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How AI is improving climate forecasts

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Climate scientist Tapio Schneider is delighted that machine learning has taken the drudgery out of his day. When he first started modelling how clouds form, more than a decade ago, this mostly involved painstakingly tweaking equations that describe how water droplets, air flow and temperature interact. But since 2017, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) have transformed the way he works.

“Machine learning makes this science a lot more fun,” says Schneider, who works at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. “It’s vastly faster, more satisfying and you can get better solutions.”

Conventional climate models are built manually from scratch by scientists such as Schneider, who use mathematical equations to describe the physical processes by which the land, oceans and air interact and affect the climate. These models work well enough to make climate projections that guide global policy.

But the models rely on powerful supercomputers, take weeks to run and are energy-intensive. A typical model consumes up to 10 megawatt hours of energy to simulate a century of climate, says Schneider. On average, that is about the amount of electricity used annually by a US household. Moreover, such models struggle to simulate small-scale processes, such as how raindrops form, which often have an important role in large-scale weather and climate outcomes, says Schneider.

The branch of AI called machine learning — in which computer programs learn by spotting patterns in data sets — has shown promise in weather forecasting and is now stepping in to help with these issues in climate modelling.

“The trajectory of machine learning for climate projections is looking really promising,” says computer scientist Aditya Grover at the University of California, Los Angeles. Similar to the early days of weather forecasting, he says, there is a flurry of innovation that promises to transform how scientists model the climate.

But there are still hurdles to overcome — including convincing everyone that models based on machine learning are getting their projections right.

Copy cats

Researchers are using AI for climate modelling in three main ways. The first approach involves developing machine-learning models called emulators, which produce the same results as conventional models without having to crank through all the mathematical calculations.

Think of a conventional climate model as a computer program that can calculate where a ball will land on the basis of physical factors, such as how hard the ball is thrown, where it is thrown from and how fast it is spinning. Emulators can be considered as equivalent to a sports player who learns the patterns in all those modelled outputs and is then able to predict, without crunching through all the maths, where the ball will land.

In a 2023 study, climate scientist Vassili Kitsios at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Melbourne, Australia, and his colleagues developed 15 machine-learning models that could emulate 15 physics-based models of the atmosphere1. They trained their system, called QuickClim, using the physical models’ projections of surface air temperature up to the year 2100 for two atmospheric carbon concentration pathways: a low and a high carbon emission scenario. Training each model took about 30 minutes on a laptop, says Kitsios. Researchers then asked the QuickClim models to forecast temperatures under a medium carbon emission scenario, which the models had not seen during training. The results closely matched those of the conventional physics-based models (see ‘AI climate model works at speed’).

AI climate model works at speed. Graphic showing similarity between a physics-based climate model and the AI emulator.

Source: Ref. 1

Once trained with all three emissions scenarios, QuickClim could quickly predict how global surface temperatures would change during the century under many carbon emission scenarios — about one million times faster than the conventional model could, says Kitsios. “With traditional models, you have less than five or so carbon concentration pathways you can analyse. QuickClim now allows us to do many thousands of pathways — because it’s fast,” he says.

QuickClim could one day help policymakers by exploring multiple scenarios, which would take conventional approaches simply too long to simulate. Models such as QuickClim will not replace physics-based models, Kitsios says, but could work alongside them.

Another team of researchers, led by atmospheric scientist Christopher Bretherton at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Seattle, Washington, developed a machine-learning emulator for one physics-based atmospheric model. In a 2023 preprint study2, the team first created a training data set for the model, called ACE, by feeding ten sets of initial atmospheric conditions into a physics-based model. For each set, the physics-based model projected how 16 variables, including air temperature, water vapour and windspeed, would change over the next decade.

After training, ACE was able to iteratively use estimates from 6 hours earlier in its projections to make forecasts 6 hours ahead, over a time span of up to a decade. And it performed well: better than a pared-down version of the physics-based model that runs at half the resolution to save on time and computing power. In that comparison, ACE more accurately predicted the state of 90% of the atmospheric variables, ran 100 times faster and was 100 times more energy-efficient.

Study author and climate scientist Oliver Watt-Meyer at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence says he was surprised. “I was impressed by the result. These early findings suggest that we’ll be able to make these models that are very fast, accurate and able to probe a lot of different scenarios,” he says.

Firm foundations

In the second approach, researchers are using AI in a more fundamental way, to power the guts of climate models. These ‘foundation’ models can later be tweaked to perform a wide range of downstream climate- and weather-related tasks.

Foundation models hinge on the idea that there are fundamental, possibly unknown, patterns in the data that are predictive of the future climate, says Grover. By picking up on these hidden patterns, the hope is that foundation models might be able to churn out better climate and weather predictions than conventional approaches can, he says.

In a 2023 paper3, Grover and researchers at the tech giant Microsoft built the first such foundation model, called ClimaX. It was trained on the output from five physics-based climate models that simulated the global weather and climate from 1850 to 2015, including factors such as air temperature, air pressure and humidity, simulated on timescales from hours to years. Unlike emulator models, ClimaX was not trained towards the specific task of mimicking an existing climate model.

After this general training, the team fine-tuned ClimaX to perform a wide range of tasks. In one, the model predicted the average surface temperature, daily temperature range and rainfall worldwide from input variables of carbon dioxide, sulphur dioxide, black carbon and methane levels. This task was proposed in 2022 as a benchmark for comparing AI climate models, in a study by atmospheric physicist Duncan Watson-Parris at the University of California, San Diego, and his colleagues4. ClimaX predicted the state of temperature-related variables better than did three climate emulators built by Watson-Parris’s team3. However, it performed less well than the best of these three emulators in predicting rainfall, says Grover.

“I like the idea of foundation models,” says Watson-Parris. But these early findings don’t yet prove that ClimaX can outperform conventional climate models, or that foundation models are intrinsically superior to emulators, he adds.

In fact, it will be difficult to convince people that any machine-learning model can outperform conventional approaches, says Schneider. The true state of the future climate is unknown and we can’t wait for decades to see how well the models are performing, he says. Testing climate models against past climate behaviour is useful, but not a perfect measure of how well they can predict a future that’s likely to be vastly different from what humanity has seen before. Perhaps if models get better at seasonal weather prediction, they’ll be better at long-term climate predictions, too, says Schneider. “But to my knowledge, that’s not yet been demonstrated and that’s no guarantee,” he says.

Moreover, it is hard to interpret the way in which many of the AI models work, a problem known as the the black box of AI, which could make it hard to trust them. “With climate projections, you absolutely need to trust the model to extrapolate,” says Watson-Parris.

Best of both

A third approach is to embed machine-learning components inside physics-based models to produce hybrid models — a sort of compromise, says Schneider.

An aerial view of thick snow covering houses and trees

Snow cover is hard for conventional climate models to predict, but hybrid models that blend machine-learning and physics-based techniques have successfully simulated snow cover and other small-scale processes.Credit: Mario Tama/Getty

In this case, machine-learning models would replace only the parts of conventional models that work less well — typically the modelling of small-scale, complex and important processes such as cloud formation, snow cover and river flows. These are a “key sticking point” in standard climate modelling, says Schneider. “I think the holy grail really is to use machine learning or AI tools to learn how to represent small-scale processes,” he says. Such hybrid models could perform better than purely physics-based models, while being more trustworthy than models built entirely from AI, he says.

In this vein, Schneider and his colleagues have built physical models of Earth’s atmosphere and land that contain machine-learning representations of a handful of such small-scale processes. They perform well, he says, in tests of river-flow and snow-cover projections against historical observations5. “We’ve found machine-learning models can be more successful than physical models in simulating certain phenomena,” says Schneider. Watson-Parris agrees with that assessment.

By the end of the year, Schneider and his team hope to complete a hybrid model of the ocean that can be coupled to the atmosphere and land models, as part of their Climate Modeling Alliance (CliMA) project.

Similar efforts to create ‘digital twins’ of Earth are being developed by NASA and the European Commission. The European project, called Destination Earth (DestinE), is entering its second phase in June this year, in which machine learning will have a key role, says Florian Pappenberger, who leads the forecast department at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts in Reading, UK.

The ultimate goal, says Schneider, is to create digital models of Earth’s systems, partly powered by AI, that can simulate all aspects of the weather and climate down to kilometre scales, with great accuracy and at lightning speed. We’re not there yet, but advocates say this target is now in sight.

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Climate models can’t explain 2023’s huge heat anomaly — we could be in uncharted territory

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When I took over as the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, I inherited a project that tracks temperature changes since 1880. Using this trove of data, I’ve made climate predictions at the start of every year since 2016. It’s humbling, and a bit worrying, to admit that no year has confounded climate scientists’ predictive capabilities more than 2023 has.

For the past nine months, mean land and sea surface temperatures have overshot previous records each month by up to 0.2 °C — a huge margin at the planetary scale. A general warming trend is expected because of rising greenhouse-gas emissions, but this sudden heat spike greatly exceeds predictions made by statistical climate models that rely on past observations. Many reasons for this discrepancy have been proposed but, as yet, no combination of them has been able to reconcile our theories with what has happened.

For a start, prevalent global climate conditions one year ago would have suggested that a spell of record-setting warmth was unlikely. Early last year, the tropical Pacific Ocean was coming out of a three-year period of La Niña, a climate phenomenon associated with the relative cooling of the central and eastern Pacific Ocean. Drawing on precedents when similar conditions prevailed at the beginning of a year, several climate scientists, including me, put the odds of 2023 turning out to be a record warm year at just one in five.

El Niño — the inverse of La Niña — causes the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean to warm up. This weather pattern set in only in the second half of the year, and the current spell is milder than similar events in 1997–98 and 2015–16.

However, starting last March, sea surface temperatures in the North Atlantic Ocean began to shoot up. By June, the extent of sea ice around Antarctica was by far the lowest on record. Compared with the average ice cover between 1981 and 2010, a patch of sea ice roughly the size of Alaska was missing. The observed temperature anomaly has not only been much larger than expected, but also started showing up several months before the onset of El Niño.

So, what might have caused this heat spike? Atmospheric greenhouse-gas levels have continued to rise, but the extra load since 2022 can account for further warming of only about 0.02 °C. Other theories put forward by climate scientists include fallout from the January 2022 Hunga Tonga–Hunga Ha‘apai volcanic eruption in Tonga, which had both cooling effects from aerosols and warming ones from stratospheric water vapour, and the ramping up of solar activity in the run-up to a predicted solar maximum. But these factors explain, at most, a few hundredths of a degree in warming (Schoeberl, M. R. et al. Geophys. Res. Lett. 50, e2023GL104634; 2023). Even after taking all plausible explanations into account, the divergence between expected and observed annual mean temperatures in 2023 remains about 0.2 °C — roughly the gap between the previous and current annual record.

There is one more factor that could be playing a part. In 2020, new regulations required the shipping industry to use cleaner fuels that reduce sulfur emissions. Sulfur compounds in the atmosphere are reflective and influence several properties of clouds, thereby having an overall cooling effect. Preliminary estimates of the impact of these rules show a negligible effect on global mean temperatures — a change of only a few hundredths of a degree. But reliable assessments of aerosol emissions rely on networks of mostly volunteer-driven efforts, and it could be a year or more before the full data from 2023 are available.

This is too long a wait. Better, more nimble data-collection systems are clearly needed. NASA’s PACE mission, which launched in February, is a step in the right direction. In a few months, the satellite should start providing a global assessment of the composition of various aerosol particles in the atmosphere. The data will be invaluable for reducing the substantial aerosol-related uncertainty in climate models. Hindcasts, informed by new data, could also provide insights into last year’s climate events.

But it seems unlikely that aerosol effects provide anything close to a full answer. In general, the 2023 temperature anomaly has come out of the blue, revealing an unprecedented knowledge gap perhaps for the first time since about 40 years ago, when satellite data began offering modellers an unparalleled, real-time view of Earth’s climate system. If the anomaly does not stabilize by August — a reasonable expectation based on previous El Niño events — then the world will be in uncharted territory. It could imply that a warming planet is already fundamentally altering how the climate system operates, much sooner than scientists had anticipated. It could also mean that statistical inferences based on past events are less reliable than we thought, adding more uncertainty to seasonal predictions of droughts and rainfall patterns.

Much of the world’s climate is driven by intricate, long-distance links — known as teleconnections — fuelled by sea and atmospheric currents. If their behaviour is in flux or markedly diverging from previous observations, we need to know about such changes in real time. We need answers for why 2023 turned out to be the warmest year in possibly the past 100,000 years. And we need them quickly.

Competing Interests

The author declares no competing interests.

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Are we all doomed? How to cope with the daunting uncertainties of climate change

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How doomed are we? It’s a question I have been asked as a climate scientist many times over the years, sometimes with “doomed” replaced by less printable synonyms.

I struggle to answer it every time. It’s not a scientific question, because the terms are not well defined. What does it mean to be “doomed”? And who is “we”?

Maybe some people really mean it in the most extreme and literal sense: whether global warming is going to single-handedly wipe out the human species in the near future. In that case, it’s easy to talk them down. The evidence doesn’t support that prediction.

But I think that they mostly mean to ask a more subtle question. Something like, “as someone who understands the science on climate change better than most people, what is your emotional reaction to it? How scared are you?”

Fear is an emotion. No scientist, nor anyone else for that matter, can tell you the right amount of it to feel. If you knew that you were going to die in six months, how much fear should you feel? And what should you do in response? You wouldn’t go to a scientist for the answers to these questions.

But having facts to inform our feelings can nonetheless be helpful. Scientists can at least provide some of those. We know that the planet is warming because of human-caused greenhouse-gas emissions. We can project the rate of warming with some confidence over at least the next few decades. At a broad level, we know what many of its effects will be. But when we look more closely, and ask about the societal consequences, things get blurrier.

The global increase in temperature is the simplest and most predictable dimension of climate change. It is also the one that scares me the most, partly because the direction of change is so certain and partly because heat is such a persistent and widespread hazard. For the large proportion of the world where it’s already hot during some or all of the year, just a couple of degrees of warming will cause great societal harm. In places with cooler climates, such as much of Europe, severe heatwaves can sometimes be even more deadly, because people there are less accustomed to heat1.

Sea-level rise is another area in which we can be certain about how things are changing, even if we are uncertain about how fast. Extreme rainfall events are becoming heavier and hydrological droughts are worsening owing to faster evaporation of water from hotter soils and plants. Wildfires are becoming more frequent and severe for similar reasons, although they are also affected by forest-management practices.

With some other hazards, however, even the direction of change is uncertain. Individual hurricanes are getting more dangerous, because of strengthening winds and rains, and worsening coastal flooding as sea levels rise. But we don’t know whether hurricanes will become more or less frequent — if the latter, the overall risk they pose might decrease2. We also don’t know whether meteorological droughts — lack of rain — will become more or less prevalent, or what changes we should expect with severe convective storms that produce tornadoes and hail3.

This scientific uncertainty itself is scary, because it means that some things might well get worse faster than we expect. Scientists always expected warming to exacerbate wildfires in the western United States, but I don’t think anyone predicted that it would happen as soon and as badly as it has.

Threat multiplier

Particularly disturbing is the possibility of ‘tipping points’ — large, possibly abrupt and irreversible changes with planetary-scale consequences4, such as the loss of large chunks of the Antarctic or Greenland ice sheets, the emission of large amounts of methane from melted permafrost or sea-floor sediments, or the shutdown of the Atlantic thermohaline circulation. The probabilities of such changes happening soon are all low, but they are hard to estimate with confidence.

Despite all the facts, and the uncertainties in the facts, climate change itself is not really what keeps me up at night. Maybe that’s because my professional training has disconnected me from my emotions on this score. But I think that there is a bigger reason. If we care about climate change because we care about human well-being, then climate change can be only one part of the story.

Humanity faces many existential risks. Wars are being fought today that are already catastrophic for those in the places involved. They could become catastrophic for many more if they expand, especially in a world with many nuclear-armed nations. Loss of biodiversity and ecosystems, for example in the Amazon rainforest, is an immediate, global-scale disaster. The rise of artificial intelligence creates species-level risks, even if our assessment of them is highly speculative. What I personally find the most disturbing is the democratic backsliding in my own country — the United States — as well as in others. This threatens society’s ability to responsibly handle crises, and also tends to create other crises, as authoritarian regimes consolidate and express their power in harmful ways.

Wind turnbines on a Scottish hilltop at sunset

The transition towards cleaner energy sources provides glimmers of climate hope — but citizens must prevail on governments to speed it up.Credit: Getty

Climate is coupled to all these problems, in one way or another. But as scary as many direct consequences of climate change will be at 2 °C of warming or more, the greatest harm, at least in the short term, comes from its role as a ‘threat multiplier’. For example, high rates of migration from low-income countries to the United States and Europe has already been weaponized politically by far-right groups. If warming increases rates of migration, and democracies slide into authoritarianism, is that a result of climate change, or of already polarized and dysfunctional political systems? I don’t know — but I do fear this scenario deeply.

Climate change, in fact, might be one of the more certain components of our future. Social and political developments are even more difficult to predict. Can anyone really predict life on Earth in 2050, let alone 2100, well enough to suggest specific outcomes on a planetary scale, with or without climate change?

And again, even if we did know the planet’s future with perfect certainty, there still wouldn’t be a single right way to feel about it. How good or bad is the present moment, for that matter? The answer to that question depends on our position in the world. In other words: who is “we”?

Emotion and action

The writer Amitav Ghosh is one of the world’s most insightful thinkers on climate, and a friend of mine. He has argued that existential fears about climate change are actually Western fears about the end of colonial power, because in much of the rest of the world — especially for Indigenous people — “catastrophe has already happened”. For people in richer countries searching for the right way to feel about the climate crisis, it’s worth pondering this.

But maybe searching for the right emotion is not the best use of our time. Maybe a more pragmatic and constructive question than “how doomed are we?” is “what should we do about it?”

Emotions and actions are connected, of course. ‘Doomers’ — climate communicators and activists who focus on the potential for catastrophic outcomes — are criticized for their negative messaging, which some say turns many people off and makes them less likely to act. I am sceptical of this. Greta Thunberg’s message has not been limited to expressions of positive emotion, and it’s hard to think of any climate activist who has been more effective. You could plausibly argue that the 2022 US Inflation Reduction Act, which is possibly the most important piece of federal climate legislation in the nation’s history, wouldn’t have happened without the political pressure applied by her and groups that she inspired.

But “what should we do?” is not a scientific question any more than “how doomed are we?” is. It depends on our values, and on the unscientific question of how to effect social change. Again, I don’t claim to have authoritative answers. I do think, however, that climate scientists such as myself should think a little harder about these questions than perhaps we have.

I have a few basic principles that guide my thinking. One is that democracy is crucial to human well-being, and that we should all support political candidates who think similarly, and oppose authoritarianism. In this regard, the United States has a particularly consequential election coming up this November.

Another principle is that, when it comes to the need to stop using fossil fuels, none of the uncertainties that I’ve catalogued really matter. We know that the negative consequences of warming far outweigh the positive, and that we need to cut emissions much faster than we are now5. Future scientific advances won’t change this calculus.

This means that collective, governmental action is essential to speed up the clean-energy transition. As citizens, we should all be politically engaged in ensuring that our countries move further and faster towards this goal. Personal actions that reduce emissions matter too: although insignificant to the global carbon budget on their own, they create a culture that motivates collective action. I am flying less, eating a mostly vegetarian diet and making other low-carbon choices, and I am talking about those choices. I am far from perfect, and I don’t seek to shame anyone else. I know that my steps are largely symbolic. But symbols matter. I take these steps to make climate awareness part of my daily life, and to show to myself and others that I take it seriously.

Treating the symptoms

Climate scientists might consider whether we have a greater responsibility than others, and whether we should seek to bring about positive outcomes through our work. Not all scientific knowledge is relevant to action. As an atmospheric dynamicist, I have come to think that I can have the most positive impact by working not on problems related to climate mitigation — stopping the burning of fossil fuels and other sources of carbon emissions — but on adaptation6.

Mitigation is still absolutely crucial. To make a medical analogy, it’s like treating the underlying cause of the disease. But we already know what needs to be done, and the reasons we aren’t doing it are political, not a consequence of scientific uncertainties.

Adaptation, however, is like treating the disease’s symptoms — the impacts of climate change. These are as diverse and specific as the places and ways in which climate affects society generally. Addressing those impacts requires equally diverse, specific and detailed scientific information. For me at least, this is where it’s possible to work towards answering both “what should we do?” and “how doomed are we?” at the same time.

When a national, state or local government writes a climate-adaptation plan, designs infrastructure or develops a policy that influences development in high-risk areas, it needs specific information about the relevant climate risks. Corporations, non-governmental organizations and community groups need the same, if they are taking any action that accounts for climate risk. Because climate change most sharply manifests in extreme events, information about such events’ probabilities and impacts are needed7.

Most climate information available from academics or governments doesn’t quite meet this need. Climate-risk-assessment tools and data sets developed to inform the insurance and financial industries are expensive and proprietary. As governments face politically difficult decisions regarding adaptation — for example, how much should taxpayers in low-risk areas pay to support protection of those in high-risk areas? — they will need relevant climate information that has been subject to open scrutiny and debate8.

Some uncertainties in climate science are so stubborn that we might not be able to reduce them much in the near term. Scientists such as myself can help by orienting our research towards characterizing the changing hazards, risks and uncertainties, with the granularity and pragmatism needed for decisions on adaptation, in the public domain where all the issues can be hashed out openly.

There are many other answers, of course. The important thing is to remain engaged. That means recognizing that doom is a state of mind, and that uncertainty about the planet’s future is now just part of the human condition. It means doing our best to keep both the climate crisis and the many other dimensions of human and planetary well-being in our view at the same time, both in their global and local dimensions. It means trying to live our values in ways consistent with those realities, as well as we can understand them. And it means recognizing that science has a crucial part to play — but that science can only take us so far.

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China–US climate collaboration concerns as Xie and Kerry retire

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John Kerry, U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, and his Chinese counterpart Xie Zhenhua at the UNFCCC COP28 Climate Conference in Dubai.

John Kerry and Xie Zhenhua’s friendship kept US–China climate negotiations rolling even when the two countries disagreed on other matters.Credit: Fadel Dawod/Getty

Researchers are regarding the parallel retirements of the US and Chinese climate envoys with apprehension, saying that the change could rattle the current co-operative spirit between the world’s two biggest carbon emitters.

John Kerry’s term as US climate envoy ended on 6 March. In January, his counterpart in China, Xie Zhenhua, also officially retired as climate envoy.

The friendship between the two men was seen as integral to maintaining an open door on climate issues, even when the powerful countries did not see eye-to-eye on other matters. “We are indeed turning a page when it comes to the US–China climate relationship,” says Li Shuo, director of the China Climate Hub, Asia Society Policy Institute, in Washington DC. “I hope it still remains one of the rare bright spots.”

But bigger concerns for researchers in the year ahead are US elections and broader geopolitical tensions, which they say could undermine progress towards achieving global climate goals.

A workable, healthy relationship between the United States and China is a prerequisite for collective climate action, says Li. It was crucial to the success of the 2015 Paris climate agreement and will play a defining role as countries finalize their climate commitments, which are expected to be submitted by early 2025, he says.

Climate veteran Xie has been replaced by Liu Zhenmin, a diplomat. In Kerry’s place, John Podesta, a strategist for the Democratic party, has been appointed senior advisor to the president for international climate policy, according to a spokesperson for the US Department of State. The role is not a direct replacement of Kerry’s position, but Podesta will dedicate significant time to international climate policy working with the special climate envoy office, and continue to oversee implementation of the Inflation Reduction Act, a massive climate and tax bill signed by current President Joe Biden in 2022, the spokesperson said.

In a public interview on 1 March, Kerry said that he and Xie will continue to maintain connections through their respective work at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, and Tsinghua University in Beijing.

Good friends

Xie and Kerry’s friendship and understanding of climate issues allowed them to broker agreement, “despite the vicissitudes of the US–China relationship”, says Barbara Finamore, who studies environmental policy and law with a focus on China at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies in the United Kingdom, and who is based in Londonderry, New Hampshire.

Kerry visited China three times as climate envoy, including at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic when China had imposed strict restrictions on travel.

The two found ways to engage even when tensions escalated, says Fan Dai, director of the California–China Climate Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. For example, in August 2022, Nancy Pelosi, then speaker of the US House of Representatives, made a high-profile trip to Taiwan. China responded by imposing a year-long freeze on climate talks with the United States. During that time, Xie and Kerry remained in contact so they could be “instantly ready” to restart official talks when the situation improved, says Dai.

And in November 2023, the two met in Sunnylands, California to re-establish formal dialogue on topics such as energy policy and transportation. During their tenures, they facilitated stronger cooperation between cities, provinces and regions in the two countries. “Their work tried to carve out a special space for climate policy,” says Li.

Xie and Kerry are considered “heroes”, says Gang He, an energy-systems modeller at Baruch College in Manhattan, New York City. “They represent the height of what can be achieved with climate diplomacy.”

Timeline: a decade of US–China climate relations

November 2014: Then-US-President Barack Obama and Chinese president Xi Jinping make a US–China joint announcement on climate change, including setting post-2020 targets, and expanding joint research on clean-energy.

December 2015: John Kerry and Xie Zhenhua represent their nations and sign the Paris climate accord.

June 2017: Then-US-President Donald Trump announces US withdrawal from Paris agreement.

January 2021: Newly elected US President Joe Biden rejoins Paris accord on his first day in office.

January 2021: Biden appoints Kerry special presidential envoy for climate.

February 2021: Xie Zhenhua is appointed China’s special climate envoy.

April 2021: Kerry visits Shanghai, China — the first official in Biden’s administration to make an official visit to China. Following the visit, the two countries sign a joint statement to co-operate on climate change.

April 2021: President Biden hosts a Leaders Summit on Climate, attended by Xi.

August–September 2021: Kerry visits China for a second time as climate envoy.

October 2021: United States and China agree to monitor and control methane emissions at the Glasgow climate meeting.

August 2022: Nancy Pelosi, then -speaker of US House of Representatives, visits Taiwan, and China responds by suspending climate talks.

July 2023: Kerry visits Beijing for the third time as climate envoy.

November 2023: United States and China announce that they will enhance co-operation to address the climate crisis, and restart formal working groups, in a joint statement signed at Sunnylands, California.

December 2023: Xie and Kerry meet at the climate summit in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, their last conference as climate envoys.

January 2024: China officially announces the retirement of Xie, and names his replacement as climate envoy to be Liu Zhenmin.

March 2024: Kerry’s term as climate envoy ends. John Podesta assumes role as Senior Advisor to the President for International Climate Policy, leading the administration’s international climate agenda.

New envoys

Researchers say that Xie’s and Kerry’s departures bring uncertainty, but are reassured by the climate credentials of their replacements. Still, it remains to be seen how well they will work together, they say.

Liu is a long-time foreign-services bureaucrat, who has worked at the United Nations and been involved in climate negotiations since the mid-1990s. “He is not a stranger to climate issues,” says Li. But engaging in detailed negotiations in a highly politicized environment will be a “learning process”, for Liu, says Wang Yi, who studies energy and environment public policy at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institutes of Science and Development in Beijing, and who has been a member of the Chinese delegation in global climate negotiations.

Dai will pay close attention to how Liu responds to unfriendly questions from journalists about China’s climate actions. Xie always responded in a “sophisticated” way, relying on lots of data, she says.

Another challenge for Liu will be co-ordinating multiple agencies, Dai says. Climate change is an issue that cuts across energy, natural resources and the economy. In China, it falls under the remit of the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, which typically has had a narrow scope of environmental protection, pollution and enforcement, says Dai.

Podesta has advised multiple US presidents, including on clean-energy innovation for Biden, and founded a think-tank, the Center for American Progress in Washington DC. “He is brilliant on climate issues,” says Finamore.

The good personal relationship between Xie and Kerry made engagement easier, but behind these individuals are the interests and powers of the countries they represent, says Wang. For now, the United States and China have shown their willingness to co-operate on climate. “They could have decided not to appoint any successors,” says Finamore. “The fact that they are even there is very important.”

US elections

But the two won’t have much time to get to know each other before what researchers see as a major hurdle comes into view — the US presidential election in November 2024. “The biggest uncertainty is American politics,” says Wang.

Biden’s predecessor and 2024 election opponent, Donald Trump, withdrew the United States from the 2015 Paris climate agreement when he was president. “I’m hoping that history will not repeat again,” says Wang. Biden rejoined the agreement on his first day in office.

“We definitely have more hope for a Biden world, because that means more consistency,” says Dai.

Others worry that geopolitical tensions and a focus on competition could scupper progress. “The climate agenda remains rather fragile in the context of the broader US–China relationship,” says Li. “What if another Pelosi-like event happens?”

But researchers say that a lot of progress has been made to formalize ties that should withstand a change in administration and be resilient to geopolitics. Dai lists several initiatives occurring at the sub-national level, including between Kentucky and Shanxi; Seattle and Shenzhen; Houston, Chengdu, New York and Guangzhou. Those, and collaborations between academics and companies create avenues for technical exchange regardless of which party is in power, says Dai.

As He puts it: “if the river freezes over, water will still flow underneath”.

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How five crucial elections in 2024 could shape climate action for decades

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This year, voters in five of the world’s biggest carbon-emitting territories go to the polls. These regions — the United States, India, Indonesia, Russia and the European Union — represent one-third of the world’s population and about the same proportion of human-made carbon emissions.

How the political wind blows from these elections will be crucial in determining whether humanity can correct its current trajectory of dangerous climate warming (see ‘Monstrous emissions’). Current climate policies are likely to result in warming of about 2.7 °C by 2100, according to the group Climate Action Tracker, which monitors global climate commitments — well above the 1.5 °C goal laid out in the 2015 Paris climate accord. Long-term climate commitments could prevent another 0.6 °C of warming, but those depend on further action by governments, including many whose leaders are up for election in 2024. It could be a pivotal year.

MONSTROUS EMISSIONS: infographic showing emissions as a global share vs population for the five largest emitters that have elections in 2023.

Source: Global Carbon Budget 2023 (emissions); UN Population Division (population)

United States: Biden versus Trump

In August 2022, US President Joe Biden surprised the world with a legislative victory on climate spending that, by some recent estimates, is likely to lock in nearly US$1 trillion in investment until 2032. This includes direct spending as well as tax credits for everything from wind and solar power to electric transport, carbon sequestration and reskilling programmes for people who currently work in the fossil-fuel sector. One of the Biden administration’s main jobs now is to ensure that the money is invested wisely and keeps flowing if Biden is re-elected on 5 November.

Researchers have estimated that Biden’s flagship achievement, the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, could double the pace of US climate progress by itself and reduce the country’s carbon emissions by 43–48% by 2035, relative to 2005 levels. That is short of the US commitment to cut emissions by 50% by 2030, also compared with 2005, but the administration is pushing forwards on other fronts, including issuing regulations to reduce emissions from vehicles and power plants. Overall, climate specialists say it’s a historic effort that could help the world’s second-largest greenhouse-gas emitter (behind China) to lead a clean-energy revolution.

“We’ve never seen a decarbonization effort like this,” says Noah Kaufman, an economist at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy in Washington DC. The Biden administration’s climate agenda has significant momentum, Kaufman says, and another four years would help the administration to lock in progress. “The question is, what happens if we lose this momentum?”

Biden’s likely main opponent in the November election, former president Donald Trump, remains hostile to government action on climate, and there is little doubt that he will do everything he can to promote fossil fuels if he wins. He is widely expected to pull the United States out of the 2015 Paris climate agreement — for a second time. The first withdrawal, which came into effect on 4 November 2020, a day after Trump lost his re-election bid, was quickly reversed by the incoming Biden administration. Trump has also said he would use his executive authority to weaken climate regulations and expand federal oil and gas programmes.

But it would be difficult for Trump to override the clean-energy investments in the Inflation Reduction Act. Because those investments were laid out in a law, Congress would need to enact a new one to roll them back, says Samantha Gross, who heads the Energy Security and Climate Initiative at the Brookings Institution, a think tank based in Washington DC.

To have any chance of doing that, Republicans would need to retain control of the House of Representatives and win enough seats to take control of the Senate in the November elections. Even then, Gross says, it wouldn’t be easy. The law is already incentivizing businesses to invest and create jobs in communities across the country, and many are in Republican districts. “Once the economic benefits start flowing, the political calculus changes,” she says.

India: Modi’s climate balancing act

Climate change isn’t high on the agenda in India’s upcoming general elections. But it is crucial to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s global ambitions, say researchers.

Voting across the vast country will probably take place in April and May. If Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) win a third five-year term, he will be preoccupied with his legacy as a climate leader, says Aseem Prakash, a political scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle.

India is the world’s third-biggest emitter of greenhouse gases. But the country is also home to 1.4 billion people, which is more than one-sixth of the world’s population. Its per-capita emissions are less than one-seventh those of the United States and one-quarter those of China.

In very low visibility a person walks down a road past a billboard in support of Narendra Modi ahead of the 2024 general election

In India’s upcoming election, climate action is not a campaign talking point for the two leading parties.Credit: Subhash Sharma/Polaris/eyevine

In 2021, at the COP26 global climate conference in Glasgow, UK, Modi committed to achieving net-zero emissions by 2070. India has also agreed that, with foreign financial and technical assistance, non-fossil-fuel sources will make up about half of its electricity generation capacity by 2030.

The country has backed some of those promises with action. India’s wind and solar power capacity has almost doubled over the past 5 years, to 135 gigawatts. Together with hydropower, renewables now account for 42% of power generation capacity (although owing to the variability of many of the sources, they make up a lesser share of actual electricity production). “It’s a renewables miracle,” says Sangeeth Selvaraju, a sustainable finance analyst at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment in London.

Under a newly elected Modi, India’s climate policies will “continue in an aggressive manner”, says Suruchi Bhadwal, a climate scientist at The Energy and Resources Institute in New Delhi. These include expansion of solar and wind infrastructure, and investment in green hydrogen development. Last month, Modi’s government presented its interim budget for the year from April, which includes subsidies for offshore wind energy and rooftop solar panels — “two nascent industries that need a real boost”, says Selvaraju.

But climate action is not a campaign talking point for the two leading parties, the BJP and the Indian National Congress, say researchers. Instead, the priority is energy security to meet burgeoning demand, which in the short term means more fossil-fuel consumption and a continued reliance on coal. Last year, energy demand peaked in September, and was 13% higher than during the previous year’s peak month of April. Coal still accounts for three-quarters of electricity generation — a reason why India has played a key part in resisting attempts to introduce language about phasing out fossil fuels in communiqués from the past few climate summits.

In September, India’s minister for power, Raj Kumar Singh, said the country might need to build new thermal power plants. “There will be more coal power plants in the next ten years,” says Nandini Das, a climate and energy economist at the policy institute Climate Analytics in Perth, Australia.

In the unlikely event that Modi loses, Selvaraju says he doesn’t expect a shift away from India’s dual push for renewables and coal, “simply because it’s not really in the hands of the politicians”. Unlike in the United States, India’s climate policies don’t flip-flop according to who is in power, says Dhruba Purkayastha, director for India at the non-profit research group Climate Policy Initiative, based in New Delhi.

But climate change should be on the agenda, says Das. From flooding to drought and heat stress, “India is a highly climate-vulnerable country.”

Indonesia: powered by nickel and coal

Indonesians went to the polls on 14 February to elect a new president and legislature. Votes are still being counted, but the majority of the almost 130 million Indonesians who voted look to have chosen a leader who promised continuity with the policies of Joko Widodo, the outgoing president. Prabowo Subianto, a former army general and minister of defence under Widodo, ran with Widodo’s eldest son, Gibran Rakabuming Raka, as his vice-presidential candidate.

“From the perspective of climate change, not much will change,” says Daniel Murdiyarso, a climate scientist and president of the Indonesian Academy of Sciences, who is based in Bogor, south of the capital Jakarta.

Electoral officers examine 2024 ballot papers at a flooded general election polling station in Indonesia

The result of Indonesia’s election is unlikely to affect its current climate policies, which reflect an economy that is heavily dependent on coal.Credit: Sulthony Hasanuddin/Antara Foto/Reuters

Researchers say that in the short term, that means more coal consumption and exports, slow progress on reducing deforestation and cheap but dirty nickel extraction. The country is the world’s leading producer of raw nickel, needed to fuel the growing global appetite for electric vehicles, batteries and stainless steel. “Business is probably going to trump any other concerns,” says political scientist Jemma Purdey at the Australia–Indonesia Centre at Monash University in Melbourne.

Even bigger business than nickel is coal. Indonesia is the world’s largest coal exporter, and 60% of its own electricity supply comes from the fossil fuel — a reliance that is locked in for several more decades owing to government support and relatively young power plants. Together with the difficulty of building an electricity grid across Indonesia’s many islands, this is why renewables have not boomed in the country as they have in India or China. “It’s got the resources, and it’s got the conditions to generate a lot of wind and solar power. But the infrastructure and institutional challenges are yet to be tackled for that to happen at scale,” says Selvaraju.

Indonesia aims to reach net-zero emissions by 2060, “but has been fairly non-committal” with that target, says Dirk Tomsa, a political scientist at LaTrobe University in Melbourne. Despite a relatively young voting population, climate and environment were not key issues in these elections, says Ika Idris, who chairs the Monash Climate Change Communication Research Hub Indonesia Node, and is based in Jakarta. “During the campaign, none of the candidates really focused on that.”

Some popular initiatives that Subianto is likely to inherit include support for the development of a home-grown electric vehicle industry, as well as construction of a renewables-fuelled green city, Nusantara, which is set to become Indonesia’s new capital later this year. But even these were framed as economic development and not climate issues, says Idris.

In 2020, Widodo banned exports of raw nickel to strengthen domestic processing, which is highly carbon-intensive. Subianto’s win will probably see continued prioritization of nickel mining and processing to fuel the country’s economic development, at the cost of concerns about local environmental pollution and worker safety, say researchers.

Indonesia is also home to some of the world’s largest tropical rainforests, peatlands and mangroves. Under Subianto, researchers expect Indonesia to adhere to its international commitments to reducing deforestation — the rate of forest loss there has declined over the past five years — while also strengthening the palm-oil industry, which adds to pressure on rainforests and carbon-storing peatlands.

Russia: the smog of war

In March, Russian leader Vladimir Putin will begin a fifth term as president following an election, the result of which is not in doubt. Climate change will not feature in a campaign that Putin will use to claim endorsement of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and rally anti-Western sentiment.

The ongoing war and economic sanctions — imposed by the European Union and countries including the United States and United Kingdom — are likely to hinder future climate action in the world’s fourth-largest greenhouse-gas emitter, says Marianna Poberezhskaya, who studies Russian climate politics at Nottingham Trent University, UK.

“Major shocks like economic crises, and obviously the war, the worst of them all, makes the already quite weak climate position and policy in Russia even weaker,” says Poberezhskaya. This is despite the nation already experiencing severe wildfires and flooding owing to climate change in recent years.

Russia is aiming to cut greenhouse-gas emissions by 70% compared with 1990 levels by 2030, and to reach carbon neutrality by 2060. The nation’s emissions are already around 30% below 1990 levels, with most of this reduction due to deindustrialization following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. According to Putin’s regime, these goals will be met through the expansion of forest carbon sinks, carbon capture and storage technologies and a continued reliance on nuclear power and hydropower.

The plan to cut emissions does not include a phase-out of fossil fuels, on which the Russian economy is highly dependent. “Russia is not itself going to reduce its fossil-fuel economy. If it goes down, it is because of other countries’ policies — Russia will clearly sell fossil fuel as long as someone buys it,” says Anna Korppoo, who studies Russian climate policy at the Fridtjof Nansen Institute in Fornebu, Norway. Proposed targets to expand tree-based carbon sinks are unlikely to be met, she says: these sinks are currently in decline and there are no national policies to reverse the trend.

The detrimental impact of Russia’s war in Ukraine on Arctic climate science will also continue. Russia covers almost half the landmass of the Arctic, but in March 2022, immediately after the invasion, the seven other countries on the Arctic Council, which discusses sustainable development and environmental issues in the polar region, suspended cooperation with Russia. Russian data have been excluded from Arctic climate models and from research on the impacts of climate change on Arctic people and ecosystems, and Russia last month froze payments to the Arctic Council. “The loss of Siberian research stations may be detrimental to our ability to track global responses to climate change,” says Arctic ecosystem modeller Efrén López-Blanco at Aarhus University in Denmark.

As the war continues, climate change and its impact on human rights will continue to take a back seat, says Matthew Druckenmiller, vice-president of the International Arctic Science Committee. “This is sad to see; the majority of Indigenous peoples in the Arctic are in Russia, and now they are removed from the equation.”

EU: A challenging shift to the right

The European Union likes to see itself as a world leader on climate action. In 2021, the bloc’s members agreed and passed laws to reduce net greenhouse-gas emissions by at least 55% from 1990 levels by 2030, and to achieve climate neutrality by 2050. A proposal unveiled last month targets an even more ambitious 90% reduction by 2040. So far, Europe has reduced its emissions by 32.5% from 1990 levels.

Over 4 days from 6 to 9 June, European citizens from 27 countries will elect 720 politicians to the European Parliament for 5 years. Polling indicates a sharp move towards parties on the right that are less focused on climate action, a trend that could stymie Europe’s climate leadership and delay urgent measures, say experts.

Climate “is not a big issue for most far-right parties and it’s not a priority”, says Claire Dupont, a climate policy specialist at Ghent University in Belgium. They tend to focus on more nationalistic interests, she says. Polls indicate that the main parliamentary groupings — the centre-right European People’s Party and the centre-left Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats — will maintain their majority in the parliament, which scrutinizes other EU bodies and has the power to adopt and amend proposed legislation.

This election is only the beginning of the EU’s political process. The parliament ultimately elects the president of the European Commission, which sets out the EU’s strategy for the next five years and monitors policy implementation, says Dupont. The current president, Ursula von der Leyen, put the European Green Deal and its climate targets at the heart of the bloc’s strategy, and in February announced that she would seek a second term.

But bottom-up political pressures mean that Europe’s previous broad consensus on climate action is beginning to fray. “There’s not a lot of room to roll back decisions on climate,” says Corinne Le Quéré, a climate scientist at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK. “But there is room to slow down progress or to give political flavours to actions that are going to be in place.” This has international ramifications, she warns. “It is the region that is the most proactive about tackling climate change, so if the leaders start slowing down on climate action, then the risk is that this is going to slip all around the world.”

In particular, the EU’s nature-based climate goals, including biodiversity and soil protections, are running into trouble. Last month, the bloc shelved plans to cut pesticide use and diluted its green farming provisions after protests by farmers in several member states. The EU’s total carbon emissions have gone down, but emissions from its agricultural sector have declined only modestly in the past decade.

Another sticking point is carbon capture and storage technologies, which the EU will have to rely on if it is going to meet its most ambitious emissions targets. Right-leaning parties tend to favour these technological solutions over those that require behavioural change, but they have not been shown to work at scale. “The other carbon capture techniques of planting forests, upgrading our soils and nature-based solutions are already facing a lot of backlash,” says Dupont.

“The EU has successfully tackled the low-hanging fruit, like renewable energy and energy efficiency,” she says. “Can it actually go the next step in tackling the harder parts of the transition to carbon neutrality?”

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Megafires are here to stay — and blaming only climate change won’t help

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In February, megafires ripped through the Chilean central coastal hills, killing at least 132 people, injuring hundreds and destroying 7,000 homes. At the time of writing, more than 300 people remain missing.

These wildfires are not a one-off calamity. You only need watch the news to know that wildfires are becoming more frequent and more destructive. Last year, catastrophic fires in Hawaii, Canada and Greece took hundreds of lives and caused widespread destruction. The 2019–20 Black Summer was the most uncontrolled fire season ever recorded in Australia. California’s 2018 Camp Fire was the deadliest ever in the state, and the most expensive natural disaster in the world that year. As a fire scientist at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, I have lost track of how many times I have scrambled to analyse the deadly consequences of cataclysmic fires worldwide.

Countries need to take megafires more seriously and implement urgent programmes to mitigate the associated risks. That’s doesn’t just mean tackling the root causes of climate change. It means more-effective and consistent land- and fire-management policies, greater efforts to conserve native species and more education for local people on how to minimize risks.

Climate change is a major driver of wildfires. Rising temperatures have increased the frequency, intensity and duration of extreme events such as droughts, heatwaves and high-speed winds, which fuel longer and wilder fires. The past few years have given us a bitter taste of the future of fires on a warming planet. Hotspot regions might face a tenfold increase in fire risk under future global warming.

But it isn’t just global warming that should be blamed, argues a 2022 report by the United Nations Environment Programme (see go.nature.com/3uwv9np) that I helped to author. Climate and land-cover changes, including deforestation, urbanization, mining and use of land for agriculture and pasture, have all increased the likelihood of extreme wildfires over the past decades.

The 2024 Chilean wildfires resulted from a complex interplay between extreme weather conditions and human behaviour, as we found in an attribution study (see go.nature.com/3tjjscy). Since 2010, central-south Chile has seen more frequent and larger wildfires, as well as a prolonged drought within what was the nation’s warmest decade recorded since 1970.

But, as in many other countries, key factors in boosting megafires are poor land management and the growing proximity of flammable vegetation to populated urban and suburban areas. The wildland–urban interface covers only 5% of Chile’s land surface, but is home to 80% of the country’s population — and 60% of its wildfires.

Land-cover changes have homogenized the landscape, and have increased the likelihood of megafires by removing natural fire barriers — native plants — and increasing the number of informal settlements near forests. Pasture and agricultural areas are typical ignition sources. Either accidentally or through negligence or arson, humans were responsible for around 98% of the known causes of Chilean fires between 1985 and 2018.

Worldwide, land management is underused as a means of reducing fire vulnerabilities and exposure. Prescribed burns are not a new wildfire-prevention technique, but they have been marginalized owing to negative public perception. For this to change, the first step would be to implement proper fire-management regulations that are firmly built on the necessity of prescribed burns. Good regulations, appropriate funding and adequate crew training are essential. Climate change has substantially decreased the number of days that provide favourable conditions for prescribed burns.

Prevention and regulation are a must, because once a megafire begins, it is almost impossible to snuff out, even with sophisticated methods. Policies focusing on reactive responses — such as fire suppression — could result in the ‘firefighting trap’, a positive feedback loop in which fire suppression leads to there being more dry fuel in the landscape, which leads to worse fires, requiring more suppression. Breaking this loop requires effective and continuous science–policy interaction.

Another important concern is human behaviour. Governments must pass and enforce laws that discourage people from starting fires when danger is elevated. But laws count for little without cultural change. To change hearts and minds, local governments, non-governmental organizations and companies can foster community engagement in fire prevention through education campaigns, and the media can systematically disseminate information to raise awareness of the consequences of irresponsible practices. Furthermore, fire-management plans should be embedded in local knowledge, and include the needs and concerns of Indigenous communities and smallholder farms.

Megafires are a humanitarian crisis. As a fire scientist, I always end my talks with a call to action: to implement a resilient fire-management strategy. Decelerating global warming isn’t enough. Nations need a holistic approach to fire governance, adjusting prevention, regulation and planning according to each local and ecological context.

Competing Interests

The author declares no competing interests.

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New study reveals insight into which animals are most vulnerable to extinction due to climate change

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In a new study, researchers have used the fossil record to better understand what factors make animals more vulnerable to extinction from climate change. The results could help to identify species most at risk today from human-driven climate change. The findings have been published today in the journal Science.

Past climate change (often caused by natural changes in greenhouse gases due to volcanic activity) has been responsible for countless species’ extinctions during the history of life on Earth. But, to date, it has not been clear what factors cause species to be more or less resilient to such change, and how the magnitude of climate change affects extinction risk.

Led by researchers at the University of Oxford, this new study sought to answer this question by analysing the fossil record for marine invertebrates (such as sea urchins, snails, and shellfish) over the past 485 million years. Marine invertebrates have a rich and well-studied fossil record, making it possible to identify when, and potentially why, species become extinct.

Using over 290,000 fossil records covering more than 9,200 genera, the researchers collated a dataset of key traits that may affect resilience to extinction, including traits not studied in depth previously, such as preferred temperature. This trait information was integrated with climate simulation data to develop a model to understand which factors were most important in determining the risk of extinction during climate change.

Key findings:

  • The authors found that species exposed to greater climate change were more likely to become extinct. In particular, species that experienced temperature changes of 7°C or more across geological stages were significantly more vulnerable to extinction.
  • The authors also found that species occupying climatic extremes (for instance in polar regions) were disproportionately vulnerable to extinction, and animals that could only live in a narrow range of temperatures (especially ranges less than 15°C) were significantly more likely to become extinct.
  • However, geographic range size was the strongest predictor of extinction risk. Species with larger geographic ranges were significantly less likely to go extinct. Body size was also important, with smaller-bodied species more likely to become extinct.
  • All of the traits studied had a cumulative impact on extinction risk. For instance, species with both small geographic ranges and narrow thermal ranges were even more susceptible to extinction than species that had only one of these traits.

Cooper Malanoski (Department of Earth Sciences, University of Oxford), first author of the study, said: ‘Our study revealed that geographic range was the strongest predictor of extinction risk for marine invertebrates, but that the magnitude of climate change is also an important predictor of extinction, which has implications for biodiversity today in the face of climate change.’

With current human-driven climate change already pushing many species up to and beyond the brink of extinction, these results could help identify the animals that are most at risk, and inform strategies to protect them.

Lead author Professor Erin Saupe (Department of Earth Sciences, University of Oxford) said: ‘The evidence from the geological past suggests that global biodiversity faces a harrowing future, given projected climate change estimates. In particular, our model suggests that species with restricted thermal ranges of less than 15°C, living in the poles or tropics, are likely to be at the greatest risk of extinction. However, if the localized climate change is large enough, it could lead to significant extinction globally, potentially pushing us closer to a sixth mass extinction.’

According to the research team, future work should explore how climate change interacts with other potential drivers of extinction, such as ocean acidification and anoxia (where seawater becomes depleted of oxygen).

The study also involved researchers from the School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol. Professor Dan Lunt, from the University of Bristol, said: ‘This study shows that over the course of Earth’s history, the extinction risk of marine life has been inextricably linked to climate change. This should act as a stark warning to humanity as we recklessly continue to cause climate change ourselves through burning fossil fuels.’

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Climate Misinformation ‘Scorecard’ Ranks Elon Musk’s X, Previously Twitter, Last.

Environmental organizations issued a report on Wednesday that rated social media platforms based on their reaction to climate change misinformation. Elon Musk’s X app was harshly criticized in the study.

X, formerly known as Twitter, received the lowest grade since it is unknown whether or not the app has restrictions against the dissemination of erroneous information about climate change, according to the score card’s inventor, Climate Action Against Disinformation. The group includes over fifty environmental organizations, advertising corporations, and others.

Some famous accounts on X promote the notion that climate change is a “hoax” or spread conspiracy theories about green energy programs, making it easy to obtain inaccurate information on the issue. Musk has wrongly asserted that surface-level phenomena have no influence on global warming.

According to the group, the stakes are high since climate change disinformation has impeded action, such as stronger limits on fossil fuels.

“A toxic and fossil-fueled minority is drowning out the voices of science and reason,” Friends of the Earth spokesperson Erika Seiber said in a statement. “Social media platforms are complicit.”

The alliance was formed in 2021 by environmental organisations concerned that the United Nations Climate Summit in Scotland will be damaged by fake news. Friends of the Earth, World Wildlife Fund International, and Patagonia are just a handful of the coalition’s member groups.

The group opted to share the data during this week’s United Nations General Assembly session and Climate Week NYC, where leaders from civil society and other sectors converge to discuss climate change policy.

In the year preceding up to Musk’s purchase of Twitter, the firm announced that it will no longer accept advertisements that “contradict the scientific consensus on climate change.” However, it is unclear if the restriction is still in effect at this moment.

According to the story, Elon Musk’s acquisition of X/Twitter has people questioning whose company policies are still in force.

X’s officials did not respond to NBC News’ request for comment. The authors of the research also claimed that they contacted X throughout the report writing process but did not obtain a response.

The scale of 1 to 21 was utilized, and X received a 1. According to the researchers, the app’s privacy policy is critical in the fight against climate misinformation since fossil fuel companies, like other advertisers, may use personal data to affect public opinion. You did terrible if you received a 0.

Pinterest received the most points (12) in this round. Researchers discovered that this platform was the only one that identified climate misinformation specifically in its community rules and released an annual report on the topic. (Other websites do not describe climate-related misinformation.)

Pinterest has received plaudits for its attempts to restrict the selling of climate denial and to protect the personal information of individuals who protest against fossil fuels.

Corporate leaders acknowledged their delight with their efforts on Tuesday.

“Pinterest has a long history of establishing guidelines that help to grow a welcoming community in cyberspace.” Pinterest noted in a statement that it is “constantly evaluating our guidelines and enforcement approaches” owing to the dynamic nature of the anti-disinformation battle.

TikTok came in second with 9 points, Meta came in eighth with 8, and YouTube came in sixth with 6 points. Despite the fact that LinkedIn and Wikipedia were not included in the scope of the analysis, the researchers stated that they visited other tech sites to share their experiences with users.

For years, social media researchers have been warning about the rise of climate change denial, claiming that the inability of internet platforms to aggressively delete false material adds to concerns such as increasing sea levels. Extreme weather events, particularly in Spanish-speaking nations, can elicit a spike in climate-related conspiracy theories, which are sometimes entwined with other types of misinformation, such as those regarding Covid.

In various ways, the platforms have begun to crack down on climate deception.

When Facebook was still known as Meta, the corporation stated in 2021 that it will identify and redirect users away from content that promotes climate change denial. Despite this, researchers from outside Facebook reported that the labels were not always used by Facebook.

In the same year, YouTube said that it will prohibit climate change doubters from selling their material on the site; nevertheless, the New York Times reported that some skeptics were still doing so as of May of this year.

Following the release of the climate report card, YouTube issued the following statement: “Our climate change policy explicitly prohibits the monetization of content that denies the existence of climate change, as well as ads that promote these claims.” We do not remove advertising from videos that involve debate or arguments on climate change subjects, such as public policy or research, but we do remove commercials from videos that explicitly or indirectly dispute the scientific consensus on climate change. Our algorithms also do not like or surface anything that spreads climate change misinformation.

YouTube has also said that its search and recommendation algorithms promote information from reliable sources.

TikTok did not respond immediately to the results. Meta did not respond immediately when we requested for comment.

The scorecard focused on the limits themselves and their extent, rather than how closely social networking services enforced them.

Bringing the average down: It said that none of the platforms offered researchers and academics with sufficient access to anonymised data on content and advertising.