"The U.S. was the only major economy that failed last year to reduce its carbon pollution or at least slow the growth in how much carbon dioxide is spewed by burning fossil fuels."

A new peer-reviewed study published in the journal Science confirms that human greenhouse gas emissions halted a 2,000-year cooling trend.

A temporary breach of the 1.5C global-warming limit is now “inevitable” following “decades of insufficient climate action”, says the UN Environment Programme (UNEP). In its “sobering” annual assessment of the global “emissions gap”, UNEP says that exceeding the Paris Agreement’s 1.5C limit is “imminent and unavoidable”.

This year’s report, titled “The point of return”, says the “task now” is to minimise the size and scale of a temperature “overshoot” and to “establish a credible return path to 1.5C by the end of the century”. Even the “lowest possible” overshoot scenario for 1.5C would first see global warming peak at around 1.7-1.8C in the middle of the century before declining, says the report.

This scenario – which is “still aligned with the long-term temperature goal of the Paris Agreement” – would require global emissions cuts of 18% by 2030 and 45% by 2035, while ramping up “removals” of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere, says UNEP. In contrast, it notes that the current climate pledges by countries around the world – even if fully implemented – would only reduce emissions by 5-8% by 2030 and 11-15 % by 2035, relative to 2025 levels.

Nonetheless, the report identifies “ample opportunity to accelerate action”, concluding that “countries can still limit peak warming, shorten the duration of overshoot and keep the goals of the Paris Agreement within reach”.

The world is running headlong towards a long-term temperature rise of 2.8C based on present government policies, the latest UN report shows, with the US standing out among developed economies with sharply higher energy-related emissions.

Under President Donald Trump’s policies, a rebound in coal generation to meet increased US power demand drove the rise, after mainly trending down over the past decade. Emissions also rose in Indonesia and China, but were lower in India and the European Union.

The UN report confirmed that there was no longer any chance of preventing global warming of 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, the lower limit enshrined in the 2015 Paris accord between almost 200 countries.

This summer’s heat was the continent’s deadliest by far this century, according to new peer-reviewed estimates.

https://archive.ph/P1gyQ

By Raymond Zhong

Reporting from London

Oct. 22, 2026, 7:01 p.m. ET

Severe heat killed more than 50,000 people in European cities and towns this summer, according to peer-reviewed estimates released by scientists in London on Friday.

That is three times as many people as would have died had humankind not warmed the planet by burning oil, gas and coal, the researchers said. Their estimates suggest that this summer’s intense heat was Europe’s deadliest by far this century.

The findings, detailed in a pair of studies in the journal Nature Health, are based on a combination of factors that influence heat-related health risks in particular locations, including demographics, socioeconomic indicators and availability of health services.

...

Large parts of Europe sweated this summer through a series of heat domes, or sprawling weather systems that allow heat to build for days on end. The extra heat trapped around Earth by greenhouse gas emissions allows temperatures during these events to scale even higher, increasing the risks to health.

“Even in a preindustrial climate, for some of these heat waves, we would have expected to see high mortality,” said Clair Barnes, a climate scientist at Imperial College London and lead author of both studies. “But that mortality has been pushed substantially higher by the human-caused warming, primarily from the burning of fossil fuels.”

...Furnace-like conditions fueled the largest wildfires in modern history in France and Spain, displacing 300,000 people. All in all, it was Western Europe’s hottest summer on record, and the third hottest for the continent as a whole.

The authors of the new studies focused on mortality in 854 urban areas across 30 nations: the 27 member states of the European Union, plus Britain, Norway and Switzerland. These towns and cities account for roughly 40 percent of the total population of those countries, but they aren’t necessarily representative of Europe as a whole. The researchers chose them because they could obtain the necessary data to estimate heat-related mortality in every summer since 2000.

The scientists’ estimate of 50,391 deaths in these towns and cities this summer suggests a big jump in fatalities over previous years. Heat killed an estimated 29,480 people in the second-deadliest summer, 2022, and 28,462 people in the summer of 2003, when devastating hot spells prompted widespread concern about Europe’s readiness to cope with climate change.

...

Supersized heat waves used to be rare. No longer. A Reuters data-driven examination of global temperatures reveals the emergence of what we call ‘heat storms.’ They now swarm the planet, upending life around the world from Texas to Ivory Coast to Poland.

In less than a lifetime, about six and a half decades, heat waves have evolved from sporadic, isolated episodes to massive, cascading weather events that can blanket vast swaths of the planet for months or even years at a time. The largest heat wave of the 1960s reached about 6% of the planet as it drifted for 46 days over the Atlantic Ocean, parts of Latin America and West Africa.

The largest one this decade swept across almost 85% of the globe during its 367-day lifetime, stretching into the polar latitudes and touching virtually every human being on Earth.

To continue calling such sprawling phenomena “heat waves” would be like calling a monsoon a rain shower. To understand the new reality of these immense expanses of heat, Reuters consulted with two dozen meteorologists and climate researchers – and analyzed temperatures for every hour of every day since 1960 for more than one million grid squares covering the entire globe. Out of those results we developed a new concept: the “heat storm.”

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