Increased heat will supercharge extreme weather events, warns UN agency as Cop31 climate summit begins
Heat is accumulating in Earth’s systems at an accelerating rate, the UN’s weather agency has reported as the Cop31 climate change summit begins in Turkey, with 2026 on track to be one of the four warmest years on record.
The imbalance between incoming energy from the sun and energy leaving Earth reached its highest level since monitoring began, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said in its State of the Global Climate update.
That imbalance and the accumulation of heat will supercharge extreme weather events such as heatwaves, droughts and tropical cyclones.
I’m not a climatologist by any means, but it’s starting to seem like geoengineering measures (like aerosols to reflect more light) could be the only way to keep large swathes of Earth habitable while fossil fuels are phased out. Concerns about it being potentially dangerous are legitimate, but there’s a point where the danger of heat waves and drought outweighs that and it seems like we’re coming up on it.
could be the only way to keep large swathes of Earth habitable while fossil fuels are phased out.
For that to work fossil fuels have to actually be phased out, though, and that’s not happening. In fact, new fossil fuel projects and infrastructure continued to be built every year.
The top three greenhouse gas producers are China, India and the US. China has been massively investing and developing solar panels and other renewables so I think they could drop fossil fuels in 5 to 10 years. India is at point where China was a few decades back, their industry is developing rapidly and standards of living are increasing but this also means they are very power hungry and will use a lot of fossil fuel. They probably won’t be ready to stop using them. The US could have dropped fossil fuel use by now but Trump and his ilk have somehow made the Sun woke and canceled pretty much any renewable project they could. Could they recover that progress in 5 years? A decade? What if another Trump gets in?
From what I understand a lot of that is due to AI buildout, the grid as used by people is incredibly solar-heavy in a lot of places. So kill AI + ICEs and we might be on track.
It’s mostly massive amount of corruption and bribes, AI and cars still running on gasoline are symptoms of that.
I’m guessing there will be huge trials eventually, with oil execs getting sentenced to death if it continues. A lot of people are either going to die or lose their homes, it’s going to get messy.
No, AI is a tiny fraction of energy use, and indeed fossil fuel use.
The biggest single sectors are heating and transport.
I’m pretty sure there never was a huge danger to reflecting in the atmosphere right now, the danger comes from if we start doing that then they won’t stop doing the things that are causing climate change which comes down to more than just phasing out fossil fuels.
My understanding is there is legitimate concern about the potential effects of photosynthesis on plants, and that there’s not an undo button if you fuck it up and you just have to wait it out.
I don’t know if it works this way for aerosols, but to illustrate the idea, in chemistry when you’re mixing an acid and a base, the pH doesn’t gradually change; if you start with a base it’s very basic/high pH for a long time, and then it suddenly swings to low pH/acidic in the space of a few drops. What if atmospheric cooling has a similar mechanism, and we proverbially add too many drops? It’s not something I know enough about to dismiss as a concern when we’re talking literal global effects.
I get that it’s also a legitimate concern that people will just go the Futurama route of kicking the can down the road forever, but man, so many people are dying I feel like every idea deserves consideration.
I don’t know if it works this way for aerosols, but to illustrate the idea, in chemistry when you’re mixing an acid and a base, the pH doesn’t gradually change; if you start with a base it’s very basic/high pH for a long time, and then it suddenly swings to low pH/acidic in the space of a few drops. What if atmospheric cooling has a similar mechanism, and we proverbially add too many drops? It’s not something I know enough about to dismiss as a concern when we’re talking literal global effects.
Fun fact: that’s what northwestern Europe will get to experience when the AMOC collapses. It will continue getting warmer there for a while as the current slows (just long enough to kill a bunch of people in heat waves and make everybody spend a fuckton of money upgrading buildings to have the air conditioning they’ve never needed historically), then once it actually stops it’ll plunge them into a localized ice age, with the climate of England suddenly shifting to resemble that of British Columbia or Alaska (because that’s what that latitude is like without a warm current modifying it).
Oh I agree
Indeed
