[Photo by Federico Gambarini/picture alliance via Getty Images]
World must slash emissions to limit irreversible climate damage
The world must rapidly change course as it drifts beyond the global warming limit of 1.5°C above pre-industrial temperatures, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has warned in a new report.
The UN and climate scientists have already conceded that the red line agreed in Paris over a decade ago will be crossed. The three-year average last year exceeded the limit agreed in Paris in 2015, many are betting on 2026 being among the hottest years ever, and 2027 looks set to be hotter still.
“We must make the overshoot as small and short as possible,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres said in a statement ahead of the report’s publication on Wednesday. This means “limiting how high temperatures rise and how long they remain above 1.5°C,” he said.
At a time of growing political resistance to climate action, Guterres called for an “overshoot of ambition” that would include a faster phase-out of fossil fuels and sharp cuts to methane emissions.
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A person using an electric fan to cool down on the underground in London. Education, health services and transport all suffered in the heat. Photograph: Tolga Akmen/EPA
Meteorologists say mean average temperature of 16.5C was made 130 times more likely by climate crisis
This year’s summer was the UK’s hottest on record, according to provisional data, and the Met Office said the season’s mean temperature was made 130 times more likely by the climate crisis.
Record-breaking and back-to-back heatwaves have scorched much of Europe. In England, temperatures peaked at 38.1C (100.1F) at Kew Gardens in London on 13 August, and June had already been confirmed as the country’s hottest since records began in 1884. Scientists have said these heatwaves are only possible because of the climate crisis driven by burning fossil fuels.
The Met Office said an average mean UK temperature of 16.5C made this summer provisionally the warmest on record as well as the warmest season in a series going back to 1884. England, Wales and Northern Ireland broke their respective mean temperature records for summer while Scotland recorded its joint sixth hottest summer.
This is the second year in a row that temperature records have been broken, with 2025 and 2026 both the warmest UK summers since records began.
The infamous summer of 1976 is now the seventh warmest on record in terms of mean temperature.
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US President Donald Trump holds an image showing the size of Meta’s new data center in Washington, DC on August 26, 2025. (Photo by Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images)
“Donald Trump is actively trying to help as many Democratic senators as possible get elected,” said one polling expert.
President Donald Trump on Monday warned Americans that they risk becoming “backwards and poor” unless they allow Big Tech companies to build artificial intelligence data centers in their communities.
In a social mediapost, the president expressed indignation that any town or city wouldn’t welcome data centers, which have drawn nationwide opposition for generating pollution and jacking up utility bills.
“The only reason that communities throughout the USA should not want Data Centers is if they want to end up being backwards and poor,” Trump wrote. “If they want to be successful and rich, with far lower taxes and jobs all over the place, let Data Reign.”
In reality, AI data centers create very few jobs once they are completed, as most of their functions are fully automated.
Trump then said that Americans “will only have yourselves to blame” if they “kill the Golden Goose” that is AI data centers.
“China could not be happier with this anti Data Center movement,” Trump wrote. “Actually, they can’t believe it is happening!”
Building AI data centers has become massively unpopular throughout the US.
A poll conducted by Embold Research and published by Heatmap Pro earlier this month shows that 75% of Americans now oppose building AI data centers in their area, including 61% registering strong opposition.
While Republicans polled in the survey were more supportive of data centers than Democrats and independent voters, it nonetheless found that opposition among Republicans outweighed support by 43 points.
Polling analyst G. Elliott Morris marveled at how politically tone deaf the president sounds when it comes to data centers, commenting that “Donald Trump is actively trying to help as many Democratic senators as possible get elected.”
Longtime GOP operative Frank Luntz similarly noted data centers’ unpopularity, citing a recent Gallup poll showing 63% of Republican voters oppose having one of the facilities built in their communities.
“We’re about to see whether President Trump can sway those voters to support them, as he’s done on many issues before,” Luntz remarked.
Democratic US Senate hopeful Abdul El-Sayed wasted no time tying the president’s position on data centers to his opponent, Republican Mike Rogers.
“Make no mistake—this is Mike Rogers’ position on data centers,” wrote El-Sayed. “He’s got up to $2.6 million invested in companies cashing in on the data center boom, all while Michiganders watch their utility bills soar. You can’t trust a word out of Mike’s mouth because he’s only out for himself, for Donald Trump, and for Big Tech—not Michigan.”
Faiz Shakir, a longtime adviser to US Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), observed that Trump is merely “sharing the perspective of Wall Street and Big Tech” and is showing “no interest… in grappling with the mass revolt across American communities, or to learn anything from them.”
Screenwriter David Simon, creator of the acclaimed television series The Wire, accused Trump of brazenly lying about data centers’ economic benefits.
“If data centers are a geographic benefit to communities, you can be sure they’d be siting and building them in affluent and politically connected environs,” wrote Simon. “Curiously, they’re dumped in poorer, less influential places. Go fucking figure.”
Republican Kentucky state Rep. Savannah Maddox took issue with the president disparaging communities opposed to data centers, which include many of the rural communities that voted for him in three presidential elections.
“Rural doesn’t mean ‘backwards and poor’ and development doesn’t always equate to being ‘successful and rich,’” wrote Maddox. “President Trump wouldn’t be president without the rural voters who inhabit America’s heartland. It is not wrong of us to question the sudden and wide-scale effort to convert arable land into data centers. We are not stupid for wanting to protect our rural way of life.”
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Last month was the driest July ever recorded in the country since records began in 1836 | Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
Adapting to an over-heated planet means very little unless it is accompanied by addressing the root causes of climate breakdown.
Will the succession of heatwaves across Europe and the UK compel governments of all complexions to take climate breakdown more seriously? While much of the news and public conversation this summer has focused on the tragic deaths of people caught in wildfires, floods, and storms, less attention has been paid to how heat waves kill people directly.
When the temperature rises to the point where the body can no longer cool itself, this is termed “uncompensable heat stress”, or UHS, and has long been known to have a disproportionate risk for the over sixties: The older you are, the less you can sweat; your heart works harder and your blood vessels are less able to widen, all adding to the risk of heat stress and early death. In an ageing and warming world, people older than sixty will increase in numbers to 2.1 billion by 2050 and are more likely to succumb to UHS.
Last year, one of the hottest ever on record in Britain, analysis from the UK Health Security Agency put excess deaths due to heat-related factors at 1,504. As of June this year, most of the country had already experienced four heatwaves, causing 2,877 excess deaths. Since then, there have been more heat waves with early indications of another in September, meaning a huge increase in heat-related deaths as compared to the previous year.
This rapid escalation in heat-related deaths is worth considering in a context where previous forecasts on the rate of climate change have proved to be too optimistic: Heavily populated Europe appears to be heating up much faster than the average, and research on the ability of forests to soak up greenhouse gases and help prevent climate breakdown has turned out to be less than expected.
Meanwhile, the naturally occurring El Niño/La Niña climate cycle is entering a “heating phase”, which is likely to further increase global heating and disruptive weather in the coming months. On Friday, the Met Office warned that this year’s El Nino is likely to be the most intense in recent memory. “We should be clear that this is an unprecedented event,” Prof Adam Scaife, head of long-range forecasting at the UK Met Office, told the BBC. “I have never seen an El Niño signal this intense in our forecasts.”
Sleep-walking towards disaster
Why are we sleepwalking towards disaster in this way when it simply does not make sense? Of the many reasons, three stand out; each requiring concerted governmental effort and leadership.
First, what needs to be done is a mammoth task. Not only will we have to radically decarbonise our economies, but we will need major changes in behaviour including a much less meat-based diet, far less use of air travel and far greater use of electricity generated from renewable resources, and a far more circular economy.
Second, the current economic system where neoliberal economics in its various forms is simply not fit for purpose. Crucially, when it comes to climate breakdown the need to act a decade or more ahead of impact is incompatible with free market ideology that believes that the market works best when it has the minimum of regulation. The kind of economic planning and management that the risk of climate breakdown requires is anathema to the very idea of a free market.
Moreover, this is in addition to the runaway wealth that the current free market system favours. So endemic to the system is the accumulation of wealth and political power in the hands of an elite few, that any attempt at an environmentally sustainable economy “for the many, not the few” will be strongly resisted by the few.
Finally, there are the well-resourced right-wing think tanks and lobbies determined to maintain the status quo. The Atlas Foundation alone “provides training, networking, and grants for libertarian, free-market and conservative groups around the world” working with nearly 800 groups in over a hundred countries.
There is already support in the UK and many other countries for adapting to a warmer world, including much better funded emergency services, improved housing and better ventilation, but a core problem remains.
Adaption currently envisaged means very little unless it is accompanied by addressing the root causes of climate breakdown, especially the burning of fossil carbon in the form of coal, oil or gas. All that adaptation does is give us a few extra years before we are overwhelmed by even higher temperatures and wilder weather, and that goes on, and on, with far more of the world becoming uninhabitable.
The heat excesses of the past year will have killed many tens of thousands of people across the world, especially among the poorest. It is vital to shift the political mood enough to truly accelerate the necessary changes. There is a small chance that further devastation caused by El Nino might focus minds on the reality of climate breakdown, but the likes of Trump and most of the global oligarchy will do all they can to prevent that.
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.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 RichardsGreenpeace 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)
dizzy: UK government’s inaction and support of climate-destroying datacentres suggests that Burnham & Co are likely to permit the Rosebank and Jackdaw North Sea oil and gas fields further destroying the planet.
A study published August 27, 2026 in the journal Science concludes that fossil fuel-driven global warming has intensified the warm phase of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation in the Pacific Ocean. (Photo by Julia Cole/Science)
“We are seeing a trend of stronger El Niños, and the one we have now is consistent with that trend,” said the lead author. “That is bad news for climate hazards and for people.”
As the flooding disaster in Tibet and Nepaldemonstrates the deadly consequences of the climate emergency, experts wrote Thursday in the journal Science that fossil fuel-driven global heating has intensified the warm phase of a key pattern in the Pacific Ocean.
The El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) has a warm phase, called El Niño, as well as a neutral phase and a cold one, La Niña. In June, scientists declared the start of a warm event nicknamed “Godzilla,” which helped push last month’s average global ocean surface temperature to the hottest ever recorded in July.
The current event is expected to become not only a super El Niño, but the most intense one on record—and it could contribute to 2027 possibly being the hottest year humanity has ever endured.
While ENSO is a naturally occurring phenomenon, the scientists behind the new paper studied coral skeletons from the Galápagos Islands and concluded that global warming—tied to humans continuing to burn fossil fuels—has intensified El Niño phases.
“Our findings suggest El Niño can supercharge global warming, but also global warming can supercharge El Niño—that is what we are seeing,” said lead author Julia Cole, who chairs the University of Michigan’s Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences.
The scientist also spoke with Inside Climate News, which noted that “the first documented super El Niño in 1982-83 killed about 95% of the shallow-water corals around the Galápagos Islands, right around the time Cole began her research career.”
Based on the team’s analysis, “after the El Niño in 1982, we start seeing much more variability; it’s a lot more extreme and looks like nothing in the previous 1,000 years,” Cole told The Guardian. “What surprised me was how consistent it was. There is just such a large, distinct difference between what has been happening in the last 40 years compared to preindustrial times.”
As Inside Climate News reported:
When Cole visited the islands in 1989, many of the large mapped corals that could have served as sample material were gone, wiped out by the El Niño early in the decade and then decomposed quickly by organisms in the biologically active waters. But in 2006, her team discovered fossil coral remnants, often perched as boulders near remote east-facing coastlines, tossed inland by large waves or tsunamis.
Cole said the signal of El Niños intensified by human-caused warming would have been even stronger if the study had included the most recent occurrences. All the events categorized as super El Niños have occurred since the 1980s and have triggered flooding in East Africa, led to disease outbreaks, and intensified tropical storms. This year’s El Niño is intensifying drought in Indonesia, fueling widespread fires that are sending smoke and hazardous air pollution across Southeast Asia, Cole said. Her team is currently analyzing corals to show the changes from the El Niños in 2015-16 and 2023-24, she added.
“We are seeing a trend of stronger El Niños, and the one we have now is consistent with that trend—it’s not a fluke. We are seeing a shift where El Niño doesn’t look like what it did prior to industrial times,” Cole said. “That is bad news for climate hazards and for people, particularly those who are badly impacted and yet have done little to cause climate change.”
According to the United States’ National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, consequences of El Niño include “increased rainfall across the southern tier of the US and in Peru, which has caused destructive flooding, and drought in the West Pacific, sometimes associated with devastating brush fires in Australia.”
Dalhousie University marine scientist Boris Worm wasn’t involved with the new study but told The Associated Press on Thursday that “El Niño is the most violent aspect of climate variability worldwide, with effects ranging from local fisheries collapse, to widespread coral die-offs to severe droughts, and food shortages around the world.”
Experts are already worried about the latest El Niño’s impact on food security and prices, with the United Nations World Food Program projecting earlier this month that almost 50 million more people worldwide face the prospect of acute hunger.
Pointing to late climate scientist Wallace Broecker’s warning that “the climate system is an angry beast and we are poking it with sticks,” Worm said that “human emissions are the stick, and El Niño is [one] of the ‘angry’ outbursts that can be so threatening to our collective safety.”
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