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The Insurance Industry Is on the Wrong Side of the Legal Battle Against Fossil Fuels
In recent years, insurers have pointed to growing climate risk as the reason for raising rates and dropping coverage. Now, they’re supporting the very industry driving that risk rather than the communities facing it. Why?
Sep 27, 2026
The US Supreme Court opens its new term on October 5 with oral arguments in Suncor v. Boulder—the most consequential climate case it has heard to date. The fossil fuel defendants are trying to block local governments from suing them for climate deception and harm. In an alarming display of corporate allegiance, the nation’s largest property insurance associations have sided with the oil companies seeking to avoid responsibility for climate losses, over the public entities and policyholders footing the growing bill.
In recent years, insurers have pointed to growing climate risk as the reason for raising rates and dropping coverage. Now, they’re supporting the very industry driving that risk rather than the communities facing it. Why?
Suncor v. Boulder and the Demand for Fossil Fuel Accountability
From establishing cooling centers and flood protection plans to equipping firefighters and emergency responders, communities are shouldering the mounting costs of climate change. The burden is both untenable and unfair. That’s why a growing number of states and local governments have turned to courts to make fossil fuel companies pay their share for driving the climate crisis.
Fossil-fueled climate destruction threatens human life, health, the economy, and vital ecosystems on which all depend. That reality should incentivize insurers to break free from fossil fuels faster and protect the public from climate peril.
Of the nearly three dozen such suits pending across the US, Suncor v. Boulder is the first to reach the Supreme Court.
The case, brought by the city and county of Boulder, alleges Suncor and ExxonMobil knowingly contributed to climate change for decades by producing fossil fuels while deceiving the public about their dangers. Boulder argues the companies should be on the hook for the resulting climate harms and the rising costs of adapting to a warming world.
Rather than address the legal claims on their merits, the fossil fuel defendants have instead sought to get the case thrown out. They are urging the Supreme Court to bar Boulder’s suit on the grounds that it aims to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, something they claim only federal law can do. But as the plaintiffs and dozens of supporters explain, Boulder is seeking to recoup the costs of local harm and to hold the fossil fuel defendants accountable for misleading consumers, not pollution controls.
If the court rules for the defendants, it could close the door not just on this suit but others like it nationwide—leaving the public and local governments, rather than the companies that caused the harm, to keep covering the costs.
Who’s Backing the Fossil Fuel Defendants?
Nearly 70 friend-of-the-court briefs were filed in the case—many, like the Center for International Environmental Law’s, supporting the plaintiffs. Others, however, came in on the side of the fossil fuel industry. Among the 38 briefs backing Suncor and ExxonMobil, Consumer Watchdog found that 25 of them have documented financial ties to fossil fuel companies or the dark-money networks behind decades of climate denial.
Three major US insurance trade associations—the American Property Casualty Insurance Association (APCIA), the Complex Insurance Claims Litigation Association, and the Reinsurance Association of America—also submitted a brief in support of the defendants. These trade groups weren’t part of Consumer Watchdog’s analysis. But insurers, including members of these very associations, have their own story to tell of financial entanglement with the fossil fuel industry.
Betting on the Problem
Like others helping the fossil fuel industry dodge accountability, the insurance sector has well-documented financial ties to oil and gas companies. Property and casualty insurers hold a growing financial stake in fossil fuels—the same products causing the climate losses that are driving insurers to hike premiums and withdraw coverage.
As of 2023, the US property and casualty insurance industry held $84.6 billion in fossil fuel investments. The share of insurers’ portfolios tied up in fossil fuels climbed from 3.8% in 2014 to 4.4% by 2023.
Every premium dollar that flows into those investments comes from policyholders, many of whom are already struggling to afford coverage in fire- and flood-prone areas. While warning it can no longer absorb climate risk, the insurance industry is betting on the very companies creating that risk.
The Real Insurability Crisis
In their published brief in support of the Suncor defendants, the insurance associations argue that allowing state tort claims like Boulder’s could make it harder for fossil fuel companies to get liability insurance—potentially creating uncertainty and instability in the insurance market.
But they ignore the actual uncertainty and instability facing tens of millions of homeowners and tenants in the US who are bearing the brunt of climate losses and a deepening insurance crisis. In 2025, the US saw more than 23 billion-dollar weather events. The country racked up the lion’s share of global insured losses last year from what the industry continues to call “natural catastrophes,” which include climate-intensified events.
Citing climate risk, insurers are raising rates, dropping policies, and widening the climate protection gap. Home insurance premiums in the US grew by almost 50% between 2020 and 2024—more than double the rate of inflation. And since 2018, insurers have dropped more than 1.9 million home insurance contracts nationwide, contributing to a rising number of uninsured homes.
Yet the insurance industry opposes efforts to make the fossil fuel companies responsible for rising climate risk pay their fair share for resulting climate harm. If insurers are sounding the alarm, it should be about the reality of climate change, not the prospect of climate accountability.
What Are Insurers Afraid of?
It’s no wonder fossil fuel companies are seeking to stay out of court. The facts are not on their side—and neither is the law. Why, then, are the insurers?
Make no mistake, real climate accountability would be destabilizing for the fossil fuel industry. But climate change is already more destabilizing—for everyone. The inevitable and transient upheaval that will come from holding polluters responsible for the harm they have caused will be far less destabilizing than the predicted and irreparable impacts of unchecked climate change.
Fossil-fueled climate destruction threatens human life, health, the economy, and vital ecosystems on which all depend. That reality should incentivize insurers to break free from fossil fuels faster and protect the public from climate peril, rather than insulate polluters from the climate costs they have knowingly unleashed.
The message to the insurance industry is clear: Insure our collective future and make fossil fuels a thing of the past.
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How We Can Halve the Rate of Global Warming in 15 Years
Cutting climate super pollutants and upping efforts to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere can help stave off disaster.
Sep 24, 2026
Among the three of us, we have 15 decades of high-level experience in climate science, policies, and actions, and we have never been more alarmed than we are at this moment. The United Nations has just officially declared that the world has failed in limiting global warming to a safe level. During the last decade, heat-trapping pollutants nearly doubled the rate that heat is being added to the planet—a rate that will push temperatures across the 1.5°C threshold in five years or less and breach the first barrier of the Paris Agreement. This will further destabilize natural climate systems and amplify weather extremes, which are already costing the world economy more than $ 2 trillion annually. At the current rate of warming, the global temperature is likely to cross 2°C in about 15 years, the outer limit of the Paris Agreement, taking us into a climate not witnessed by homo sapiens, ever.
High altitudes in the Tibetan-Himalayan region and the Alps are already warming at two to three times the global average (which may be implicated in the recent Nepal-Tibet floods that left 1,400 confirmed dead and 5,000 missing). Other disastrous impacts of reaching 2°C include the transition of the Amazon from a forest into a savanna. The health impacts could be the worst of all. At 2°C, heat deaths in 2050 could reach a staggering 2 billion in a worst-case analysis by actuarial experts at Exeter University.
If that weren’t bad enough, a new scientific study raises the possibility that the current rate of warming, if continued, could eventually shut down the ocean current called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation—AMOC. The Gulf Stream is a major part of this vital ocean current, which plays a dominant role in winter weather over North America and Europe. Worryingly, AMOC is already slowing down.
We know of no other measures of thinning the heat-trapping blanket to provide the rapid cooling needed to allow us to survive and thrive.
At today’s rate of warming AMOC could begin to collapse at warming as low as 2°C, which could be crossed by the time today’s infants are in college. Impacts would be punishing, stranding heat in the already too hot tropics, while robbing northern countries of heat now transported north to keep temperatures temperate, leading to bitter winters. If AMOC collapses, currently a low-probability event, it could trigger massive forced internal and international displacements, ushering in the world’s largest crisis of forced migration ever.
Crossing 2°C will trigger other irreversible impacts too, further amplifying warming through the loss of sea ice and glaciers. The depletion of ice and snow will make the planet darker, resulting in more absorption of incoming solar radiation, amplifying warming by 25% or more.
The good news is that we can avoid this fate if we cut the rate of warming quickly—by 50% within 15 years, which is feasible in two parts.
First, we need to cut the super pollutants of climate. These include hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), methane, lower-atmosphere ozone, and black carbon soot from diesel and cooking smoke. These short-lived climate pollutants are called super pollutants because they are tens to thousands of times more potent than carbon dioxide in heating the planet and are currently contributing more than half of the warming the planet has witnessed. However, and this is crucial—they dissipate from the atmosphere within two decades, whereas carbon dioxide, the best-known climate pollutant, takes multiple decades to a century to significantly decline.
Technologies exist to quickly and affordably reduce the super pollutants. In many cases we have the policies and laws as well. HFCs are being cut through the 2016 Kigali amendment to the successful Montreal Protocol—the treaty that has slowed warming by several decades while restoring the protective stratospheric ozone layer.
Methane pollution is getting more attention recently, including from Prime Minister Mia Mottley of Barbados, who is recommending a binding international agreement—inspired by the Montreal Protocol—to prevent the oil and gas industry from wasting natural gas, which is 90% methane. Other local solutions can reduce or even eliminate methane from landfills, starting by reducing food waste. There are many other such practical, off-the-shelf solutions.
The immediate task at hand is to thin the invisible heat‑trapping blanket. If we implement super-pollutant solutions before 2030 and scale to full potential in less than 10 years, the rate of warming can be reduced by 30% by 2040s. But we need to cut the rate of warming by half, i.e. 50%. The super pollutants should be our first target, because the technologies and policies are there and once we put them into action, the blanket thinning will start immediately.
Second, as the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report affirms, we need to focus on removing CO2. The human-made CO2 blanket up there weighs about 1,200 billion tons, and we have to thin it by 5%, or 60 billion tons. Nature-based solutions are currently removing about 2 billion tons per year. Chemical-biological-technological solutions are actively pursued. Scaling to 4 billion tons per year would remove the needed tons in 15 years.
Together, these two measures would halve the rate of warming from today’s nearly 0.4°C per decade to less than 0.2°C per decade. We know of no other measures of thinning the heat-trapping blanket to provide the rapid cooling needed to allow us to survive and thrive. Even with rapid actions, climate disruption will continue for decades. We must make people and ecosystems resilient. Since we are all interconnected, we require global cooperation to make people and ecosystems climate resilient. Toward this global cooperation, we propose creating: One Million Climate Advocates to empower the public to support local and national actions; and One Million Climate Champions to connect civil society, governments, and industries to turn climate mitigation policies into actions at the local to the global level.
It’s time to move forward, always forward. Adelante, Siempre Adelante. Those were among the last words Pope Francis offered one of us (Suárez-Orozco). Not forward when the politics are perfect or opposition relents. Forward now, with the urgency of a species that has finally seen the iceberg but still has time to turn the tiller toward safety.
This article was first published by Legal Planet.
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Extreme Heat Caused by 'Super El Niño' Could Kill Over 450,000 People in Coming Months: Report
"This is such a large number that it can be numbing, but it is made up of parents and children, grandparents and neighbors, people going to work, caring for families, and living their lives."
Sep 23, 2026
A report published Wednesday by researchers at the University of Chicago's Climate Impact Lab estimates that extreme heat fueled by this year's "Super El Niño" event could kill more than 450,000 people in the coming months, in addition to deaths from drought, wildfires, and other extreme weather.
The report notes that "anomalously warm conditions" caused by the record-shattering El Niño—which refers to the warming of ocean-surface temperatures in the Pacific—"will resemble the higher temperatures that climate change is projected to deliver 20 years in the future... and will lead to 44% more extremely hot days than we would expect in a normal year."
Climate Impact Lab researchers projected that the extreme heat will result in 451,000 more lives lost through February 2027, compared to a typical year.
"This is about 65 times larger than the 6,800 people believed to be dead or missing from the recent Nepal flash flood," the new report observes. "With current forecasts suggesting El Niño will remain in place through spring 2027, we expect all of these numbers to grow even higher, particularly as impacts such as higher-than-average temperatures and heat-related deaths will linger into June and July."
Nigeria is expected to see the largest number of El Niño-related deaths over roughly the next five months, at 31,400. Indonesia, Sudan, India, and Brazil will see more than 10,000 deaths each through February, according to the Climate Impact Lab.
"This is such a large number that it can be numbing, but it is made up of parents and children, grandparents and neighbors, people going to work, caring for families, and living their lives,” Michael Greenstone, a co-founder of the Climate Impact Lab, said in a statement. "This report allows decisionmakers to see exactly where emergency actions can be taken now to save tens of thousands of lives in the coming months."
The impact lab's report describes this year's El Niño as a "postcard from our future," noting that "it is bringing temperatures climate change is projected to deliver 20 years in the future."
"Twenty years from now, once today’s extreme temperatures become the new normal," said Tamma Carleton, faculty head of research for the Climate Impact Lab and co-author of the new report. "We don’t want to be in a constant state of emergency."
The report was released shortly after United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres warned in his final address to the UN General Assembly in New York on Tuesday that "a supersized El Niño" is "speeding straight for humanity."
"As tragic events have shown, impacts are arriving sooner, hitting harder, and spreading further than many anticipated," said Guterres. "Now we face a near-certain breach of the 1.5°C limit."
On Saturday, The Washington Post observed, the average ocean-surface temperature in a portion of the central equatorial Pacific Ocean reached 3.05°C, "the highest peak sea surface temperature anomaly on record."
"The record anomalous reading occurred two months earlier in the year than the previous peak in November 2015 and an El Niño in 1877 that contributed to a famine that wiped out 3 to 4% of the global population," the Post added.
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Intensified by Fossil Fuel-Driven Climate Crisis, 'Godzilla-Level' El Niño Smashing Records Ahead of Peak
"As long as we continue to burn fossil fuels," said one scientist, El Niño "occurs on an increasingly hotter baseline, making it much more difficult for communities to deal with the consequences.”
Sep 22, 2026
Although “El Niño comes and goes," as one climate scientist said of the naturally occurring warm-weather phenomenon on Monday, experts are in agreement that this year is different—with meteorologists already recording a temperature rise of 3.07°C in the Pacific Ocean, putting it at a statistical tie with November 2015, when El Niño caused the ocean to warm by 3.08°C.
The temperature rise is not expected to peak until November and December, when an average of 14 models examined by Zeke Hausfather of Carbon Brief and Berkeley Earth found that a temperature rise of 4.1°C is forecast.
The event has been underway since June, Hausfather wrote, and has been gathering strength "faster than any previous event on record."
Scientists typically track the strength of El Niño—which leads to heavy rainfall, higher global temperatures, and other extreme weather as warmer Pacific waters are pushed to the south—using the Niño 3.4 anomaly, or ONI, which determines how much hotter the central Pacific is compared with a 30-year rolling average.
A temperature rise above 2.0°C is considered a "very strong" El Niño, and scientists and policymakers are already calling this year's event a "super El Niño," with some experts using the terms "Godzilla-level" and "jaw-dropping" to describe the weather conditions that can be expected in the coming months due to the warmer climate.
As Common Dreams reported late last month, planetary heating driven by fossil fuel emissions is intensifying El Niño, while the naturally occurring phenomenon can in turn worsen the impacts of the climate emergency.
In the last 40 years scientists have recorded a 16% increase in the strength of El Niño events, according to a study published in Science last month. They've also gotten 36% stronger than they were before industrialization began.
The "double whammy," as The Guardian called it, could make 2027 the hottest year ever recorded, blowing through heat records that have just been set this year—and that have been linked to the deaths of people around the world from extreme heat and flooding.
“This event is a huge redistribution of energy in the climate system and is dangerous because it is unfolding on top of a much warmer, human-influenced climate system," climate scientist Friederike Otto of Imperial College London told The Guardian. “So, in many places around the world we will see never-before-experienced heat extremes, with all their consequences on health, food security, and water stress."
Despite the fact that El Niño predates the human-caused climate emergency, Otto said, "as long as we continue to burn fossil fuels, it occurs on an increasingly hotter baseline, making it much more difficult for communities to deal with the consequences.”
This year's event is likely to be the most intense El Niño in 1,000 years, reported to The Guardian, with hotter and drier conditions already linked to deadly wildfires in Indonesia and crop losses in Central America and the Caribbean region due to drought conditions. Rice production this season is expected to fail in Indonesia, according to the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability at Harvard University.
As the Southern Hemisphere's summer months approach, southern Africa and Australia are at heightened risk of wildfires and droughts as well. Meanwhile, cocoa production could be damaged by extreme rainfall in parts of South America.
"All strong El Niño events on record have continued to strengthen well into the winter—and the models are in near-unanimous agreement that this one will, too," wrote Hausfather at Carbon Brief. "If the forecast holds, the current event will peak between November and January at a level far beyond any event previously observed in the instrumental record."
In California on Monday, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency in an effort to prepare communities for El Niño's impacts in the coming months, which could include coastal flooding and heavy snow in mountain regions.
Hausfather noted that strong El Niño events like those that occurred in 1997 and 2015 were also "associated with hundreds of billions of dollars in damages globally."
"This event," he told The Guardian, "is leaving those past ones in the dust."
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‘The Diagnosis Is Unambiguous’: 2026 Planetary Health Report Finds Pressure Mounting on Earth Systems
"Seven of nine planetary boundaries are transgressed, and pressure on all seven is at its highest recorded level," said one scientist.
Sep 21, 2026
Like other recent warnings from climate scientists, the message sent by the latest Planetary Health Check report on Monday was clear: "We need to move fast," as the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, the group behind the report, said.
"Seven of nine planetary boundaries are transgressed, and pressure on all seven is at its highest recorded level," said Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute (PIK).
The report finds that seven measures of the Earth's health are no longer within the "safe operating space": ocean acidification, freshwater change, land system change, climate change, modification of biogeochemical flows, introduction of novel entities, and change in biosphere integrity.
Just two markers, stratospheric ozone depletion and the increase in atmospheric aerosol loading, have shown improvement over the last decade, said the Planetary Boundaries Science Lab at PIK.
“The diagnosis is unambiguous," said Boris Sakschewski, the lead author of the report. "Pressure is rising across every planetary boundary already outside the safe operating space. It means that the risk of large-scale, persistent, and potentially irreversible change is increasing, while our margin for error in tackling these problems is shrinking."
The scientists behind the report emphasized that with recent news regarding the state of the planet's crucial coral reefs, forests, and extreme weather events like heatwaves and flooding, it should come as no surprise that the Earth's boundaries have been transgressed, as continued fossil fuel emissions have caused runaway planetary heating.
Earlier this month, United Nations scientists said the planet can no longer avoid at least a temporary temperature rise above 1.5°C over preindustrial levels.
Oceans have also become so warm that stressed coral reefs have less and less time to recover from climate damage, as Common Dreams reported last month, and a UN report last year found that the world's governments are not moving fast enough to end the destruction of forests.
Last month and the summer of 2026 both set heat records, with extreme heat killing more than 1,000 people across Europe, and wildfires spreading across the continent and Canada. Record-breaking heat was also recorded in parts of Asia and the Middle East.
In June, the UN Children's Fund found that nearly every child on Earth is now exposed to at least one climate hazard driven by fossil fuel emissions, including flooding, heatwaves, and drought.
"Pakistan’s 2025 monsoon floods affected more than 6.9 million people," said PIK. "Global ocean heat content reached a new record in 2025, with Hurricane Melissa rapidly ramping up to a Category 5 hurricane and striking Jamaica after passing over exceptionally warm seas. From January 2023 to September 2025, bleaching-level heat stress impacted about 84.4% of the world’s coral reef area, making it the largest global coral-bleaching event observed to date."
Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim, chair of Planetary Guardians, implored readers of the Planetary Health Check report to "read that list again: Pakistan, the Caribbean, Europe, the reefs beneath our oceans. These are not separate emergencies; the planet is telling us, in every region at once, that it is out of balance."
"As chair of Planetary Guardians, I hear this same story wherever I go, whether from a pastoralist watching the rains fail season after season or a coastal community watching the sea rise," said Ibrahim. "The 2026 Planetary Health Check puts data behind what communities on the frontlines already know from living it. We do not have the luxury of treating these as separate crises any longer.”
Rockström emphasized that while "we do not have the luxury of time... we do have the knowledge, capacity, and solutions to change course."
"Accelerating action to return to the safe operating space across all planetary boundaries is essential to protect lives and livelihoods," said Rockström, "and to deliver on the promise of shared future prosperity."
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'We Are Spending Our Reserves,' WMO Chief Warns as UN Drops Global Water Report
"The buffers that have historically protected water security—snow, ice, groundwater—are eroding in many regions on a timescale of years, not overnight," the agency leader said, stressing "a sense of urgency, not panic."
Sep 17, 2026
The world's water cycle "has become more erratic and unpredictable," and recent trends have "serious implications for people and economies in the future," the United Nations' weather agency said Thursday, announcing the release of its annual report on one of the planet's most important natural resources.
Speaking at the launch of the "State of Global Water Resources 2025," World Meteorological Organization (WMO) Secretary-General Celeste Saulo explained that "some parts of this cycle—such as precipitation, river flow, soil moisture—are fast. They respond to weather within hours, days, weeks. Others, like groundwater and glaciers, are slow. They accumulate or decline over seasons to decades or longer."
"Traditionally, these slow reserves have acted as the planet's savings account: a buffer that absorbs bad years so that a single drought or a single dry season does not translate directly into a water crisis," she continued. "One of the central stories of the 2025 report is what is happening to that savings account. And the simple answer is that we are depleting it. We are spending our reserves."
According to the WMO's new report, terrestrial water storage—or the total stored in groundwater, lakes, rivers, soil moisture, vegetation, ice, and snow—has been falling since the mid-2010s. Saulo stressed that "this is not a single bad year, but it is a persistent, decadelong signal."
The agency also found that 2025 was among the driest years for river discharge worldwide in more than three decades, with below-normal flows over a third of the global basin area—and for the seventh straight year in a row, the number of river basins with "normal" conditions was in the minority.
Last year was also the fourth straight to feature widespread glacier loss across all regions. The WMO noted that the losses from 2023-25 could fill about 560 million Olympic-sized swimming pools—or about a third of annual freshwater withdrawals.
The report also "shows that water-related extreme events continue to devastate communities and economies," Saulo noted, highlighting the Early Warnings for All Initiative. "Over the past five years, Asia and Africa have accounted for at least half of all reported hydrological extreme events and more than 80% of associated deaths. And precisely these regions often lack the observations necessary for forecasts and early warnings."
Her comments came a day after the death toll from the flooding disaster in Tibet and Nepal topped 1,400. Experts have emphasized that tragedy's connection to the fossil fuel-driven climate crisis, with University of Pennsylvania professor Michael Mann writing that the "glacial collapse and deluge... was not a freak weather event; it was the structural failure of a mountain itself, nature's latest commentary on the deadly consequences of human-caused planetary warming."
That warming has also intensified the naturally occurring warm phase of a key pattern in the Pacific Ocean called El Niño, according to a study published last month. The WMO chief warned in her Wednesday remarks that "the strengthening El Niño will increase the extremes—drought in some countries and floods in others."
The agency's latest forecast, also released Wednesday, anticipates an "exceptionally high likelihood of nearly 100%" that the warm phase will persist through to February 2027. UN Secretary-General António Guterres said that "El Niño is being supersized before our eyes. The science leaves no room for doubt: The planet is in uncharted waters, and those waters are heating up."
Only when the last glacier has melted and the last reservoir has dried up will you realize that you can't drink gasoline…#climatecrisis#climatecollapse
[image or embed]
— Jürgen Döschner (@jdoeschner.bsky.social) September 17, 2026 at 4:01 PM
While the related releases generated calls for action, Saulo said that "it is not all bad news. Some regions showed improvement in 2025," pointing out that "parts of South America saw a partial recovery in water storage during 2025 after a severe multiyear deficit," while "Central and Southern Africa maintained much-above-normal water levels across several major lakes."
Still, action is needed. As Saulo put it: "The State of Global Water Resources report calls for a sense of urgency, not panic. The buffers that have historically protected water security—snow, ice, groundwater—are eroding in many regions on a timescale of years, not overnight. We have a genuine window for action: expanding early warning coverage; investing in the hydrological monitoring infrastructure; and opting for water management policies to address both water supply and use/overuse."
"My concluding message is that this report exists because members share their data and their science," she said. "This level of understanding—global, standardized, comparable year to year—did not exist a decade ago. It is the product of sustained international cooperation under WMO's mandate. And my last call is for all of you to continue to invest in it."
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On the Heuristics of Fear: The Ecological Catastrophe Scenario
If the right decisions are not made in the coming years and drastic systemic changes are not implemented, the destruction of planetary habitats can no longer be stopped.
Sep 02, 2026
The escalation of the current crisis-ridden conditions in the areas of climate change, the economy, international security, and the development of democracy—leading to dystopian future scenarios—need not occur in this form. However, there is a real possibility that they could occur if humanity fails to bring about a paradigm shift, makes the wrong decisions, and continues its destructive behavior toward the planet.
Learning from the ‘Anticipated Danger'
The construction of negative scenarios in the sense of an anticipated possibility of dystopian development can certainly serve a constructive purpose.
In his book The Imperative of Responsibility, the philosopher Hans Jonas developed what he called a “heuristics of fear,” by which he meant that potential undesirable developments should be recognized in all their severity and menace and described in drastic terms commensurate with their presumed magnitude. According to Jonas (1979/2015, 7), this enables a society to look the potential risks squarely in the eye and thereby resolve to acknowledge its own responsibility for the planet and the fate of future generations:
What can serve as a compass? The anticipated danger itself! In its flash of lightning from the future, in the foreshadowing of its planetary scope and its human depth, the ethical principles from which the new duties of new power can be derived first become apparent.
Of course, this negative vision must be compatible with the developments already analyzed; it must not, therefore, be plucked out of thin air, even if not all the information needed for an assessment is yet available. Heuristics is a creative thought process based on estimates, assumptions, and calculations.
Immersing oneself in a likely future situation and sensing the potential of a future catastrophe can provide insights for preventive action. It is possible that the fear of a catastrophic planetary scenario could lead to a systemic shift in course and to responsible decisions.
The Inadequacy of the Paris Climate Agreements
From the spectrum of multiple crises—which are certainly interconnected—this article will focus on the disrupted relationship between humanity and nature and heuristically develop it into a negative scenario.
David Spratt and Ian Dunlop (2019, 6) predict that even if the 2015 Paris Climate Agreements were fully implemented, stable climate conditions would still not be expected. In particular, climatic feedback effects would render the Earth largely uninhabitable for human civilization by the end of the century. Even if the Paris climate targets were met, a warming of 5°C would be expected by the year 2100, with devastating consequences for life on Earth.
It must also be taken into account that not all countries have accepted the Paris Agreements or, in some cases—such as the U.S. under Trump—have since withdrawn from them.
Fires, Storms, Overheating, and Floods
A worst-case scenario for such an increasingly hot biosphere must anticipate a rise in wildfires. Vast areas of the Earth will begin to burn. Fire walls driven by massive gusts of wind will devour everything in their path: trees and bushes, houses, animals, and people. Such firestorms are beyond human control and cannot be fought; they depend on heavy rainfall, and it is unclear whether such rain will fall in the burning regions at all due to climate shifts. The result will be the desolation of entire regions, leading to humanitarian, ecological, and financial problems on a global scale. The fires of 2025 and 2026 are already offering a glimpse of what lies ahead for humanity.
Future average temperatures in the Persian Gulf are projected to reach 50-60°C, meaning that for the average person, human life here will no longer be possible—or will only be possible in artificially cooled spaces. Even in the countries of the Global North, mass mortality is beginning due to overheated living environments. Initially, this will affect older people and those who are already ill, and will then spread to people who would otherwise be considered healthy. Circulatory shock, overheating, and dehydration will then also affect younger people.
It is undisputed that sea levels will rise due to the melting of the poles, the warming of seawater, and the accompanying melting of Arctic ice.
However, a potential average rise of 2.5 meters by 2100 does not represent the extreme level of sea-level rise. During storm surges in particular, the rise in sea level can be several times this value and lead to flooding deep into continental areas. This will also affect the Global North.
Islands, coastal regions, and low-lying inland areas will be flooded, destroying living conditions there and, in turn, triggering migration. Not only will island groups disappear, but large parts of countries such as Bangladesh and India will also be flooded, triggering mass exoduses. In this context, the rise in sea level, combined with the monsoon rains in this region—which are already becoming increasingly devastating—will have a particularly dangerous effect.
The thawing of Arctic and Siberian permafrost, through the associated release of carbon dioxide and methane, will lead to a massive increase in global warming and abruptly intensify all related processes.
In other parts of the world, climate shifts are causing air masses with extremely different temperatures to collide, resulting in devastating storms such as tornadoes and hurricanes. Houses, cars, animals, and people are swept up into the air and smashed to pieces. Skyscrapers collapse, and the infrastructure—including electricity, water, and gas lines, as well as the internet—is irreparably destroyed. Radioactivity is released from destroyed nuclear power plants; it circulates in the Earth’s atmosphere, falls as rain, and will lead to increased rates of cancer and birth defects in humans and animals.
Catastrophic Impact on Social and Political Development on a Global Scale
Massive migration—in the form of mass exoduses or mass migrations—will be triggered by climate change. Migration to date should be viewed, at best, as the tip of the iceberg in this context, as billions of people will set out as refugees if global warming continues unchecked. It is not difficult to imagine the conflicts—including military confrontations—that will arise from these upheavals in the struggle for ecologically intact regions.
Global warming will lead to massive crop failures and associated famines. The global agricultural food system will collapse. The struggle for food and survival will lead to massive price increases, looting, and military conflicts. The call for a heavy hand, for authoritarian leaders, and for police-state methods will grow louder even in democracies.
Far-right governments will attempt, in the interests of their constituencies, to deny climate change and continue to rely on the exploitation of fossil fuels.
The struggle for drinking water will intensify, on the one hand due to increasing periods of drought and, on the other, due to the growing trend toward profit-driven privatization of water sources. Privatized water sources will be guarded by militarized security forces against raids by groups of thirsty people. In drought-stricken areas, people will die of thirst—especially those who no longer have the financial means to purchase water, a scarce and therefore increasingly expensive commodity.
Spratt and Dunlop (2019, 9) describe the societal consequences of climate change even at the 3°C level. States and societies will be overwhelmed and will face extreme collective stress:
The flooding of coastal communities around the world—particularly in the Netherlands, the United States, South Asia, and China—has the potential to call regional and even national identities into question. Armed conflicts between nations over resources such as the Nile and its tributaries are likely, and a nuclear war is possible. The societal consequences range from heightened religious zeal to utter chaos. In this scenario, climate change triggers a lasting change in humanity’s relationship with nature.
Furthermore, if a UN in need of strengthening fails to dissuade unscrupulous governments from the generationally selfish destruction of the rainforest for the purposes of livestock ranching, soybean cultivation, the search for mineral resources, or land speculation, then this, too, will not only destroy the Earth’s lungs but also bring about a drastic climate shift.
Wars raging globally and emissions from explosions and fires exacerbate climate change while simultaneously preventing the affected regions from taking effective measures against this climatic dystopia. The military in active service is becoming the largest institutional global destroyer of the climate.
These are just a few of the developments addressed so far. Threats such as temperature changes and the resulting diversion of the Gulf Stream, the narrowing of the temperature difference between the North Pole and the equator—which leads to a weakening of the jet stream—the release of methane trapped in the seabed, insect die-offs due to the increased use of pesticides in agriculture, the destruction of clean drinking water due to overfertilization of fields, as well as plastic pollution in the oceans and the demise of all life in increasingly larger marine regions are likely to represent additional ecological tipping points that will further exacerbate the massive problems already mentioned.
When Will the “Point of No Return” Be Reached?
The question is when the global situation will reach a point from which there will be no return to ecological balance for many generations to come.
The progression of overpopulation, coupled with unchecked economic growth and rampant consumerism, leads to increased ecological exploitation of the Earth system under the conditions of an increasingly overcrowded planet.
However, it is to be expected that population pressure is not primarily responsible for environmental destruction, but rather, in particular, the irresponsible consumption of resources by the wealthier segment of the world’s population (Roettig 2021).
The “point of no return” is likely to be crossed soon. Once the biosphere’s planetary responses develop an uncontrollable momentum of their own that turns against human civilization and the conditions necessary for all life on Earth, it will be too late—both for prevention and for mitigation.
Over the past 20 years, the planet’s resilience has reached its breaking point; in some areas, it has demonstrably been exceeded.
The Doomsday Clock makes this clear. According to the Doomsday Clock—founded and calculated in 1947 by Albert Einstein, among others—we are already 85 seconds away from the destruction of the planet’s foundations as of February 2026. In 1991, we were still 17 minutes away from destruction.
Eco-Imperialist and Systemic Causes
Violent competition over the use of resources is intensifying as more people’s basic needs—and, in particular, their luxury needs—must be met. Not only the struggle for clean drinking water and food, but also the struggle for lithium, cobalt, uranium, etc., is leading to violent conflicts between different groups of people and regions. German political scientist Hans-Jürgen Burchardt criticizes the fact that the rich industrialized nations are the main contributors to climate change, yet the Global South bears the brunt of its consequences.
Thus, following the phase-out of nuclear power, Germany’s energy transition is also made possible by cheap coal imports from Colombia. There, mining takes place in highly environmentally damaging open-pit mines; entire communities are forcibly displaced for this purpose, and human rights violations are commonplace. Even the much-lauded green economy, which relies on electric mobility, would not be possible without the lithium reserves in the Andes. Locally, however, lithium mining robs residents of their livelihoods.
The war in Ukraine, too, must be viewed not only from a geostrategic perspective but also through an eco-imperialist lens, in which Russia and the US are attempting to divide up Ukraine’s natural resource deposits among themselves.
Conclusion: The Need for a Positive Vision of Social Development
The outline presented here of a dystopia of planetary development—based on a negative ecological scenario—should have made it very clear: If the right decisions are not made in the coming years and drastic systemic changes are not implemented, the destruction of planetary habitats can no longer be stopped. If, in addition to a biosphere in decline, further stressors arise—such as potentially runaway generative AI, authoritarian and aggressively acting nation-states at war with one another, and the threat of a nuclear inferno—this will likely spell the end of humanity. No more and no less.
The ecological dystopia outlined here does not have to come to pass. Everything depends on how responsibly and competently the current generation—which is currently active in the global centers of power—will act, and on the corrective influence that civil society resistance can exert in this regard.
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A Deadly Glacier Collapse... and All the Future Damage We Could Still Forestall
How do we translate these horrors (of which there will be far far more as the growing El Niño envelops the world in record temperatures) into political change here in the US?
Aug 31, 2026
It’s been harder than usual for me to write these past few days, and that’s because the glacier collapse and subsequent calamity along the Tibet-Nepal border hit very hard. As it happens, I’ve stood in that border crossing where you’ve watched the giant wave obliterate… everything in a split second. I’d spent weeks in the high, dry, cold of Buddhist Tibet, and then crossed into the lush humid chaos of Hindu Nepal, and so I can summon up some sense of what it must have been like, and of the people who died almost before panic could grip them.
More, I knew it was coming. Not on that day, of course, but I’d been in Tibet 20 years ago partly to report on what we already knew was an enormous threat: the fallout from the rapid melt on what is sometimes called Earth’s Third Pole. The danger of these collapses, and the blocked lakes they can create, were well-known to scientists; they happen often, but usually in unpopulated valleys. I’m not going to concentrate on these reports—there’s been much good coverage in the last few days. Jonathan Watts, for instance, does the important service of laying out the exact link between the climate crisis and the collapse:
Two days before the collapse, the ground temperature hit its highest point in the last two years, according to Dr. Hamish Pritchard, a glaciologist with the British Antarctic Survey, whose team had sensors 6 miles (10 kilometers) away from the site.
“These high temperatures would have weakened the snowpack, filled crevasses with water, and thawed the bonds between ice and rock that hold these glaciers in place,” he told the Science Media Centre.
Jeff Berardelli tracks the ongoing increase in temperature in the region (it’s been about twice the global average, up 5°F since 1940). And Jonathan Mingle provides a very fine account of his own travels in the region, and of the similar smaller incidents that have happened across the years.
I want simply to ask you to focus on the image at the top of this newsletter, taken by a Chinese mountaineer named Zhia Yitie, that shows the collapse—that’s the stream in the center of the picture that looks like a waterfall. And what I want you to notice is how much ice is still there—to the naked eye it looks like 99% of the glacier remains. And this is just one glacier of perhaps 50,000 across the Himalayas and Hindu Kush. My point is: There is infinitely more damage to be done, or to put it another way there is infinitely more damage we might still be able to forestall. And that’s what should concern us.
In short: In a world beginning to turn away from oil, the United States has become the biggest force trying to insure we keep pouring carbon into the atmosphere. If the rest of that ice is going to fall off that Nepali glacier, this will be why.
Just to do the math for a minute: On average, Nepalis produce about four-tenths of a ton of carbon emissions annually, compared with about 14 tons for an American. More than 99% of the country’s electricity comes from hydropower (though much of that capacity was wiped out in last week’s floods). They are not causing the crisis that is killing them: We are.
Indeed, even as the mud was settling over the ruins of Himalayan villages we took the next steps to insure these catastrophes would continue, announcing an “agreement” with the Venezuela that we control to dramatically increase its oil production. As Al Jazeera put it:
Shortly before the deal was announced, energy analyst Gregory Brew likened reports of the impending agreement to oil concessions sought by the British Empire in the early 20th century.
“Such a thing is without precedent,” Brew wrote on social media. “The closest thing would be BP [British Petroleum] (back when it was majority owned by the UK govt) claiming ownership of Iraqi and Iranian oil reserves pre-WWII.”
Trump himself has embraced the colonial-era slogan “Manifest Destiny”, as part of his plan for a “growing nation” that “increases our wealth” and “expands our territory."
This is literal colonialism, in the service of President Donald Trump’s Big Oil donors—it’s pretty much precisely what we did to Iran’s Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953, triggering a set of bloody events that continue to this day.
And it comes, of course, as we continue to sabotage renewable energy—this week’s installment, thanks to great investigative reporting from Evan Halper, finds the White House paying a European firm to cancel yet more wind leases, on the condition that the money be “reinvested” with a big Trump donor building export facilities for liquefied natural gas on the Louisiana coast.
In short: In a world beginning to turn away from oil, the United States has become the biggest force trying to insure we keep pouring carbon into the atmosphere. If the rest of that ice is going to fall off that Nepali glacier, this will be why.
Which means that the question I promised to raise in last week’s newsletter is more important than ever: How do we translate these horrors (of which there will be far far more as the growing El Niño envelops the world in record temperatures) into political change here?
To be clear: I don’t mean before November’s midterms. The issues on which that will be fought—democracy, data centers, dementia—are baked in by this point. Gas prices will play a crucial role too, which means that anyone challenging the GOP should be pointing out the absurdity of our energy policy: The polling is clear that Americans hate Trump’s attacks on wind and solar. I’ll be spending the rest of the fall out on the trail with the Third Act and Gray Pac, mobilizing voters in key races; for the moment the goal is just to reestablish some beachhead for sanity in DC.
But physics is giving us very little time now, and so the next set of elections in this country will be, I think, our last real chance to make the sea change—replacing oil and gas with sun and wind—that is our best hope for limiting warming. And the El Niño will be peaking just as the Democratic candidates start jockeying for position. So it is not too early to start trying to get them thinking about all this.
Matt Pawa, the lawyer who helped launch much of the litigation to hold oil companies responsible for global warming, has helpfully provided a three-part summation of why Democrats should run in part on climate. It is lawyerly in the best sense of the word, which is to say filled with fact—he finds the long-term polling data, offers the historical examples dating back to 1988, and brings it home with what I think will be the most salient argument: Clean energy is potentially very cheap energy:
We are in an utterly extraordinary moment of energy transformation. Yet powerful corporations are keeping us stuck burning stuff from the dinosaur era to make energy. It’s dangerously heating up the climate and causing extreme weather. It kills millions of people who breathe bad air. It poisons our water. And yet renewable energy is now the cheapest way to make energy. This is not a moment for climate silence. It’s a moment for action.
You can see this dynamic playing out right now in the UK, which isn’t in the midst of an election but—since a parliamentary system means a kind of daily political battle—is nonetheless trying to figure out how to grapple with the shock they got this summer: week after week of blistering heat, and the drought that came with it. The green and pleasant land spent most of the summer brown and sweaty. (Not only that, but it turns out that shoppers shop less if the temperature gets above 25°C, and so businesses are grump too).
It’s all put the Labour government in a difficult spot. On the one hand, they’d like to appease the Murdoch press and open up more of the North Sea to drilling. This would accomplish nothing to reduce energy prices, since oil prices are set on a global market and there’s not enough crude left off UK shores to influence that number. But it would send a signal of “moderation,” which is the same kind of signal that American politicians—New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, say—have tried to send with their embrace of gas. (It turns out, new reporting shows this week, that Hochul was also lobbied persuasasively by a natural gas front group).
But the problem is that danged heat, and the upsurge in concern, anger, and activism it’s causing among voters—it turns out that that latent hope for a workable future emerges quickly once the temperature rises. And so we’ve seen in recent weeks a spate of new data comparing the climate damage from North Sea oil drilling to the economic benefit: “The economic damage caused by the carbon pollution from the oil and gas produced would be between £119bn and £336bn in the coming decades, compared with the £28.7bn in value to the UK estimated by Adura, the fossil fuel company promoting the new fields.”
As Matthew Taylor lays out in a long and useful essay, it’s become a crucial question in UK politics, with the surging Greens on one side and the Conservatives and far-right Reform on the other:
The leader of Reform UK, Nigel Farage, and the Conservative Party leader, Kemi Badenoch, have called for a massive expansion of drilling in the North Sea, claiming they would reverse the ban on new licences if elected.
In a speech this year, Farage declared that the UK should be “self-sufficient in gas.” Badenoch followed with the promise of a growing UK oil and gas industry that would “ensure our energy security for generations to come.”
At the moment, the new Labour leader Andy Burnham is trying to figure out if there’s a straddle available. His new environment secretary, the wonderfully named Angela Eagle, tried to bluster her way through in a recent column for The Guardian but I suspect that promises of “healthier ecosystems” to fight fire risk won’t cut it. People are generally sophisticated enough by now to know that the real question hinges on fossil fuels.
I don’t know how the UK decision on drilling will fall next week—again, there’s a lot that’s been baked in by now—but I do know that ambitious American politicians would be well-advised to get ahead of this storm. I don’t think it’s hard. The basic argument goes like this:
"Donald Trump and the GOP are corrupt and stupid to insist that the future lies with fossil fuel. I will stop coddling Big Oil and instead start making it much easier to America to run on energy from the sun and wind. Instead of shutting down wind farms we’ll be opening them up; instead of tariffing solar panels we’ll be making it simple for Americans to stick them on the roof and balcony. This is our best chance to cut the risk and cost of catastrophe (not to mention rising insurance prices). It’s also our best chance to let Americans enjoy the plummeting energy prices that other parts of the world have begun to see. And it may be the only path we have to restoring even a little of our standing in a world that now sees us as a reckless and rogue state."
If nothing else, prospective candidates should be thinking of it as a way to El Niño-proof their campaigns. And they should get on it sooner rather than later.
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'Where Things Get Tricky': Daniel Swain on the Ocean, El Niño, and Climate Change
A climate scientists weighs in on what we can and can't expect from an El Niño supercharged by the climate crisis.
Aug 30, 2026
On Saturday August 22, the world’s ocean surface temperature was the hottest it’s ever been recorded—just a fraction under 70°F. As the ocean continues warming, I and Vicki Nichols Goldstein of the Inland Ocean Coalition interviewed weather and climate scientist Daniel Swain who is affiliated with the University of California’s California Institute for Water Resources and the National Science Foundation’s National Center for Atmospheric Research. We spoke with him on our Rising Tide Ocean Podcast. Here is an excerpted version of that conversation:
David Helvarg: Before we get into our rapidly heating ocean and its impacts onshore and off, give us some background.
Daniel Swain: I started out as a weather geek, even as a kid. When I went to UC Davis for an undergraduate degree in atmospheric science, I thought I might become a federal meteorologist with the National Weather Service. But at some point, I realized that some of the really big questions, both intellectually interesting and societally important, were at this weather-climate interface. We can predict the weather really well, but the climate is changing. What does that mean for the weather?
So, I came into climate from the weather side—day-to-day weather changes and operational forecasting. I still get to wear that weather-geek hat pretty regularly, even though today I would call myself a climate scientist. I exist at that boundary between weather and climate, which of course is not very distinct to begin with. It’s all the same fluid atmosphere and the same fluid ocean, just different densities.
If funding becomes dependent on whether a research topic aligns with the political priorities of whoever happens to be president, that fundamentally changes the scientific enterprise. It is difficult to overstate how destructive and dangerous that could be.
I’ve been known to call the ocean, “the atmosphere, but upside down and wet.” That comes from an Earth-system perspective. The atmosphere, ocean, biosphere, and cryosphere (frozen water) aren’t really distinct elements. That becomes more obvious with each passing decade as we try to predict and model these different Earth systems and discover we can’t do it very well unless we connect them. We can’t predict the atmosphere very well unless we connect it to the ocean, and vice versa.
Helvarg: So, let’s start at that large scale. People don’t necessarily think of the ocean as a driver of climate and weather, even though it covers more than 70% of the planet.
Swain: Exactly. We live on a water planet even though we don’t really think of it that way. Fundamentally, that is what Earth is. The fact that more than 70% of the planet is covered by water means that long-term variations in the atmosphere are largely driven by what’s happening in the ocean.
Climate change, as we think about it, is actually, to a first order, ocean warming. The majority of the accumulated heat is going into the oceans. Then it affects the atmosphere as some of that heat comes back out of the ocean and comes back to bite us on land. One way to think about global warming is that it is primarily a tremendous amount of extra energy accumulating in the oceans and then spilling over into the remaining third of the Earth that isn’t ocean covered.
Vicki Nichols Goldstein: We know that about 90% of the excess heat is being stored in the ocean. Why can the ocean absorb so much heat compared to land?
Swain: First, because most of the planet is ocean. If you’re warming the whole sphere, most of that warming is going to involve the ocean simply because that’s most of the planet. But there’s more to it. Water has an enormous specific heat capacity. It can absorb an incredible amount of energy compared to an equivalent mass of soil or rock. It can also absorb that energy over a very deep layer.
On land, we talk about geology over millions of years—mountains building and collapsing, continents colliding and diverging. But over a few decades, that’s not happening to a meaningful degree. The ocean moves much more rapidly. An individual water molecule at the surface can end up in the atmosphere through evaporation or thousands of feet down in the deep ocean within a couple of years. The ocean is therefore very good at transferring energy from the surface to the depths.
It’s not just that the ocean covers 70+% of the planet and absorbs a lot of the increased warmth at the surface. Through vertical circulation and currents, it transfers some of that heat downward and redistributes it across the planet—longitudinally, latitudinally, and vertically.
The atmosphere overturns very quickly. A cumulus cloud can go from your house up to 20,000 feet in 20 minutes during a thunderstorm. The ocean takes longer, but significant movement can still occur over weeks, months, and years. On land, comparable movement can take millennia to millions of years. That’s why the ocean and atmosphere are tightly coupled. They interact causally, bidirectionally, and continuously.
Helvarg: People also have a hard time grasping how rapidly this change has occurred. Since we began burning fossil fuels just a few centuries ago, we’ve been changing the physical nature of the ocean—its temperature, chemistry, circulation, even its color. What does increasing ocean heat mean in terms of marine heatwaves?
Swain: Marine heatwaves really just mean anomalously warm ocean temperatures. Usually, we’re talking about the surface ocean because that’s what we can observe most readily and where these heatwaves are often most pronounced. We’re seeing them emerge with much greater frequency, intensity, and spatial connectedness, year after year and decade after decade. Unfortunately, I don’t see that stopping.
We’re going to see continued acceleration in marine heatwaves for as long as planetary warming continues. And marine heatwaves can have a lot of staying power because the oceans evolve more slowly than the atmosphere. You get a blob of unusually warm water and, except under unusual circumstances, you can’t just blow it away with a strong wind the way you might end a heatwave over land. A large marine heatwave can take days, weeks, or months to dissipate because there’s so much thermal inertia in the ocean.
Ironically, that persistence is also part of why the ocean helps us predict the atmosphere. The ocean varies more slowly. It has more “memory,” and therefore its variations can exert a persistent influence on the atmosphere. At a fundamental level, as the air warms, the ocean beneath it is going to warm too—although it will warm more in some places than others because of ocean currents, circulation, and atmospheric conditions.
Goldstein: We hear a lot about La Niña and El Niño. What is actually happening during that transition?
Swain: El Niño and La Niña are parts of a broader pattern of natural ocean variability called the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, or ENSO.
El Niño is the warm phase. La Niña is the cool phase. Essentially, we’re talking about whether the eastern tropical Pacific, particularly the ocean off Peru and South America, is warmer or cooler than usual. That’s a region where there’s normally a lot of coastal upwelling, with cold water moving vertically upward from the deeper ocean. Despite being in the tropics, this keeps coastal temperatures relatively moderate.
During El Niño, that cold-water upwelling weakens as warm water from the western Pacific literally sloshes eastward, sometimes thousands of miles. The prevailing easterly winds that help drive the upwelling can also weaken or even reverse. When the eastern tropical Pacific warms substantially, that is fundamentally El Niño.
But the reason it matters globally is that ENSO performs something like a thermostat function in the global climate system. During La Niña, heat gets stored below the surface in the tropical Pacific. During El Niño, some of that accumulated heat is released from the ocean into the tropical atmosphere, where it spreads through the rest of the climate system.
Swain: Because El Niño unleashes stored energy from the tropical ocean, it increases the global average temperature. And in a warming world, when you put a big El Niño on top of long-term global warming, you increase the likelihood of new global temperature records. It also accelerates the hydrologic cycle.
The warmer the air, the greater the potential swings between extreme wet and extreme dry. Warmer air can hold more water vapor. It doesn’t necessarily do so everywhere, but it raises the ceiling on how much moisture can be present. That raises the ceiling on extreme precipitation events, but also on extreme drought and wildfire conditions in different places and at different times. Some parts of the world see increased flood risk during El Niño. Other places see increased drought risk. El Niño shifts weather patterns while global warming increases the potential magnitude of whatever those patterns produce.
Helvarg: Here on the West Coast, my experience with El Niño has generally meant more storminess. How strong is that relationship?
Swain: El Niño in general exerts a meaningful but sometimes hard-to-pinpoint influence on California because it’s just one of many relevant factors. But with a very strong El Niño, I think it’s a different story.
This is a message I’ve tried to communicate to people in emergency management and policy. Recent El Niño events haven’t always produced the canonical effects people expected. The 2015-16 El Niño, for example, was one of the strongest ever observed in the tropical Pacific, but we did not see extremely strong impacts in California. Some people took that to mean, “Well, what does El Niño really mean anyway?” My answer is: not much if it’s weak. But if it’s strong or very strong, it should significantly tilt the odds.
It can mean a significantly warmer California nearshore ocean. It can mean temporarily elevated local sea levels, increasing the risk of coastal flooding and marine heatwave impacts. And in winter it can significantly increase the odds of a wetter-than-average California winter, potentially even a very wet winter with increased flood risk.
But if you asked me for one single predictor in the global climate system that could provide three to six months’ advance notice of the potential for a very wet California winter, it would be a very strong El Niño.
Goldstein: What does that mean for mountain snowpack in California and across the West?
Swain: This is where things get tricky because precipitation means different things in a warming world. You can have a winter that isn’t particularly dry and still have very low snowpack because it’s simply too warm. Some places can actually be wetter than average and still have unusually low snowpack. So, a strong El Niño may increase precipitation in California, including the Sierra Nevada, and could bring needed water to parts of the Colorado River Basin.
But more precipitation doesn’t necessarily mean more snow (if it rains). We may see above-average precipitation in some mountainous regions while still seeing below-average snowpack. That can help alleviate drought, but it’s a very different picture from a cold, snowy winter.
Helvarg: Jumping from the Pacific to that other still-significant ocean, the Atlantic: Strong El Niño events are supposed to suppress Atlantic hurricanes. Is that right? And why?
Swain: This is a good example of global warming and El Niño pushing in different directions. El Niño usually decreases Atlantic hurricane activity, mainly because of its effect on vertical wind shear rather than temperature. Tropical cyclones don’t like strong winds at upper levels of the atmosphere because those winds can literally decapitate storms—shear them apart. El Niño tends to increase wind shear in the Atlantic hurricane development region, making it more difficult for hurricanes to form and strengthen.
But there’s a big asterisk. If you have record-warm waters in places like the Gulf of Mexico, and a storm manages to develop during a brief period when wind shear is low, you can still get an extremely strong hurricane. So, a strong El Niño may suppress the overall hurricane season, while exceptionally warm ocean water can supercharge a storm that does manage to develop.
That’s a good example of natural variability—El Niño and the Southern Oscillation—interacting with the decidedly unnatural long-term warming trend to produce outcomes we haven’t seen very often before. It’s also why, despite all our advances in prediction and historical data, science still has a lot to learn.
Goldstein: That brings us to science itself. The Trump administration is changing Office of Management and Budget rules in ways that could make federal research funding reflect presidential priorities. How does that affect climate research and communication?
Swain: This goes far beyond weather, climate, and oceans. It affects any domain requiring expert knowledge to make important decisions—from health to public policy to research funding. There has been a lot of focus on research funding, but it’s important to emphasize that this affects everything.
The degree of alarm in academic and research institutions is significant. Changes that politicize the federal grant system could make us vastly less able to understand how the world works and prepare for future contingencies—whether storms, floods, pandemics, or geopolitical disturbances. It also becomes much harder for people in science to remain nonpartisan and simply focus on their research.
If funding becomes dependent on whether a research topic aligns with the political priorities of whoever happens to be president, that fundamentally changes the scientific enterprise. It is difficult to overstate how destructive and dangerous that could be.
Goldstein: That’s why people have to follow these issues, raise their voices, and try to hold the line.
Helvarg: Democracy doesn’t guarantee that we’ll be good ocean stewards or base public policy on sound science. But without democratic means, it becomes far harder to move forward on existential challenges like climate change and ocean protection.
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The World Is Burning and Time Is Not Our Friend
We may despair and grieve for our planet, and we can try to “do what we can” as individuals. But we must act politically as well, or we—and especially our children and grandchildren—are doomed.
Aug 28, 2026
If you’ve paid any attention to the news lately, you’re aware of massive forest fires raging in Western North America and Europe this summer. It appears as if the world is on fire.
In an important sense, the world is burning, in two related ways. In the United States, as of this writing, there are 661 active wildfires covering 4.7 million acres, largely concentrated in the western states. British Columbia is currently experiencing 180 active wildfires, nearly half of which are burning out of control. So far this summer, fires in the US and Canada have burned 25% more land than the 10-year average, according to national wildfire centers.
This summer, Europe experienced two unprecedented wildfires in France and Spain, and fires have also raged in Greece and other nations. Fires are also raging in Indonesia and Australia.
If you’ve managed to see video of wildfires, you know that the living things in these forests are being burned alive. Tens of thousands of people are evacuated from their homes, which are often totally destroyed. The courageous firefighters, too, can suffer from profound health issues, even death, for their efforts. Fires also spew carbon and toxic pollution into the atmosphere.
We happen to live in the very nation whose president pursues policies that greatly accelerate rising global temperatures by promoting the expansion of fossil fuels while simultaneously slashing renewable energy options.
But the world is also burning up from unprecedented heatwaves over the past several years. You’ve probably heard of temperatures well over 100°F in the southeastern and southwestern United States. Northern parts of the country have also experienced unprecedented heatwaves, with a heat index over 100.
In a recently published New York Times article titled “Bigger and Hotter Fires are Erasing America’s Great Forests,” wildfires from Oregon to New Mexico “sweep through forests that have not evolved to survive such high-intensity blazes and a warmer climate.” Researchers contend that the shift to hotter fires reflects a permanent ecosystem shift with profound consequences for people, wildlife, and the planet.
The hotter fires leave a wasteland of spike shrubs rather than new tree seedlings. As trees disappear, spring snows melt faster leaving water shortages in their wake. The increasingly arid climate dries the soil and pulls moisture from the plants, making them more susceptible to wildfire. Since forests absorb planet-warming carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, as the Times put it, ‘The loss of conifer forests today means a hotter tomorrow.”
In sum, rising global temperatures and wildfires are interdependent. As hotter forest fires increase, greenhouse gases increase, heating the planet, producing extreme weather events like droughts, which themselves increase the spread of wildfires.
Several years of record heatwaves around the world are but one product of global climate change—along with melting ice caps and glaciers, rising sea levels, warming oceans, severe droughts, and more extreme storm weather: torrential rains and floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, and the like. People the world over are bearing the impact of global warming, albeit some far more than others.
However, we happen to live in the very nation whose president pursues policies that greatly accelerate rising global temperatures by promoting the expansion of fossil fuels while simultaneously slashing renewable energy options. Climate change is a profound political issue that calls on us to act together to realign our politics and our economy.
How we do that is the challenge.
Despite President Donald Trump’s continual harangue that climate change is a hoax, only 15% of Americans believed climate change is not happening, according to a 2025 Yale Program on Climate Change Communication poll. A full 69% believed it is happening, and 60% or more believed it is causing droughts, wildfires, and extreme heat. And that was before this summer.
Yet an article written by film director Adam McKay (Don't Look Up) in the August 6 edition of Current Affairs focuses on “The Gargantuan Lie that is Collapsing the World’s Climate.” In McKay’s words, the lie is “told worldwide by hundreds of thousands of institutions, elected officials, many universities, legacy news, some large nonprofits and eventually… by ourselves, to ourselves.”
He sums up that lie as “when it comes to climate change… we have more time.” We don’t.
The climate has already temporarily passed the 1.5°C target of the Paris Accords. With the likelihood that this year’s El Niño will push next year’s average warming to 1.7°C, it will likely cause agricultural failure and food shortages, leaving us staring at the catastrophic 2°C increase we are currently hurtling toward.
As Robert Hunziker wrote of McKay’s article, climate change is an “existential threat to all forms of life sooner rather than later, meaning current lifetimes.”
We are clearly facing many crises—horrific wars, unaffordable healthcare, income and wealth inequality, inflation, fascist-like repression, and targeting of vulnerable peoples. How can we cope with the impending doom suggested by the well-established scientific data on climate change, especially when elected officials virtually ignore the climate crisis and mass media treat critical events as isolated crises?
We may feel tempted to block or ignore messages like these, and powerful corporate interests are perpetually encouraging us to do exactly that. We may despair and grieve for our planet, and we can try to “do what we can” as individuals. But we must act politically as well, or we—and especially our children and grandchildren—are doomed. We must demand action from public officials; we can oppose data centers and boycott corporations that profit from climate damaging activities; we can join with others around the world, but we must act. Individually and collectively. We need to talk to each other.
More than any other crisis, our shared global climate has the potential to unite us on the path toward political and economic transformation.
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