Humanity heating planet faster than ever before, study finds | Climate crisis | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/mar/06/humanity-heating-planet-faster-than-ever-before-study-finds

global heating accelerated from a steady rate of less than 0.2C per decade between 1970 and 2015 to about 0.35C per decade over the past 10 years. The rate is higher than scientists have seen since they started systematically taking the Earth’s temperature in 1880.

“If the warming rate of the past 10 years continues, it would lead to a long-term exceedance of the 1.5C (2.7F) limit of the Paris agreement before 2030,” said Stefan Rahmstorf, a scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and co-author of the study.

Extreme heat in recent years has been pushed higher by natural fluctuations – such as solar cycles, volcanic eruptions, and the weather pattern El Niño – that have led scientists to question whether startling temperature readings are outliers or the result of an increase in global heating.

The researchers applied a noise-reduction method to filter out the estimated effect of nonhuman factors in five major datasets that scientists have compiled to gauge the Earth’s temperature. In each of them, they found an acceleration in global heating emerged in 2013 or 2014.

French prosecutors intervene in defense of TotalEnergies in climate trial
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/environment/article/2026/02/17/french-prosecutors-intervene-in-defense-of-totalenergies-in-climate-trial_6750572_114.html

In France's first major climate trial against an oil and gas giant, opening Thursday, February 19 at the Paris Court of Justice, TotalEnergies will receive unexpected support from the prosecutor's office. Since 2020, a coalition of advocacy groups (Notre Affaire à Tous, Sherpa, France Nature Environnement) and the City of Paris have asked the courts to require TotalEnergies to drastically reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by cutting its hydrocarbon production, in order to comply with the Paris Agreement target of limiting global warming to 1.5°C.

The case is based on France's law on due diligence, enacted in 2017. It requires companies with more than 5,000 employees in France (or over 10,000 worldwide) to implement a plan to identify risks and prevent serious violations of human rights, health and the environment linked to their activities and those of their subsidiaries, suppliers and subcontractors.

In an unusual move, the prosecutor's office intervened on Tuesday, February 3, as a "joined party," aligning with TotalEnergies. Such intervention by the prosecutor's office in ongoing civil proceedings is extremely rare and justified only when issues of general interest are at stake.

According to the brief, reviewed by Le Monde, the prosecutor's office, like the multinational, considers that "the scope of the due diligence law does not extend to climate change." It argues that global warming is a "worldwide phenomenon," that it "concerns everyone, but is essentially the responsibility of the international community and states." It calls for a restrictive interpretation of the law. According to its conclusions, "it cannot be up to large French companies alone to bear a global obligation to protect human rights and fundamental freedoms. The same applies to the environment."

The Evil Genius Of The Global Food System | Richard Hames Meets Charles C. Mann
https://youtu.be/QV99s0Ny6tg?si=2ZQQePvLti8tqA1u


Richard Hames presents a new show about the systems that make modern life possible. We’ve made the planet into a giant machine, filled with the strangest stories – and now it’s all coming apart. It’s time to Do Your Own Research.

There’s nothing in the world more important than the food system. The twentieth century was scarred by enormous famines – and, like the one in Gaza, they are still deliberately engineered. But since the 1970s, the absolute number of deaths from famine has dropped by over 90%.

On a global scale, we now make so much food that farmers will sometimes destroy it just to keep the prices high.

How is there so much food? How did we get to a world where, globally, people are more likely to be obese than underweight? And, amid all these calories, how are so many people still malnourished? Why is it suddenly all so expensive? And is it all about to come crashing down?

Charles C. Mann explains the historical power of bird shit, the strange reason Indian scientists put wheat in a nuclear reactor, and how the genius who made modern farming possible also invented the gas that was used to murder millions in the Holocaust.

‘Daunting but doable’: Europe urged to prepare for 3C of global heating | Climate crisis | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/feb/16/europe-climate-advisory-board-3c-global-heating

Maarten van Aalst, a member of the European Scientific Advisory Board on Climate Change (ESABCC), said the continent was already “paying a price” for its lack of preparation but that adapting to a hotter future was in part “common sense and low-hanging fruit”.

“It is a daunting task, but at the same time quite a doable task. It’s not rocket science,” said van Aalst, who used to lead the climate centre at the International Red Cross and Red Crescent and is now the director general of the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI).

The ESABCC describes current efforts to adapt to rising temperatures as “insufficient, largely incremental [and] often coming too late” in a new report that advises officials to prepare for a world 2.8-3.3C hotter than preindustrial levels by 2100.

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Weather extremes in Europe in recent years have at times surprised climate scientists with their strength and adaptation experts with their lethality as rising temperatures have warped the climate.

Heavy rains supercharged by climate breakdown killed 134 people in Germany’s Ahr valley in 2021 and 229 people in the Valencia region of Spain in 2024. Across the continent, summer heat kills many tens of thousands of people each year, with studies attributing between half and two-thirds of the death toll to the rise in temperatures caused by fossil fuel pollution. Last year’s wildfires, meanwhile, torched more of Europe than scientists have ever recorded.

Last week, Portugal was urged to draw up climate adaptation plans as the country was hit by an unprecedented series of storms that killed at least 16 people and caused an estimated €775m (£675m) of damage.

The global extent of the grassland biome and implications for the terrestrial carbon sink | Nature Ecology & Evolution
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-025-02955-6

New research shows how weak the global data on grasslands have been and still is:

"Here we demonstrate this data vulnerability in grasslands, which are critical to C cycling but whose estimated distribution has varied by >50 million km2 (3.5–42% of the Earth’s terrestrial surface). Comparing multiple high-resolution land cover products with expertly annotated grassland data from six continents, we show sources of mapping error and discuss C implications based on 2023 United Nations (UN) FAO estimates. Past misidentification arose from inconsistent definitions on grassland identity and classification flaws especially relating to woody plant cover. "

Governments must fix ‘faulty radar’ in economic climate models as storm approaches, scientists warn - Carbon Tracker Initiative
https://carbontracker.org/governments-must-fix-faulty-radar-in-economic-climate-models-as-storm-approaches-scientists-warn/

Flawed economic models mean climate crisis could crash global economy, experts warn | Green economy | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/feb/05/flawed-economic-models-mean-climate-crisis-could-crash-global-economy-experts-warn



This report by the Carbon Tracker Initiative and the University of Exeter makes clear that the economic modeling currently employed by many governments, regulators, and financial managers greatly underestimates the potential impacts of climate change. What this means is that we are speeding towards Armageddon while wearing rose-tinted glasses.

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"Flawed economic models mean the accelerating impact of the climate crisis could lead to a global financial crash, experts warn.

Recovery would be far harder than after the 2008 financial crash, they said, as “we can’t bail out the Earth like we did the banks”.

As the world speeds towards 2C of global heating, the risks of extreme weather disasters and climate tipping points are increasing fast. But current economic models used by governments and financial institutions entirely miss such shocks, the researchers said, instead forecasting that steady economic growth will be slowed only by gradually rising average temperatures. This is because the models assume the future will behave like the past, despite the burning of fossil fuels pushing the climate system into uncharted territory.

Tipping points, such as the collapse of critical Atlantic currents or the Greenland ice sheet, would have global consequences for society. Some are thought to be at, or very close to, their tipping points but the timing is difficult to predict. Combined extreme weather disasters could wipe out national economies, the researchers, from the University of Exeter and financial thinktank Carbon Tracker Initiative, said.

Their report concludes governments, regulators and financial managers must pay far more attention to these high impact but lower likelihood risks, because avoiding irreversible outcomes by cutting carbon emissions is far cheaper than trying to cope with them.

“We’re not dealing with manageable economic adjustments,” said Dr Jesse Abrams, at the University of Exeter. “The climate scientists we surveyed were unambiguous: current economic models can’t capture what matters most – the cascading failures and compounding shocks that define climate risk in a warmer world – and could undermine the very foundations of economic growth.”

“For financial institutions and policymakers, it’s a fundamental misreading of the risks we face,” he said. “We are thinking about something like a 2008 [crash], but one we can’t recover from as well. Once we have ecosystem breakdown or climate breakdown, we can’t bail out the Earth like we did the banks.”

Mark Campanale, CEO of Carbon Tracker, said: “The net result of flawed economic advice is widespread complacency amongst investors and policymakers. There’s a tendency in certain government departments to trivialise the impacts of climate on the economy so as to avoid making difficult choices today. This is a big problem – the consequences of delay are catastrophic.”

Hetal Patel, at Phoenix Group, which manages about £300bn of long-term investments for its customers, said: “Underestimating physical risk doesn’t just distort investment decisions, it underplays the real‑world consequences that will ultimately affect society as a whole.”

Actuaries predicted in 2025 that the global economy could face a 50% loss in GDP between 2070 and 2090 from catastrophic climate shocks, far higher than previously estimated.

The new report drew on expert judgments from 68 climate scientists from research institutions and government agencies in the UK, US, China and nine other countries. A key finding was that while economic modelling traditionally links climate damages to changes in average temperatures, societies and markets suffer most from extremes, such as heatwaves, floods and droughts.

Another finding was that GDP can mask the full cost of climate damage by failing to account for deaths and ill health, social disruption and degraded ecosystems. GDP can actually increase after disasters owing to spending on recovery, the researchers added.

They said that rather than waiting for perfect models of risk, greater emphasis should be placed on extremes, not just central estimates, and on the vulnerability of the entire financial system. Investors should also speed up the move away from fossil fuels as a fiduciary duty to avoid large future losses, said Campanale.

Current economic models can give estimates of losses that look precise but which the scientists said were wildly optimistic. “Some are saying we’ll have a 10% GDP loss at between 3C and 4C degrees [of global heating], but the physical climate scientists are saying the economy and society will cease to function as we know it. That’s a big mismatch,” Abrams said.

Laurie Laybourn, at the Strategic Climate Risks Initiative, said: “We are currently living through a paradigm shift in the speed, scale and severity of risks driven by the climate-nature crisis. Yet many regulations and government actions are dangerously out of touch with reality.” - Damian Carrington