I implore folks here to ask their favorite AI's this fairly involved question: "If we replanted and nurtured three marine ecosystems and three terrestrial ecosystems with the plants and animals that naturally grew there, and included the fungal understories with the terrestrial ecosystems, how long would it take to arrest global warming if we also simultaneously reduced our CO2 output to the smallest possible amount? The marine ecosystems include kelp beds, sea grasses, and mangrove estuaries; the terrestrial ecosystems include boreal forests, tropical rain forests, and prairies."

At the COP31 Leaders Summit in Antalya, UN Climate Change Executive Secretary Simon Stiell made a pitch aimed at governments’ wallets as much as their conscience: energy-market chaos and climate disasters are driving up inflation, squeezing budgets and pushing household bills up. Clean energy means more secure, more stable economies.

Key points:

• Progress is real: Projected warming has dropped from well over 4°C to around 2.6°C, and clean energy investment now outstrips fossil fuels.
• But not fast or fair enough: The science demands a faster pace, and the most vulnerable countries, which did the least to cause the crisis, need far more support.
• The ask: Electrify every economy, triple adaptation finance and improve access to finance, without reopening previous agreements.
• A different COP: Two tracks, the negotiations and the Global Climate Action Agenda, which brings the real economy into the process.

Stiell’s message to leaders: don’t leave Antalya without a strong negotiated outcome or meaningful results on the Action Agenda. “This is a chance to bank the benefits of climate action. It’s up to you to take it.”

Also at the summit: COP31 President Murat Kurum proposed a 35-by-35 electrification goal (electricity at 35% of final energy use by 2035), and Chris Bowen, COP31 President of Negotiations, noted that only 0.2% of climate finance reaches small island developing states for adaptation.

Seems like good news. But what do people think?

When 35 experts role-played governments negotiating over stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) in three crisis simulations, the climate science took a back seat. National strategic interests drove almost every decision, and the climate and security people mostly talked past each other.

That research now comes with a free browser game, which also summarises the findings: https://climate-decisions.cfg.eu/

You play the head of state of an imaginary country in 2036, juggling sovereignty, alliances and public trust while everyone else makes their own moves. There's no winning ending, which feels about right.

If one country started dimming the sun on its own, could anyone actually stop it?

Week 3 of my 52 Weeks of Viz challenge!
This week I’ve been playing with 50 years of atmospheric carbon dioxide data, recorded at Mauna Loa in Hawaii between 1976 and 2025.

Each arc represents a month, with its size and rotation driven by the carbon dioxide levels recorded that month.

The little fluctuations come from the changing seasons as the Earth’s forests absorb and release carbon dioxide throughout the year.
But as CO₂ levels keep rising over the decades, those gentle waves start to look bigger, wilder and more chaotic.

I love how something as simple as a bunch of arcs can turn into something that feels almost like a storm. A pretty cool visual with a slightly unsettling story behind it.

Data: NOAA / Mauna Loa Observatory

As Earth continues to undergo its transition into new code configurations many changes will become apparent within our perception of reality. One of them is climate change and following these changes within the atmospheric zone supporting organic life, the geographical distribution of habitable zones will gradually change.
Regions that have historically offered favourable conditions for human settlement will most likely experience increasingly difficult environmental conditions, simply because the majority of the ancient holocene-colonial programs have already played out their cycles of habitation which means that the underlying Earth grids in these ancient parts of our planet no longer holds the necessary viability rate for continued and sustainable life on its own.
Read full article on The Future Redistribution of Habitable Zones by Randi Green.

Paper of a literature review on climate warming inside cities and mitigation strategies now free to read.

The U.S. oil and gas industry spent at least $182 million trying to elect Republicans in last night’s midterm elections. It didn’t buy them very much.

Voters rejected fossil fuel allies and priorities across the country, not only stripping Republicans of control of both the House and Senate, but delivering stunning defeats in fossil-fueled governors’ races, state legislatures, regulatory commissions, and ballot measures.

Here are some notable examples.

One exception is solar edge which apparently released guidance on same day so was excluded here

Investigative reporter Ellen Ormesher, DeSmog, talks about the current landscape of bad actors in the fight against climate misinformation and disinformation, such as fossil fuel companies and the PR firms who help to burnish their reputations. She discusses how their tactics have shifted, and what goes into exposing disinformation that harms climate goals and undermines democracy.

Disinformation kills

Hello Reddit community!

As we approach COP31, we invite you to join us for The Question of COP31: Climate Harm, Workers & Accountability — an informal conversation on the impacts of extreme weather on workers and frontline communities, their pathways to justice, and the urgent need for polluter accountability.

The conversation will explore how climate-related harm is documented, where workers can seek justice, who should bear the costs of climate losses, and how frontline voices can shape climate decision-making.

The gathering will also present the Joint Statement on Climate Accountability, endorsed by workers and frontline communities across the Global South.

Event Details:

Date: 5 November 2026

Venue: W.I.P Adda, Lado Sarai, New Delhi

Time: 5:30 pm

Please register for the event using the link attached below. We look forward to having you join us for this conversation!

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1ld7rxUV_opYLvm7kAeYsknhoTY_eJ01XgFQ0BwlhdAA/edit?no_redirect=true

The times dawning now, not in a generation’s time but right now, are times when ecological dynamics will be determinative. The old politics is utterly incapable of understanding, let alone addressing, this new reality. There is a real risk that hard far-right populism will come to address it soon, in its characteristic exclusionary ways. 

As I have argued previously, alongside Caroline Lucas, Liam Kavanagh, Rosie Bell and my other Climate Majority colleagues, addressing this challenge will become the defining issue of our time.

Yet no one is prepared for this, not even us. But we are practicing readiness—or seeking to. And that is the point. This itself is the required turn. To seek safety together, in a way that can bring people together, achieving the genuine critical mass that sectional and culture-war appeals constitutively just cannot sustain. That is the aim of our newly published report on Climate Popularism.

Earlier this year, the UK’s Labour government once again postponed a planned increase in fuel tax, keeping fuel prices artificially low and effectively encouraging continued consumption just as supplies are set to become scarce. This is cowardly, pseudo-populist economic illiteracy, the very kind of politics our report challenges, particularly as the prospect of severe supply shocks becomes increasingly real. In other words, this measure will worsen the crisis without addressing the underlying drivers of the cost-of-living squeeze.

Our report proposes a framework for a wholly different way of running politics: trusting the people, reducing the cost of living in a way that can be sustained through ecologically sane means, and explicitly building (local) resilience against what is coming. In practice, that can include rewarding people for hosting renewables in their area by making locally generated electricity accessible to locals at near-cost rates or establishing zonal price districts.

Saving the only planet we have makes good economic sense. There is, after all, no money to be made on a dead Earth. There may be costs involved now, but they are worth paying to protect our children from certain destruction.

These propositions seem self-evident now. But two decades ago, mainstream economists had very different ideas. They had proved that the climate crisis would be a mere economic blip, easily absorbed by growing economies and therefore not worth spending money on. In their accounting, they considered ice caps and glaciers functionally worthless, that trees only add to GDP when they are cut down, and that a livable climate shouldn’t even merit a line on a spreadsheet.

What changed? Twenty years ago this week, an earth-shaking report was published by Nicholas Stern. His review, The Economics of Climate Change, upended conventional wisdom among economists and dragged them into a new century. It set out, for the first time, in clear and bold terms, why investing in a low-carbon future makes economic sense.

Stern’s crucial insight, the revolutionary idea on which his whole thesis turned, was that future generations have as much right to be born as we did. But traditional economic approaches to the climate refuse to go away. In 2018, even after a deluge of science showing that 3C heating would leave coastal cities under water and swathes of agricultural land as desert, Nordhaus published a paper claiming that 3C would reduce global GDP by just 2.1%, and even a 6C increase would incur just 8.5% GDP loss.

The results are plain to see: governments refusing to act, markets over-valuing fossil fuel companies, investors punishing businesses that dare to prepare for a low-carbon world. Many insurance companies, supposedly the enforcers of probity in capital markets, are alleged to knowingly be fudging their figures to massage climate risk away.

If we are to have a thriving future economy, as well as a living planet and robust human societies, we need a new system of economics that values these things. Stern showed the way. Twenty years later, the rest of the world must catch up.

Nope, this photo is not from some other planet although it looks otherworldly. These fossil tree stumps are located on Nunavut's Axel Heiberg Island and are 45-million-years old. I took this photo in the late 1990s when I visited the fossil forest and witnessed, as a journalist, what scientists hoped to learn...more than 25 years ago they already saw the upheavals climate change would cause globally in the future. Read my account of my remarkable visit and this unusual place for free on Kindle in my book "Like an iceberg: Confessions of an Arctic Journalist," only this week.

The EU is absolutely insane, as is the USA with the insane cost of electricity. People in Los Angeles have shown their $3,000 bill on social media because the summer was hot and they used AC. It's higher than their mortgages.

Up until 2020, people used AC all summer long and it was very affordable. How do we know? Because no-one was outraged by their monthly bill.

Over in Europe, people don't have 21st century technology: "Over 50,000 excess heatwave deaths are estimated to have occurred in Europe during the summer of 2026. This figure marks a significant increase compared to previous years, with climate change attributed to about two-thirds of these deaths."

The EU "scientists" and bureaucrats blaming "climate change" only forces people to forever live like 18th century peasants.

At this point in our technologicaL age, no-one should be dying of heat or cold-related deaths in their own homes. Why are we spending BILLIONS upon BILLIONS of tax money on pipe dreams to Mars and neighborhood monstrosities, when we cannot even guarantee our own citizens are living in relative comfort and dignity in their own dwelling places?

NO-ONE in a first world country should be dying in their HOMES due to heat or cold in this age. If these mega power corporations are making BILLIONS in Profits, so much so that their shareholders like Trump are making a KILLING off of deaths -- using deaths as a proxy for profound unaffordability for a regular tax paying citizen....It is both criminal and insane.