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Conversations about climate change have broken into everyday life, to the top of the headlines and to center stage in the presidential campaign.

The questions are profound and urgent. Can this be reversed? What can be done to minimize the looming dangers for the decades ahead? Will the destruction of recent weeks become a moment of reckoning, or just a blip in the news cycle?

“It’s as if we’ve been smoking a pack of cigarettes a day for decades” and the world is now feeling the effects

But, she said, “we’re not dead yet.”

Climate change is more a slope than a cliff, experts agreed. We’re still far from any sort of “game over” moment where it’s too late to act. There remains much that can be done to limit the damage to come, to brace against the coming megafires and superstorms and save lives and hold onto a thriving civilization.

The effects of climate change evident today are the results of choices that countries made decades ago to keep pumping heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at ever-increasing rates despite warnings from scientists about the price to be paid.

Nations, including the United States, have dithered so long in cutting emissions that progressively more global warming is assured for decades to come, even if efforts to shift away from fossil fuels were accelerated tomorrow.

Things are on track to get “twice as bad” as they are now, he said, “if not worse.”

it may be time to flip that chronological framing, and consider today the new starting point.

“Don’t think of it as the warmest month of August in California in the last century,” he wrote. “Think of it as one of the coolest months of August in California in the next century.”

Their most sobering message was that the world still hasn’t seen the worst of it. Gone is the climate of yesteryear, and there’s no going back.

“It’s not that it’s out of our control. The whole thing is in our control.”

Managing climate change, experts said, will require rethinking virtually every aspect of daily life

how and where homes are built, how power grids are designed, how people plan for the future with the collective good in mind.

It will require an epochal shift in politics in a country that has, on the whole, ignored climate change

The fires, along with others in places including Colorado, Oregon and Washington, destroyed entire towns and sent smoke tens of thousands of feet high. San Francisco, Portland and Seattle have suffered some of the unhealthiest air quality on the planet, beating cities such as Beijing and New Delhi for the title. Smoke spread all the way across the continent, with particles coloring sunsets on the East Coast.

Evidence of global warming — which, scientists said, helps drive a rise in wildfire activity by creating hotter and drier conditions — was hanging visibly in the air.

For a long time, “there was so much focus on how climate change would affect the most vulnerable, like low-lying island nations or coral reefs — things that don’t dramatically affect the economic powerhouses of the world,”

“There’s often been this arrogant assumption that wealth provides protection.”

“we’re all in this together.”

Again and again, climate scientists have shown that our choices now range from merely awful to incomprehensibly horrible.

every coal plant in China, every steel mill in Europe, every car and truck in the United States.

It’s a staggering task. It means reorienting a global economy that depends on fossil fuels

Even if we start radically slashing emissions today, it could be decades before those changes start to appreciably slow the rate at which Earth is warming. In the meantime, we’ll have to deal with effects that continue to worsen.

“Seriously, it is not reversible.”

First, experts broadly agreed, if we want to stop the planet from relentlessly heating up forever, humanity will quickly need to eliminate its emissions of planet-warming greenhouse gases.

Whether Americans can adopt that mentality remains an open question.“We’ve often heard the argument that it will be too expensive to cut emissions and it will just be easier to adapt,” said Noah Diffenbaugh, a climate scientist at Stanford University. But we’ve now had decades of warnings, he said, “and we’re not even adapted to the present climate.”

Failure to do so doubles or triples that number.

If we act now, sea levels could rise another 1 to 2 feet this century.

If we don’t, Antarctica’s ice sheets could destabilize irreversibly and ocean levels could keep rising at an inexorable pace for centuries, making coastal civilization all but unmanageable.

The best hope is to slow the pace of warming enough to maintain some control for humanity.

“In our research, we’ve found that most systems can cope with a 1.5-degree or 2-degree world, although it will be very costly and extremely difficult to adapt

“But in a 4-degree world, in many cases, the system just doesn’t work anymore.”

So, even as nations cut emissions, they will need to accelerate efforts to adapt to the climate change they can no longer avoid.

“The human capacity for adaptation is extraordinary — not unlimited, but extraordinary,”

“I’m much more concerned for the future of the nonhuman than I am for the future of humans, precisely because we’re just very, very good at adaptation.”

adaptation is usually a reactive measure, not a preventive one

Adapting to climate change means envisioning bigger disasters to come — again, flipping the framing away from history and into the future.

“Humans have difficulty imagining things that we haven’t experienced yet,”

It’s hard to visualize the entire West Coast aflame until you actually see it. And if we can’t see it, we tend to discount the risk.”

And there’s the moral hazard problem, which is when people are shielded from the costs of their decisions and thus make bad ones.

Cascading Disasters

Adaptation can quickly become bogged down in a tangle of competing motivations and unintended consequences.

Proposals for stricter building codes or higher insurance premiums face opposition from builders and voters alike.

If we cut emissions rapidly, about one-seventh of the world’s population will suffer severe heat waves every few years.

as climate change intensifies, it increases the risk of “compound hazards,” when numerous disasters strike simultaneously, as well as the risk that one disaster cascades into another.

Experts also noted that climate change is an accelerant of inequality. Those most affected, globally and in the United States, tend to be the most vulnerable populations.

One concern is that adaptability will not be a collective effort. Wealthier people may find ways to protect themselves, while others are left fending for themselves

A Lifetime of Clues

For well over a century, science has provided us with powerful clues that this was coming.

As early as the 1850s, researchers realized that greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide could trap heat on Earth. This came at the dawn of the Industrial Age,

“I feel like the climate scientists have kind of done our job,” said Dr. Kalmus, the Los Angeles-based scientist. “We’ve laid it out pretty clearly, but nobody’s doing anything. So now it’s kind of up to the social scientists.”

ne 2017 study found that people who experience extreme weather are more likely to support climate adaptation measures than before. But the effect diminished over time. It may be that people mentally adjust to unusual weather patterns, updating their perception of what they consider normal.

“There’s too much complexity and, frankly, too much that needs to be changed, that we’re flitting from one concern to another,”

“What’s beautiful about the human species is that we have the free will to decide our own fate,” said Ilona Otto, a climate scientist at the Wegener Center for Climate and Global Change. “We have the agency to take courageous decisions and do what’s needed,” she said. “If we choose.”

major upgrade of its previous commitment to reducing greenhouse gases, and necessary if the world hopes to keep a global temperature rise well below 2 degrees

Japan is the world’s fifth-largest emitter of greenhouse gases. It had previously said it would go carbon neutral “at the earliest possible date,” vowing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent by 205

Joseph R. Biden Jr., his challenger in the presidential election, has vowed to restore the United States’ participation in the accord.

reinforced just how much of an outlier the United States, the world’s second-largest carbon emitter

decision was most likely driven by a combination of domestic and external political pressures

As a developed nation, Mr. Kuramochi said, it would be “somewhat embarrassing for Japan to have a net zero emissions timeline later than China.”

he would harness the power of “innovation” and “regulatory reform” to transform the country’s energy production and usage

The country has made steady progress in reducing its emissions, but still generated 1.06 billion tons of the gas in the one-year period that ended in March 2019, placing it among the top 10 per capita emitters

By the early 2000s, Japan had made substantial progress in curbing carbon dioxide emissions through the use of nuclear power. But the meltdown of a nuclear power plant in Fukushima after a devastating earthquake and tsunami in 2011 led to a widespread shutdown of the country’s energy-producing reactors, which had generated roughly a third of Japan’s total power supply. Only a handful of the plants have since restarted.

Short on energy sources, Japan decided to reinvest in coal.

Japan currently plans to reduce — but not eliminate — its dependence on coa

The country has also vowed to end contentious government subsidies for the export of coal-fired power technology to developing nations, where the use of coal for electricity continues to rise

Further efforts to decrease Japan’s domestic commitment to coal will likely meet powerful resistance from Japanese industry, which is still heavily dependent on the fuel

Japan is already considering a substantial increase in its supply of wind and solar power, and it is also looking at newer, less-established technologies, such as plants that burn ammonia or hydrogen.

Mr. Suga said that Japan would continue to develop nuclear power with “maximum priority on safety,”

Movement toward the new goal had already started on the local level, where 150 municipal governments have pledged to be carbon neutral by midcentury.

But even if Japan achieves its goal, it will not by itself be enough to halt or even slow the current trend of global warming, a goal that requires a global effort

Preventing a climate catastrophe will require “a transformation of the energy system that has underwritten modern society,”

Japan will be carbon neutral by 2050, its prime minister said on Monday

The announcement came just weeks after China, Japan’s regional rival, said it would reduce its net carbon emissions to zero by 2060.

Islington’s project is just one of many innovations by cities around the world to provide heat to residents and businesses while reducing greenhouse gas emissions, improving efficiency and saving people money.

Stockholm is also using heat from sewage, as well as tapping data centers and other sources to supply heat for much of the city.

If you can start to use a whole array of waste heat streams, you’re taking out a big chunk of greenhouse gas emissions,

We don’t really need to burn gas at 1,000 degrees centigrade [1,832 degrees Fahrenheit] to get your bath to 30 degrees centigrade,” Dr. Gluyas added. “What we need to do is work with nature to optimize the use of heat.

The concept of district heating networks is not new and may, in fact, date from 14th-century France or even, some say, the Roman Empire

New York City has one of the world’s largest district systems to provide heat, cooling and, in some cases, even electricity to many buildings in Manhattan.

Though perhaps less wasteful than having a boiler in every single building, it is not the most efficient district heating system, as it was designed to heat a building on the coldest day of the year with all the windows open — partly a public health legacy of the 1918 pandemic.

But the innovation — which took more than five years to plan and build, and began operations in March 2020 — was to feed in heat from the Underground.

Typically, the hot air from the Underground is released into the air through stations and ventilation shafts. In this case, however, air is drawn from a ventilation shaft at an abandoned Underground station into an energy center where a series of heat transfers take place, eventually leading to delivery of the heat into the buildings in the network.

For our residents, locally, this is absolutely the right thing to do,” because it saves money in an area where many residents struggle to afford heat, Mr. Townsend said. “And this is a perfect solution for big cities across the world.

Heat from wastewater and sewage now provides about 70 percent of the space heating and hot water for the 43 buildings connected to the network, with the remaining 30 percent coming from natural gas, though the goal is to end that by 2030. The electricity powering the heat pumps is 97 percent zero-carbon, supplied by hydroelectric dams.

Every time we take a shower, do the dishes or do a load of laundry, the water is still hot when it goes down the drain,” said Ashley St. Clair, Vancouver’s senior renewable energy planner.“It’s flowing under our streets, and we’re already collecting it through the traditional infrastructure of wastewater pipes, and to be able to tap into that waste heat is really the ultimate circular economy.”

And it cannot come soon enough: This year alone, Vancouver has experienced several bouts of extreme weather, made more likely and intense because of climate change: heat domes, wildfires and catastrophic flooding, which recently cut the city off by road and rail from the rest of Canada. Having its own heat and hot water supply has been an additional benefit of the project, Ms. St. Clair said.

Stockholm, Mr. Rylander said, has particularly good connectivity to Northern Europe, Finland and Russia, which makes it attractive to data center companies, as does Sweden’s relatively clean power mix. However, they use biomass to produce a significant amount of heat and power, the renewable classification of which is debated by experts.

“If you establish a data center in a cold place like Sweden, it’s stupid to waste the heat, because heat has power and value in a cold country.”

“We’re very clear that we are an experiment, and we are doing the work that will enable others to benefit from it.”

Recent reports suggest that the economic cost of Hurricane Sandy could reach $50 billion and that in the current quarter, the hurricane could remove as much as half a percentage point from the nation’s economic growth. The cost of that single hurricane may well be more than five times greater than that of a usual full year’s worth of the most expensive regulations, which ordinarily cost well under $10 billion annually

climate change is increasing the risk of costly harm from hurricanes and other natural disasters. Economists of diverse viewpoints concur that if the international community entered into a sensible agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the economic benefits would greatly outweigh the costs.

some of the best recent steps serve to save money, promote energy security and reduce air pollution. A good model is provided by rules from the Department of Transportation and the Environmental Protection Agency, widely supported by the automobile industry, which will increase the fuel economy of cars to more than 54 miles per gallon by 2025. The fuel economy rules will eventually save consumers more than $1.7 trillion, cut United States oil consumption by 12 billion barrels and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by six billion metric tons — more than the total amount of carbon dioxide emitted by the United States in 2010. The monetary benefits of these rules exceed the monetary costs by billions of dollars annually.

That may not sound like much, but scientists say even the smallest increase causes the seawater to eat away more aggressively at the shoreline in calm weather, and leads to higher tidal surges during storms. The sea-level rise of decades past thus explains why coastal towns nearly everywhere are having to spend billions of dollars fighting erosion.

The evidence suggests that the sea-level rise has probably accelerated, to about a foot a century, and scientists think it will accelerate still more with the continued emission of large amounts of greenhouse gases into the air. The gases heat the planet and cause land ice to melt into the sea.

The official stance of the world’s climate scientists is that the global sea level could rise as much as three feet by the end of this century, if emissions continue at a rapid pace. But some scientific evidence supports even higher numbers, five feet and beyond in the worst case.

the land in this part of the world is sinking. And that goes back to the last ice age, which peaked some 20,000 years ago.

s a massive ice sheet, more than a mile thick, grew over what are now Canada and the northern reaches of the United States, the weight of it depressed the crust of the earth. Areas away from the ice sheet bulged upward in response, as though somebody had stepped on one edge of a balloon, causing the other side to pop up. Now that the ice sheet has melted, the ground that was directly beneath it is rising, and the peripheral bulge is falling.

Up and down the Eastern Seaboard, municipal planners want to know: How bad are things going to get, and how fast?

People considering whether to buy or rebuild at the storm-damaged Jersey Shore, for instance, could be looking at nearly a foot of sea-level rise by the time they would pay off a 30-year mortgage, according to the Rutgers projections. That would make coastal flooding and further property damage considerably more likely than in the past.

Even if the global sea level rises only eight more inches by 2050, a moderate forecast, the Rutgers group foresees relative increases of 14 inches at bedrock locations like the Battery, and 15 inches along the New Jersey coastal plain, where the sediments are compressing. By 2100, they calculate, a global ocean rise of 28 inches would produce increases of 36 inches at the Battery and 39 inches on the coastal plain.

Black carbon is linked to asthma, cancer, emphysema, and heart and lung disease.

The movement of air pollutants associated with the production of goods in China for the American market has resulted in a decline in air quality in the Western United States

“Trade changes the location of production and thus affects emissions.”

“Dust, ozone and carbon can accumulate in valleys and basins in California and other Western states,” the statement said.

“outsourcing production to China does not always relieve consumers in the United States — or for that matter many countries in the Northern Hemisphere — from the environmental impacts of air pollution.”

in 2006, sulfate concentrations in the Western United States increased as much as 2 percent, and ozone and carbon monoxide levels also increased slightly because of the transportation of pollutants from emissions that resulted from the manufacture of goods for export to the United States.

The amount of air pollution in the Western United States resulting from emissions from China is still very small compared with the amount produced by sources in the United States that include traffic and domestic industries.

They estimated that in 2006, China’s exporting of goods to the United States was responsible for 7.4 percent of production-based Chinese emissions for sulfur dioxide, 5.7 percent for nitrogen oxides, 3.6 percent for black carbon and 4.6 percent for carbon monoxide.

. Coal-burning factories were the biggest sources of pollutants and greenhouse gases, which contribute to global warming.

“This is a reminder to us that a significant percentage of China’s emissions of traditional pollutants and greenhouse gas emissions are connected to the products we buy and use every day in the U.S. We should be concerned, not only because this pollution is harming the citizens of China, but because it’s damaging the air quality in parts of the U.S.”

So the overall percentages of economic output might not by themselves be fair indicators of the importance of exports to the Chinese economy.

only about 1 trillion tons of carbon can be burned and the resulting gas spewed into the atmosphere.

Just over half that amount has already been emitted since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and at current rates of energy consumption, the trillionth ton will be released around 2040, according to calculations by Myles R. Allen, a scientist at the University of Oxford and one of the authors of the new report. More than 3 trillion tons of carbon are still left in the ground as fossil fuels.

To keep using fossil fuels beyond the trillionth ton of emissions, companies would have to develop potentially expensive technology to capture carbon dioxide from emissions sources like power plants and store it underground.

But a considerable body of research suggests that in principle it could be done, and in the United States, the Obama administration is moving toward rules that would essentially require utilities to develop the technology if they want to keep burning coal to produce electricity. In response, the president’s Republican opponents have accused him of waging a “war on coal.”

The group has now issued five major reports, each of them finding greater certainty that the world is warming and greater likelihood that human activity is the principal cause. The new report finds a 95 to 100 percent chance that most of the warming of recent decades is human-caused, up from the 90 to 100 percent chance cited in the last report, in 2007.

By the end, Safina is nearly a contrarian. Fertilizer runoff from the Mississippi, he concludes, causes the gulf more harm than did BP, while the fishing ban that went into force just after the spill might have helped marine wildlife more than the oil hurt it.

Safina concludes that greenhouse gases from routine fossil fuel use — “That spill is invisible” — are far more worrisome than what happened in the gulf. He asserts that true market pricing of gasoline to reflect its cost in atmospheric harm — that is, a carbon tax — would be a better response to the gulf spill than cleaning birds.

“We have a special responsibility to lead the world effort to combat global climate change,” Obama added. “We hope to encourage all major economies to be ambitious.”

The new actions are likely to reinvigorate the domestic debate over environmental regulations, which have come under attack by Republicans in the wake of their electoral victories in last Tuesday’s midterm elections.

Our economy can’t take the president’s ideological war on coal,” Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell

This unrealistic plan, that the president would dump on his successor, would ensure higher utility rates and far fewer jobs.”

“Our text is the best possible balance,” he said, “a balance which is powerful yet delicate, which will enable each delegation, each group of countries, with his head held high, having achieved something important.

negotiators from countries representing a self-described “high-ambition coalition” walked into the United Nations plenary session shortly before noon, they were swarmed by cheering

Mr. Ban has said there is “no Plan B” if this deal falls apart

But it is not yet certain that the draft accord will receive the unanimous support required for it to become legally binding.

But it is not yet certain that the draft accord will receive the unanimous support required for it to become legally binding.

A more likely course of events, Ms. Morgan and others said

They would then engage in sideline talks, while Mr. Fabius and his envoys negotiate to win their support.

Poorer countries had pushed for a legally binding provision requiring that rich countries appropriate a minimum of $100 billion a year to help them mitigate and adapt to the ravages of climate change. In the final deal, that $100 billion figure appears only in a preamble, not in what would be the legally binding portion of the agreement.

The stated goal of the agreement is to begin to level off the rise in fossil fuel emissions enough to stave off an increase in atmospheric temperatures of 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit)

More recent scientific reports have concluded that even staving off that amount of warming will not save the planet from many of the worst effects of climate change, particularly rising sea levels. Thus, the text was expected to include a reference to reducing emissions enough to stave off a warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit).

Vulnerable low-lying island states have pushed for the inclusion of the more stringent target,

At the core of the agreement are a set of individual plan

n their own, those plans will lower greenhouse gas emissions only about half as much as is necessary

The accord also requires “stock-taking” meetings every five year

It also sets forth language requiring countries to monitor, verify and publicly report their levels of emissions.

In the end, the final draft requires all countries to use the same system to report their emissions, but it allows developing nations to report fewer details until they build the ability to better count their carbon emissions

Some elements of the accord would be voluntary, while others would be legally binding. That hybrid structure was specifically intended to ensure the support of the United States

Such a proposal would be dead on arrival in the Republican-controlled Senate, where many lawmakers question the established science of climate change, and where even more hope to thwart President Obama’s climate change agenda.

As a result, all language in the accord relating to the reduction of carbon emissions is essentially voluntary

“This agreement is highly unlikely to trigger any legitimate grounds for compelling Senate ratification,” said Paul Bledsoe, a climate change official in the Clinton administration.

Representatives of 195 countries reached a landmark climate accord on Saturday that will, for the first time, commit nearly every country to lowering planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions to help stave off the most drastic effects of climate change.

final deal did not achieve all that environmentalists, scientists and some countries had hoped for

A widely cited 2006 report estimated that 18% of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions were attributable to cattle, buffalo, sheep, goats, camels, pigs and poultry. However, analysis performed by Goodland, with co-writer Jeff Anhang, an environmental specialist at the World Bank Group’s International Finance Corporation, found that figure to now more accurately be 51%.

a molecule of CO2 exhaled by livestock is no more natural than one from an auto tailpipe.

Today, tens of billions more livestock are exhaling CO2 than in preindustrial days, while Earth’s photosynthetic capacity (its capacity to keep carbon out of the atmosphere by absorbing it in plant mass) has declined sharply as forest has been cleared.

One way in which this will be particularly troublesome for livestock producers will be that crops grown for feed will be refocused on biofuel sources.

this period is unique in human history because it is the first time our species is on the verge of wiping out most life as it now exists on this planet. It’s the mother of all emergencies.

Thatcher: a radical remaker of an economy and society, but in the context of previous economic stagnation, social breakdown, and a stifling collectivism, something of a moderate.

So FDR was in many ways an extremist in the context of American history; but his extremism was a form of moderation given the dire economic crisis he had to handle.

That’s why the Green New Deal has appeal. Its vast ambition is actually well-suited to the humongous scale of the challenge

When AOC’s critics say her idea is preposterously expensive and unnecessarily socialist (as it is), she is perfectly right to ask: So what’s your alternative?

Here’s a suggestion: Focus on a non-carbon energy source that is already proven to be technologically feasible, can be quickly scaled up, and can potentially meet all our energy demands. What we need, given how little time we have, is a massive nuclear energy program

The speediest drop in greenhouse gas pollution on record occurred in France in the 1970s and ‘80s, when that country transitioned from burning fossil fuels to nuclear fission for electricity, lowering its greenhouse emissions by roughly 2 percent per year. The world needs to drop its global warming pollution by 6 percent annually to avoid “dangerous” climate change in the estimation of [respected climate scientist James] Hanse

For the U.S. to get half its energy from nuclear would cost around $14 trillion. But if we committed to a huge nuclear investment, and the innovation that comes with it, that cost would come down. Compared with one estimate of $93 trillion for the Green New Deal, it’s a bargain

A build rate of 61 new reactors per year could entirely replace current fossil fuel electricity generation by 2050. Accounting for increased global electricity demand driven by population growth and development in poorer countries, which would add another 54 reactors per year, this makes a total requirement of 115 reactors per year to 2050 to entirely decarbonise the global electricity system in this illustrative scenario.

hat urgency is at odds with the stance of the Trump administration, which has rolled back several Obama-era environmental regulations and incentivized the production of fossil fuels. Trump also has said he plans to withdraw the nation from the Paris climate accord and questioned the science of climate change just last month, saying on CBS’s “60 Minutes” that “I don’t know that it’s man-made” and that the warming trend “could very well go back.”

“This report draws a direct connection between the warming atmosphere and the resulting changes that affect Americans' lives, communities, and livelihoods, now and in the future,” the document reads, concluding that “the evidence of human-caused climate change is overwhelming and continues to strengthen, that the impacts of climate change are intensifying across the country, and that climate-related threats to Americans' physical, social, and economic well-being are rising.

The report finds that the continental United States already is 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than it was 100 years ago, surrounded by seas that are on average nine inches higher and being racked by far worse heat waves than the nation experienced only 50 years ago. But those figures offer only the prelude to even more potentially severe impacts. The report suggests that by 2050, the country could see as much as 2.3 additional degrees of warming in the continental United States. By that same year, in a high-end global-warming scenario, coral reefs in Hawaii and the U.S. Pacific territories could be bleaching every single year — conditions in which their survival would be in severe doubt. A record-warm year like 2016 would become routine.

In another major step, the authors of the new report have begun to put dollar signs next to projected climate damage, specifically within the United States. In a worst-case climate-change scenario, the document finds, labor-related losses by the year 2090 as a result of extreme heat — the sort that makes it difficult to work outdoors or seriously lowers productivity — could amount to an estimated $155 billion annually. Deaths from temperature extremes could take an economic toll of $141 billion per year in the same year, while coastal property damage could total $118 billion yearly, researchers found

Of course, mitigating climate change would also mitigate this damage, by as much as 58 percent in the case of high-temperature related deaths, the report finds.

The categorical tone of the new assessments reflects scientists' growing confidence in the ability to detect the role of a changing climate in individual extreme events, such as heat waves and droughts. At the same time, increasingly sophisticated computer simulations now allow them to project future changes in highly specific regions of the country

The Second State of the Carbon Cycle Report, which examines all of North America (not just the United States), finds that over a decade, greenhouse-gas emissions from fossil fuels declined by 1 percent per year. The result is that while North America emitted 24 percent of the world’s emissions in 2004, that was down to 17 percent in 2013. This occurred in part thanks to improvements in vehicle fuel efficiency, the growth of renewable energy and the swapping of coal-burning for natural gas.

“For the globe, we’re still going up, but regionally, there have been these changes in how humans have been acting that have caused our emissions to go down,” said Ted Schuur, a Northern Arizona University expert on permafrost carbon

The report concludes that it appears possible to for economies to grow — at least in the United States, Mexico and Canada — without increasing overall emissions of greenhouse gases. That would be an important signal for the ability of the world to slow climate change over the course of the century

The next president could go further and tell allies such as Germany, Japan and Canada that their status as major trading partners protected by the U.S. security umbrella is now contingent upon their making steep emissions cuts.

adaptation, which means preparing societies and their infrastructure for the effects of climate change, such as building flood walls to hold back higher sea levels or retrofitting buildings to withstand more severe heat waves.

Rich countries industrialized with fossil fuels, developing industries powered by coal, delivering fossil-fuel-based electricity and heat to homes, and building transportation systems that run on the internal-combustion engine. In following this path, these countries chewed through most of the planet’s “carbon budget” — the amount of greenhouse gas that could be spewed until global temperatures warmed by 2 degrees Celsius

The United States has contributed about 26 percent of the world’s cumulative emissions, and the 28 nations of the European Union are responsible for only slightly less.

if Americans had been restricted to emitting a proportional share of a global carbon budget that capped warming at 1.5 degrees, we would have blown through that limit in 1944.

Climate finance means foreign aid for three main purposes

mitigation: subsidies for renewable-energy deployment and storage, electrical-grid modernization, and other means of reducing emissions

In the Paris negotiations, developing nations were explicitly open to making more ambitious commitments if developed countries contributed to making them happen.

coverage for loss or damage: compensation for people whose homes become uninhabitable or whose livelihoods are destroyed by climate change.

“climate justice,” which also includes providing support to marginalized communities that are disproportionately affected by climate change in rich countries.

Last year, at a climate summit in Poland, India reiterated its openness to doing more if it were adequately subsidized, and an organization of the 47 least-developed nations echoed that plea.

Nobody knows how big the ultimate U.S. number will need to be; it depends on how many rich countries pitch in, and how much they give, and how much help poorer countries need to modernize in eco-friendly way

to stay below 2 degrees of warming, by 2030 the global economy needs to give a “green” makeover to the $5 trillion per year spent worldwide on sectors such as agriculture, energy, transportation, construction and heavy industry.

his may be toxic for American voters. Polls show that Americans overwhelmingly accept the science of climate change, are increasingly worried about it and in theory support the notion that the government should address it — but they are more divided in their willingness to actually pay for climate action

only 23 percent said they’d pay at least $40 per month to fight climate change

The United States may have a narrow opportunity to pay down some of its historical debts, stem the tide of future climate refugees and manage the political instability that extreme warming would cause. The last chance came in 2009-2010, but the Senate failed, in part thanks to Obama’s bungling of the negotiations, to pass even domestic climate legislation

The leaders of developing nations aren’t suckers, and they know how dire the problem is. They have something rich countries want (emissions reductions), and they’d be fools to just give it away for free, even if they could. If we want them to succeed, it’s going to cost us, and we’ll need to move quickly. The science is clear: We do not have another decade to waste.

“The Earth’s climate is unequivocally undergoing a long-term warming trend, as established by decades of scientific measurements and multiple, independent lines of evidence,”

“Climate change effects could undermine important international systems on which the U.S. is critically dependent, such as trade routes, food and energy supplies, the global economy and domestic stability abroad.”

Although many of the world’s other leaders have expressed their disappointment with Trump’s decision, they have also underscored their commitment to solving the problem of global warming, with or without American participation

To date there are only two other countries that have not yet signed on to the Paris Agreement: Syria and Nicaragua. Syria, which remains in the throes of a destructive civil war, noted that it was not in a position to sign such agreements because of ongoing sanctions from Western countries. The government of Nicaragua, however, refused to sign on for different reasons. Nicaragua believes that the Paris Agreement does not go far enough to reduce emissions, arguing that wealthy countries such as the United States should have been forced to make deeper commitments.

Dr Peter Alexander, at the University of Edinburgh, UK, was also impressed but noted: “There may be environmental benefits, eg for biodiversity, from sustainably managed grazing and increasing animal product consumption may improve nutrition for some of the poorest globally. My personal opinion is we should interpret these results not as the need to become vegan overnight, but rather to moderate our [meat] consumption.” Poore said: “The reason I started this project was to understand if there were sustainable animal producers out there. But I have stopped consuming animal products over the last four years of this project. These impacts are not necessary to sustain our current way of life. The question is how much can we reduce them and the answer is a lot.”

His studies are central to determining the social cost of carbon, an attempt to quantify the total cost to society of greenhouse-gases, including hidden factors such as extreme weather and lower crop yields.

“Nordhaus was in a position early on to think about climate change from a human welfare and well-being perspective,

Romer, who is at the NYU Stern School of Business in New York, was honoured for his work on the role of technological change in economic growth. The economist is best-known for his studies on how market forces and economic decisions facilitate technological change.

His ‘endogenous growth theory’, developed in the 1990s, opened new avenues of research on how policies and regulations can prompt new ideas and economic innovation.

And Romer’s work also has implications for policies relating to climate-change mitigation. “He showed clearly that unregulated free markets will not sufficiently invest in research and development activities,”

“We are in a very dangerous position now where action could go forward or backward,” Climate Analytics CEO Bill Hare told reporters Wednesday. “The next 12 months or so will really tell.”

Research from Climate Analytics released in early 2015, for example, suggested that global greenhouse emissions would need to hit zero by 2100 at the latest to have a good chance of keeping temperatures from rising more than 2°C by the end of the century

“Ambitious plans are very good but not enough,” says Niklas Höhne, a founding partner of NewClimate Institute. “They need to be cast in stone with laws and regulation.”

There’s an even bigger elephant in the room: such bold climate proposals are not on the table for the world’s three biggest emitters, the U.S., China and India

Global emissions rose last year at the fastest rate in years thanks in large part to a spike in those countries even as emissions fell in the European Union, Japan and elsewhere.

Prior to Donald Trump’s election, the U.S. federal government had suggested the country could implement policies to reduce emissions 80% by 2050, which would have been a significant move in direction of a net-zero target

Trump has not only done away with long-term thinking to reduce the country’s emissions but targeted a slew of environmental rules for rollback. Carbon emissions rose last year more than 3% even as cities and states continued their own pushes to reduce emissions.

China has reversed a ban on the construction of new coal-fired power plants while India is projected to continue to grow its use of that fossil fuel. Others including Brazil and Australia are also backtracking on their climate change commitments.