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5 Charts Show Climate Progress as Paris Agreement Turns 10  Scientific American November 22, 2025  Meghan Bartels edited by Andrea Thompson The 2015 Paris Agreement forged a path for the world to stave off the worst climate change scenarios. Here’s where we stand 10 years later. Ten years ago the world came together to forge a path out of the climate emergency in the form of a global treaty dubbed the Paris Agreement. Under the accord, nations committed to keeping global temperatures to “well below” a two-degree-Celsius increase over preindustrial levels and to striving to limit that increase to 1.5 degrees C. These goals were ambitious and required greenhouse gas emissions to begin declining by 2025. Yet emissions continue to rise. Annual negotiations around seeing the Paris Agreement through have continued over the past two weeks at this year’s United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP30, in Brazil, where participants are acknowledging two simultaneous truths: we have made meaningful strides in protecting our planet, but huge leaps are still needed to avoid the worst outcomes.
 
Those leaps are daunting, given that President Donald Trump is once again pulling the U.S. out of the accord and that countries such as China and Saudi Arabia are also still trying to keep fossil fuels in the energy mix. China, however, is rapidly overtaking the U.S. as a renewable energy powerhouse, and solar and wind have seen exponential gains globally in recent years. These five charts show why the Paris Agreement is vital—and how the world is doing 10 years into the endeavor. The Paris Agreement is built around temperature increases compared with an unspecified preindustrial baseline, generally taken as the latter half of the 19th cIn 2015 the average global temperature was 1.1 degrees C hotter than it was during the preindustrial period. Today it is around 1.3 degrees C. (In 2024—the hottest year on record—the planet was more than 1.5 degrees C, but the Paris agreement looks at the average over many years. The World Meteorological Organization projects that 2025 will be around 1.4 degrees C above the preindustrial average and either the second or third hottest year on record.)
The increase is grim but not the end of the story—especially if humans can stop climate pollution quickly enough to reverse the warming trend. “Every ton matters; every tenth of a degree we avoid matters; every year matters,” says Costa Samaras, an energy policy expert at Carnegie Mellon University.entury. Every year since 1970—more than half a century—temperatures have been above this average and soaring upward......read on and the graphics are very revealing     https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-paris-climate-agreement-is-turning-10-these-5-charts-show-what-progress/

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2025 NDC Synthesis Report.....This report provides valuable new insights, albeit limited in scope, on the basis of the 64 new NDCs submitted by 64 Parties to the Paris Agreement and recorded in the NDC registry between 1 January 2024 and 30 September 2025, covering about 30 percent of total global emissions in 2019. It is not possible to draw wide-ranging global-level conclusions or inferences from this limited data set. Nevertheless, the report highlights many key lessons, about progress being made and major challenges ahead, emerging from the NDCs synthesized:
  1. The new NDCs show a progression in terms of quality, credibility and economic coverage, with 89 per cent of Parties communicating economy-wide targets (compared with 81 per cent in their previous NDCs);
  2. The new NDCs include responses to the outcomes of the first GST, with 88 per cent of Parties indicating that their NDCs were informed by the outcomes of the GST and 80 per cent specifying how;
  3. The emissions trajectories set out in the new NDCs are broadly consistent with a linear trajectory from the Parties’ 2030 targets to their long-term net zero targets, showing that Parties are laying out clear stepping-stones towards net zero, although acceleration of action is still needed;
  4. Collectively, the new NDCs show a reduction in projected emissions of 17 (11–24) per cent below the 2019 level;
  5. All NDCs go beyond mitigation to include elements, inter alia, on adaptation, finance, technology transfer, capacity-building and addressing loss and damage, reflecting the comprehensive scope of the Paris Agreement;
  6. Adaptation and resilience are featuring more prominently in NDCs, with 73 per cent of the new NDCs including an adaptation component;
  7. Implementation of the new NDCs necessitates strong, ongoing international cooperation, and new and innovative approaches to unlock finance and support for developing country Parties at scale.
Content of the report......Mandate and background   In accordance with the Paris Agreement, each Party is to prepare, communicate and maintain, every five years, successive NDCs that it intends to achieve and each successive NDC will represent progression reflecting the Party’s highest possible ambition and be informed by the outcomes of the GST.  The communicated NDCs are to be recorded in the NDC registry, maintained by the secretariat......read the full report.....https://unfccc.int/process-and-meetings/the-paris-agreement/nationally-determined-contributions-ndcs/2025-ndc-synthesis-report#Mandate-and-background

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  • Climate Gates......Maybe we don't need billionaire opinions on everything  Bill McKibben  Oct 31, 2025 I feel quite strongly that we should pay less attention to billionaires—indeed that’s rather the point of this small essay—so let me acknowledge at the outset that there is something odd about me therefore devoting an edition of this newsletter to replying to Bill Gates’ new missive about climate. But I fear I must, if only because it’s been treated as such important news by so many outlets—far more, say, than covered the UN Secretary General’s same-day appeal to international leaders that began with a forthright statement of the science. Here’s Antonio Guterres: The truth is that we have failed to avoid an overshooting above 1.5C in the next few years. And that going above 1.5C has devastating consequences. Some of these devastating consequences are tipping points, be it in the Amazon, be it in Greenland, or western Antarctica or the coral reefs.’ I

In fact, I could probably just note that Gates, with impeccable timing, decided to drop his remarks at the same moment that Hurricane Melissa plowed into Jamaica, doing incalculable damage because of winds made stronger by the ocean heat attributable to global warming.  As Jeff Masters reported......"Human-caused climate change increased Hurricane Melissa’s wind speeds by 7% (11 mph, or 18 km/h), leading to a 12% increase in its damages, found researchers at the Imperial College of London in a rapid attribution study just released. A separate study by scientists at Climate Central found that climate change increased Melissa’s winds by 10%, and the near-record-warm ocean waters that Melissa traversed — 1.2 degrees Celsius (1.2°F) warmer than average — were up to 900 times more likely to be that warm because of human-caused climate change.".And, oh, the same day Hue, in Vietnam, reported one of the two or three greatest rainfalls in recorded human history: five feet of rain in 24 hours, the kind of deluge made ever more likely by a warming atmosphere that can hold more water vapor. As the Associated Press reported, “global warming is making tropical storms stronger and wetter, according to experts, because warmer oceans provide them with more fuel, driving more intense winds, heavier rainfall and shifting precipitation patterns across East Asia.”

Anyway, Bill Gates’ letter......."There’s a doomsday view of climate change that goes like this: In a few decades, cataclysmic climate change will decimate civilization. The evidence is all around us—just look at all the heat waves and storms caused by rising global temperatures. Nothing matters more than limiting the rise in temperature. Fortunately for all of us, this view is wrong. Although climate change will have serious consequences—particularly for people in the poorest countries—it will not lead to humanity’s demise. People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future. Emissions projections have gone down, and with the right policies and investments, innovation will allow us to drive emissions down much further."...... It was wrong of him to write it because if his high-priced pr team didn’t anticipate the reaction, they should be fired. 

I assume they did, and that they were okay with the entirely predictable result from our president. Here’s how the Washington Times described it......“I (WE!) just won the War on the Climate Change Hoax,” said Mr. Trump in a Wednesday post on Truth Social. “Bill Gates has finally admitted that he was completely WRONG on the issue. It took courage to do so, and for that we are all grateful. MAGA!!!”....... Bill Gates didn’t, of course, say that. He said climate change was real and we should be worried about it, but that it wouldn’t lead to “humanity’s demise” or “the end of civilization” (which seems like the lowest of low bars) and that......."Although climate change will hurt poor people more than anyone else, for the vast majority of them it will not be the only or even the biggest threat to their lives and welfare. The biggest problems are poverty and disease"......and therefore that’s where we should focus our money. His letter is actually directed at delegates to the global climate conference next month in Brazil, essentially telling them to back off the emissions reductions and concentrate on growing economies in the developing world because “health and prosperity are the best defense against climate change.”

Any conversation about Bill Gates and climate should begin by acknowledging that he’s been wrong about it over and over again. He’s explained that up until 2006—i.e., 18 years after Jim Hansen’s testimony before Congress laying out the science, and well past the point where George W. Bush had acknowledged its reality—he like Trump thought the whole thing was a crock. “I had assumed there were cyclical variations or other factors that would naturally prevent a true climate disaster,” he explained—at the time he was the richest man in the world, and yet his scientific advisors couldn’t get across the simple facts to him. And he was last heard from on the topic in 2021, when he wrote a book explaining that it was going to be very hard to do renewable energy because it came with a “green premium”—i.e. it cost more. Sadly for his argument, that was pretty much the year that sun and wind crossed the invisible line making them less expensive than coal and oil and gas. (You can read my review from the New York Times here, and you can read his response to it in Rolling Stone here where he explains “McKibben is stuck in this time warp.”)

So—if we were listening to people on the grounds of whether they had a good track record, the world would not spend a lot of time on Gates and climate. But if you have a hundred billion dollars all is forgiven, and so there has been lots of fawning coverage. The fact that Gates framed all this in a way designed to appeal to the president is so obvious that it hardly bears mentioning (the richest men in the world have all been sucking up to him, so no extra shame here); let’s instead just go to the heart of his argument. Which is weak in the extreme.Bill Gates didn’t, of course, say that. He said climate change was real and we should be worried about it, but that it wouldn’t lead to “humanity’s demise” or “the end of civilization” (which seems like the lowest of low bars) and that. Although climate change will hurt poor people more than anyone else, for the vast majority of them it will not be the only or even the biggest threat to their lives and welfare. The biggest problems are poverty and disease and therefore that’s where we should focus our money. His letter is actually directed at delegates to the global climate conference next month in Brazil, essentially telling them to back off the emissions reductions and concentrate on growing economies in the developing world because “health and prosperity are the best defense against climate change.”

Any conversation about Bill Gates and climate should begin by acknowledging that he’s been wrong about it over and over again. He’s explained that up until 2006—i.e., 18 years after Jim Hansen’s testimony before Congress laying out the science, and well past the point where George W. Bush had acknowledged its reality—he like Trump thought the whole thing was a crock. “I had assumed there were cyclical variations or other factors that would naturally prevent a true climate disaster,” he explained—at the time he was the richest man in the world, and yet his scientific advisors couldn’t get across the simple facts to him.

And he was last heard from on the topic in 2021, when he wrote a book explaining that it was going to be very hard to do renewable energy because it came with a “green premium”—i.e. it cost more. Sadly for his argument, that was pretty much the year that sun and wind crossed the invisible line making them less expensive than coal and oil and gas. (You can read my review from the New York Times here, and you can read his response to it in Rolling Stone here where he explains “McKibben is stuck in this time warp.”)

So—if we were listening to people on the grounds of whether they had a good track record, the world would not spend a lot of time on Gates and climate. But if you have a hundred billion dollars all is forgiven, and so there has been lots of fawning coverage. The fact that Gates framed all this in a way designed to appeal to the president is so obvious that it hardly bears mentioning (the richest men in the world have all been sucking up to him, so no extra shame here); let’s instead just go to the heart of his argument. Which is weak in the extreme. Bill Gates didn’t, of course, say that. He said climate change was real and we should be worried about it, but that it wouldn’t lead to “humanity’s demise” or “the end of civilization” (which seems like the lowest of low bars) and that......"Although climate change will hurt poor people more than anyone else, for the vast majority of them it will not be the only or even the biggest threat to their lives and welfare. The biggest problems are poverty and disease"......read on    https://billmckibben.substack.com/p/climate-gates?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email&triedRedirect=true

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The Story of CO2 Is the Story of Everything     But according to science journalist Peter Brannen, that dismal view is far too narrow. In his first book, The Ends of the World, Brannen chronicled Earth’s five major mass extinctions, charting the deep history of our planet’s greatest catastrophes. For his second, The Story of CO2 Is the Story of Everything (Ecco, 2025), he has higher ambitions, taking readers on dizzying jaunts through deep time to reframe our understanding of what may be the most vilified and misunderstood molecule on Earth.
Inspired and informed by conversations with leading planetary scientists, Brannen’s central argument is that CO2 is not merely an industrial pollutant but a key player in the four-billion-year-old drama of life on Earth. It is the molecule that built our planet, forming the global carbon cycle that has regulated climate, shaped geology and powered evolution for eons. He shows how the ebb and flow of atmospheric CO2 across Earth’s vast history has played a role in, yes, practically everything under the sun—from the primordial origins of life to the development of human civilization and our global economic system. From the ancient past to the present day, Brannen makes the case that to understand CO2 is to understand the very fabric of our world. 
carbon dioxide has a terrible reputation. It’s much maligned because of its role as a biosphere-threatening pollutant, but in fact the atmospheric compound has been a critical driving force behind the creation of life on Earth, shaping human history and the waves of evolution preceding it.
 
Peter Brannen’s new book, “The Story of CO2 is the Story of Everything: How Carbon Dioxide Made Our World,” is just what the title promises, drawing on geology, thermodynamics, chemistry, biology, and eventually, economics and sociology to make his case. “Four billion years ago, CO2 came alive,” he writes. “It remains the ultimate source of carbon for all life, the primary knob of Earth’s temperature, and our species’ signature product.” The pivotal part of the tale begins hundreds of millions of years ago when photosynthetic energy in the form of early plant life, algae, and bacteria became buried within the Earth’s crust, eventually forming fossil fuels. Those deposits were uncorked eons later by England’s industrial capitalism, and more than a century after that, by multinational fossil-fuel corporations, creating a thickening blanket of atmospheric CO2 and detonating today’s perilous carbon bomb.

One might argue that the history of life revolves around O2 (oxygen) and H2O (water) as much as CO2. But though the buildup of oxygen in the atmosphere enabled complex life, Brannen shows that the gas wasn’t primarily created by photosynthesis but by longtime geologic processes, which naturally involve CO2. And to Brannen, water is merely an assistant, helping to transform carbon dioxide from the air into the stuff of life. So carbon dioxide, he convincingly shows, is the real star of the show.

Brannen, the author of “The Ends of the World,” a 2017 account of Earth’s five mass extinction events, is also a contributing writer at The Atlantic, where he has taken on scientifically contentious issues, like whether we’re living in the Anthropocene or not, or refuting the idea that the Amazon is the Earth’s lungs. In his latest book, he wades into other provocative debates, such as whether or not Earth is really facing a sixth major mass extinction, but he fully acknowledges that humanity’s carbon dioxide emissions are propelling us toward such a catastrophe.Before assessing how the planet became so imperiled, though, he examines the probable origins of life. Brannen explores two leading hypotheses: that it began with “metabolism first” — with chemical reactions at deep-sea hydrothermal vents that didn’t require photosynthesis — or with “information first,” in which a soup of RNA-like molecules began replicating and eventually produced proto-cells. The jury is still out on this debate, though Brannen leans toward the metabolism idea, making the provocative suggestion that “perhaps the first life wasn’t a miracle, but a necessity” to resolve chemical instabilities at those marine vents.

In chronicling how Earth reached today’s climatic tipping point, Brannen takes a lively tour of past eras, when the planet wildly swung between snowball Earth and greenhouse Earth. The former resulted from a dearth of carbon dioxide and a layer of ice encasing the planet, while the latter came from an overabundance of atmospheric carbon, dramatically raising temperatures. (Venus, where a runaway greenhouse effect made that world uninhabitable around a billion years ago, serves as a warning, he writes.) https://undark.org/2025/09/26/review-the-story-of-co2/
 
AND,......Another review........The Story of CO2 Is the Story of Everything     But according to science journalist Peter Brannen, that dismal view is far too narrow. In his first book, The Ends of the World, Brannen chronicled Earth’s five major mass extinctions, charting the deep history of our planet’s greatest catastrophes. For his second, The Story of CO2 Is the Story of Everything (Ecco, 2025), he has higher ambitions, taking readers on dizzying jaunts through deep time to reframe our understanding of what may be the most vilified and misunderstood molecule on Earth. Inspired and informed by conversations with leading planetary scientists, Brannen’s central argument is that CO2 is not merely an industrial pollutant but a key player in the four-billion-year-old drama of life on Earth. It is the molecule that built our planet, forming the global carbon cycle that has regulated climate, shaped geology and powered evolution for eons. He shows how the ebb and flow of atmospheric CO2 across Earth’s vast history has played a role in, yes, practically everything under the sun—from the primordial origins of life to the development of human civilization and our global economic system. From the ancient past to the present day, Brannen makes the case that to understand CO2 is to understand the very fabric of our world.When we talk about carbon dioxide, the narrative is almost always that of a modern-day morality play. We hear about gigatons of CO2 emitted, about rising global temperatures and about the dire, unheeded warnings of climate scientists.......read on   https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/carbon-dioxide-isnt-what-you-think-it-is/

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In a June 24, 2025, interview published in the Guardian Weekly on July 4, 2025, climate expert Genevieve Guenther discussed the reality of climate tipping points and the importance of correcting misleading narratives that downplay climate risks. She highlighted the need for honest public discourse about potential catastrophic risks and countered the false narrative that the climate threat is under control...........‘This is a fight for life’: climate expert on tipping points, doomerism and using wealth as a shield. Economic assumptions about risks of the climate crisis are no longer relevant, says the communications expert Genevieve Guenther. Guardian Jonathan Watts  Tue 24 Jun 2025 Climate breakdown can be observed across many continuous, incremental changes such as soaring carbon dioxide levels, rising seas and heating oceans. The numbers creep up year after year, fuelled by human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. But scientists have also identified at least 16 “tipping points” – thresholds where a tiny shift could cause fundamental parts of the Earth system to change dramatically, irreversibly and with potentially devastating effects. These shifts can interact with each other and create feedback loops that heat the planet further or disrupt weather patterns, with unknown but potentially catastrophic consequences for life on Earth. It is possible some tipping points may already have been passed. Dr Genevieve Guenther, an American climate communications specialist, is the founding director of End Climate Silence, which studies the representation of global heating in the media and public discourse. Last year, she published The Language of Climate Politics: Fossil Fuel Propaganda and How to Fight It, which was described by Bill McKibben as “a gift to the world”. In the run-up to the Global Tipping Points conference in July, Guenther talks to the Guardian about the need to discuss catastrophic risks when communicating about the climate crisis.The climate crisis is pushing globally important ecosystems – ice sheets, coral reefs, ocean circulation and the Amazon rainforest – towards the point of no return.                                           

Why is it important to talk about tipping points?....... We need to correct a false narrative that the climate threat is under control. These enormous risks are potentially catastrophic. They would undo the connections between human and ecological systems that form the basis of all of our civilisation

How have attitudes changed towards these dangers?.........There was a constructive wave of global climate alarm in the wake of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report on 1.5C in 2018. That was the first time scientists made it clear that the difference between 1.5C and 2C would be catastrophic for millions of people and that in order to halt global heating at a relatively safe level, we would need to start zeroing out our emissions almost immediately. Until then, I don’t think policymakers realised the timeline was that short. This prompted a flurry of activism – Greta Thunberg and Indigenous and youth activists – and a surge of media attention. All of this converged to make almost everybody feel that climate change was a terrifying and pressing problem. This prompted new pledges, new corporate sustainability targets, and new policies being passed by government. This led to a backlash by those in the climate movement who prefer to cultivate optimism. Their preferred solution was to drive capitalist investment into renewable technologies so fossil fuels could be beaten out of the marketplace. This group believed climate fear might drive away investors, so they started to argue it was counterproductive to talk about worst-case scenarios. Some commentators even argued we had averted the direst predictions and were now on a more reassuring trajectory of global warming of a little under 3C by 2100.  But it is bananas to feel reassured by that because 3C would be a totally catastrophic outcome for humanity. Even at the current level of about 1.5C, the impacts of warming are emerging on the worst side of the range of possible outcomes and there is growing concern of tipping points for the main Atlantic Ocean circulation (Amoc), Antarctic sea ice, corals and rainforests. If the risk of a plane crashing was as high as the risk of the Amoc collapsing, none of us would ever fly because they would not let the plane take off. And the idea that our little spaceship, our planet, is under the risk of essentially crashing and we’re still continuing business as usual is mindblowing. I think part of the problem is that people feel distant from the dangers and don’t realise the children we have in our homes today are threatened with a chaotic, disastrous, unliveable future. Talking about the risks of catastrophe is a very useful way to overcome this kind of false distance. 

In your book, you write that it’s appropriate to be scared and the more you know, the more likely you are to be worried, as is evident from the statements of scientists and the United Nations secretary general, António Guterres. Why?....... Some people at the centre of the media, policymaking and even research claim that climate change isn’t going to be that bad for those who live in the wealthy developed world – the UK, Europe and the United States. When you hear these messages, you are lulled into a kind of complacency and it seems reasonable to think that we can continue to live as we do now without putting ourselves, our families, our communities under threat within decades. What my book is designed to do is wake people up and raise the salience and support for phasing out fossil fuels. [It] is written for people who are already concerned about the climate crisis and are willing to entertain a level of anxiety. But the discourse of catastrophe would not be something I would recommend for people who are disengaged from the climate problem. I think that talking about catastrophe with those people can actually backfire because it’ll just either overwhelm them or make them entrench their positions. It can be too threatening. 
 
A recent Yale study found that a degree of climate anxiety was not necessarily bad because it could stir people to collective action. Do you agree?...... It depends. I talk about three different kinds of doomerism. One is the despair that arises from misunderstanding the science and thinking we’re absolutely on the path to collapse within 20 or 30 years, no matter what we do. That is not true. Second, there’s a kind of nihilistic position taken by people who suggest they are the only ones who can look at the harsh truth. I have disdain for that position. Finally, there’s the doomerism that comes from political frustration, from believing that people who have power are just happy to burn the world down.......read on- there's much more     https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2025/jun/24/tipping-points-climate-crisis-expert-doomerism-wealth

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  4. Extreme Weather cost $2tn Globally over the Past Decade

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