conference in Liverpool.
This summer’s extreme heat caused thousands of deaths in Britain and an estimated more than £4 billion damage to the economy.
Shell, meanwhile, reported profits of over £12bn in the first six months of this year, a 70 per cent year-on-year increase, as the US-Israel war on Iran sent global oil prices soaring.
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)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 RichardsNigel 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.
Heathrow airport wants to build a third runway and new terminals. Photograph: Toby Melville/Reuters
Climate Change Committee says government cannot expand airport without requiring aviation industry to clean up its emissions
Heathrow airport should be allowed to expand only if airlines pay for the removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, the government’s climate advisers have said.
…
Nigel Topping, the chair of the CCC, said: “The government cannot expand Heathrow airport without requiring the aviation industry to clean up its emissions. Therefore, the government should legislate policies that require the aviation industry to fully address all of their emissions by 2050, either directly or by purchasing engineered removals. The polluter-pays principle must apply.”
…
But campaigners rejected the CCC’s plan of relying on nascent technologies to wipe out the impact of an expansion that would commit the UK to much higher emissions for decades, and called on ministers to halt all airport expansion.
Tony Bosworth, campaigner at Friends of the Earth, accused the CCC of “pulling its punches”, pointing to recent research by the Tyndall Centre that found SAF and carbon removals were unproven and unlikely to ramp up in time to the extent needed to justify airport expansion.
“The CCC should have made it crystal clear: there is no plausible way to expand Heathrow without wrecking the UK’s climate targets,” he said.
Frequent flying is overwhelming skewed towards the wealthy. In any year, only about half of people in England take a flight abroad, while about 80% of all flights abroad were taken by people who took two or more flights – about a quarter of the population. Frequent flyers – those who took five or more return flights abroad in 2024 – made up only 5% of the population, but accounted for a third of all flights.
Those in the highest income group took 38% of all flights abroad – four times as many flights as those in the lowest income group, according to the National Travel Survey of England in 2024.
As the latest UNEP reports we will blow past 1.5°C, we must prioritise solutions that work, rather than focusing on complex, unproven technologies
For anyone who’s been paying attention, it’s no surprise that the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) reports that we will now inevitably blow past the global average temperature threshold of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.
Climate scientists like myself have been warning for years that we are about to cross this invisible red line, while quietly worrying that global average temperatures will end up being double that. Personally, I said goodbye to 1.5°C several years ago, but it still feels momentous to see it written in print, and that too by the UN.
The target to keep warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial temperatures isn’t some hard red line in the sand, because all warming carries some risk, but it’s relevant because limiting warming to 1.5°C gives us a good chance of avoiding some of the worst impacts of climate heating. We’ve already had a glimpse of what this looks like in the myriad heatwaves, wildfires, floods, droughts and storms that have made headlines this year.
Every tenth of a degree of heating means real-terms impacts for peoples’ lives, livelihoods and property, and increases the risk of the extreme events that we’ve already seen tragically claim so many lives. It also increases the likelihood of exceeding critical tipping points such as the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, beyond which there’s no return.
We’ve already had single years that have exceeded the 1.5°C limit, but the widely discussed Paris Agreement target is a multi-year average. That means we won’t know we’ve reached it until it’s in the rearview mirror, but it’s also possible to “overshoot” 1.5°C, temporarily peak at higher temperatures, and then bring them back down – and that’s now the best-case scenario outlined by UNEP.
This would mean we would have to take drastic action to bring temperatures back down again rather than continuing to drive them ever upwards. Which, in the current political climate, feels like a bit of a stretch.
Temperatures won’t stabilise until we reach net zero emissions, where we remove as much carbon from the atmosphere as we add to it. Until then, we will still be increasing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere and turning up the dial on the thermostat. Net zero isn’t a nice to have, despite what certain parts of the political spectrum would have you believe, it’s an essential if we want to have a liveable planet.
In fact, UNEP’s latest report points to the need to take action beyond net zero:
Once we have limited heating to 2°C or below — which currently feels optimistic — we will have to roll out carbon dioxide removal (CDR) to reduce temperatures on an enormous scale.
CDR often connotes high-tech solutions to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, but it can also mean one of the oldest technologies in the world: trees. That’s why restoring nature and preventing deforestation is so important for climate action.
But UNEP reports that CDR only works if we limit heating to 2C or below. As the stakes of climate heating continue to rise, another idea is moving from the sidelines to centre-stage: geoengineering, or deliberate technological interventions to alter the Earth’s climate.
Geoengineering is a spectrum, ranging from the comparatively reasonable and well-researched (injecting particles into the stratosphere to reflect incoming sunlight and cool the surface, much like major volcanic eruptions have done) to downright barmy (launching mirrors into space – you can imagine which silicon valley billionaires love that idea). And while there are sensible (if heated) scientific discussions about how to actually do it, there are also some very serious ethical and governance hurdles to overcome.
The tech bros will tell you that geoengineering will save us and allow us to keep doing what we’re doing while still ‘fixing’ climate change. But beware any arguments that downplay the importance of emissions cuts. We can’t simply geoengineer our way out of this crisis.
For example: who decides when to deploy? What happens if an intervention makes things better for some and worse for others? How do we safeguard against bad actors acting unilaterally? These questions are largely unanswered, and that’s before we get to the scientific questions around unintended consequences, like disrupting the Arctic food chain while trying to refreeze ice, or what happens if we stop the intervention, resulting in a so-called termination shock, where temperatures would shoot back up with devastating effect.
In some senses the climate crisis is relatively simple: we’re pumping planet-heating carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and it’s heating the planet. To reverse it, we need first to stop adding planet-heating carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, and then to start removing it.
The good news is that we do know what we need to do to achieve that. Climate action is less a knowledge problem, and more an implementation one.
Proponents of geoengineering argue that it’s not an either/or between emissions cuts and major interventions. But in a world with finite resources, expensive and unproven geoengineering solutions should not be a priority, rather, we should prioritise the simple stuff we know works: decarbonising energy production, improving public transport, retrofitting and building greener housing, reducing meat and dairy consumption, restoring natural ecosystems.
That said, we are now committed to some level of change, and we need to behave as such. That means we need to prepare for the sea level rise that’s to come, and adapt societies, behaviours and infrastructure to a less predictable and more extreme climate.
If the summer of 2026 has taught us anything in the UK, it’s that our houses, schools, offices, railways, emergency services, power networks and public transport are simply not fit for purpose in the heat. Nor are they built to withstand the wet, stormy, flood-prone autumn and winter that is on its way. We’re not equipped to deal with the rapidly extremifying climate or the weather whiplash it brings. Simply put: our infrastructure was built for a climate that no longer exists.
If we are to survive the coming decades, we need to build preparedness and climate resilience into our society. Extreme events are already exposing our vulnerabilities, and if we thought 2026 was bad, count my words: we ain’t seen nothing yet.
In the wake of our hottest summer on record, it’s abundantly clear that we need to slash emissions to save lives, and at the same time prepare for the changes that are now committed.
The geoengineers are right about one thing: It’s not an either/or. We have to reduce emissions to net zero and remove carbon from the atmosphere and adapt to what’s in store. There’s no other safe option.
Dr. Ella Gilbert is a climate scientist and multi-award-winning presenter with a PhD in Antarctic climate change.
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.
Leader of the Green Party Zack Polanski said: ‘Shell has spent decades making billions from fossil fuels while ordinary people around the world pay the price’
