The ONS quietly axed its annual excess winter death reports after 2022. Why? asks Paul Homewood. Could it be because they vastly outstrip the number of people that die during summer heat waves?
The post The Cover-Up of Winter Excess Death Data appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.
For the first time in my life, I have a proper garden, and I was determined to make the most of it. Back in spring, I went all in: seeds, trays, pots, grow bags, soil, and a shiny new watering can. My vision was modest but hopeful: a small patch of fruit and vegetables, flowers to attract pollinators, and a chance to teach my eldest child how things grow, and how to handle it when they don’t.
We started with tomatoes, a household favorite. The seedlings sprouted with promise, only to shrivel and die in the season’s first heatwave. It felt like a bad sign. The dahlias, ranunculus, and freesias I’d planted refused to bloom at all. Slowly, my gardening enthusiasm began to fade.
What started as a cozy parent-child project in patience and resilience is beginning to feel like something else entirely: a small, personal front line in the climate crisis. As heatwaves become more frequent and intense across Britain, pushing more regions into drought, the simple act of growing your own food is no longer just a hobby. It’s a test of adaptability, and increasingly, a luxury that requires more water, more vigilance, and more heartbreak than it once did.
My family’s failed harvest is a tiny story, but it echoes a much bigger one, as gardeners, allotment holders, and small-scale growers across the country grapple with unpredictable weather patterns that are reshaping how, and whether, we can grow our own food at all.
The post My Garden Dreams Wilted in the Heat, and Now I Wonder If Home Gardening Is a Climate-Era Luxury first appeared on EnviroLink Network.
A stunning drone video capturing dozens of stingrays swimming together off the coast of New York has drawn widespread attention from beachgoers and marine life enthusiasts alike. The footage offers an unusual bird’s-eye perspective on cownose rays, a species known for its seasonal visits to Long Island’s waters.
Captured last Friday off Southampton, the video was filmed by Joanna Steidle, a Hamptons-based drone pilot recognized for her striking aerial ocean photography. The clip shows a large group of cownose rays gliding gracefully just beneath the water’s surface, their distinctive wing-shaped bodies visible in remarkable detail.
Cownose rays, which can grow wing spans of up to three feet, are known for traveling in large schools and typically arrive in the region during the warmer summer months. Despite their somewhat intimidating appearance, marine scientists describe the species as shy and generally harmless to humans, posing little threat to swimmers or beachgoers who might encounter them.
While the sight of so many rays moving together may seem unusual to casual observers, experts note that this behavior is a normal part of their seasonal pattern and that these creatures have likely been visiting Long Island’s coastal waters for decades. The viral footage has offered a rare glimpse into a natural phenomenon that typically goes unnoticed by those on shore, highlighting the rich marine biodiversity present just off New York’s beaches during summer.
The post Drone Captures Rare Aerial View of Stingray Migration Off Long Island first appeared on EnviroLink Network.
A climate shock that unfolded about 304 million years ago is offering scientists a dramatic warning about how quickly Earth’s climate system can amplify an initial temperature rise. During the Late Paleozoic Ice Age, a relatively modest increase in global temperatures appears to have triggered a much larger episode of warming, as methane released from thawing permafrost intensified the greenhouse effect. Researchers say the ancient event provides a powerful geological parallel for the climate changes occurring today.
The study, led by Le Yao of the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology with contributions from University of Cincinnati geosciences professor Thomas Algeo and international colleagues, examined a short-lived warming episode during Earth’s penultimate ice age. Their findings suggest that global sea surface temperatures eventually increased by more than 7 degrees Celsius, or approximately 12 degrees Fahrenheit. The rise was not necessarily caused by one enormous initial pulse of carbon. Instead, it may have developed through a chain reaction in which warming activated additional natural sources of greenhouse gases.
The Late Paleozoic Ice Age extended across a vast span of geological time, when large ice sheets covered parts of the supercontinent Gondwana. Although the planet was in an “icehouse” state, atmospheric carbon dioxide and methane still had the power to destabilize the climate. The newly analyzed warming event is particularly significant because it occurred under ice-age conditions rather than during an already warm greenhouse world. That makes it a valuable analog for the modern Earth, which still contains continent-scale ice masses in Greenland and Antarctica.
According to the researchers, the initial climate disturbance may have been linked to volcanic activity. Volcanic emissions can inject carbon dioxide and other gases into the atmosphere, where they absorb outgoing infrared radiation and prevent some heat from escaping into space. The warming may also have been assisted by changes in Earth’s orbit. Over long cycles, variations in orbital shape alter the distribution of sunlight across the planet, influencing the growth and retreat of ice sheets and changing the seasonal balance of solar energy.
At first, the additional carbon may have produced only a limited temperature increase. But once warming crossed a critical threshold, frozen ground in high-latitude regions began to thaw. Permafrost contains large quantities of organic carbon preserved in frozen soils. When that material becomes available to microbes, decomposition can release carbon dioxide and methane. Methane is especially powerful over shorter atmospheric timescales because, molecule for molecule, it absorbs considerably more infrared radiation than carbon dioxide, even though it remains in the atmosphere for less time.
This process can create a positive climate feedback. An initial warming causes permafrost to thaw, thawing releases greenhouse gases, and the additional gases produce further warming. That extra heat can accelerate more thawing, allowing the cycle to reinforce itself. The researchers describe the ancient event as a transient global warming episode in which a comparatively modest carbon release appears to have crossed a climatic tipping point and initiated much more extensive carbon emissions from natural reservoirs.
The geological timescale of the ancient warming is also central to the study’s relevance. Algeo said the temperature change unfolded over tens of thousands of years, with warming occurring at an average rate of roughly one-tenth of a degree Celsius per 1,000 years. Modern warming is progressing far more rapidly. Researchers have observed an increase of nearly 1 degree Celsius in global sea surface temperature over approximately the past century, a rate many times faster than the average change reconstructed for the ancient event.
The comparison does not mean that Earth is destined to repeat the precise conditions of 304 million years ago. Continents, ecosystems, atmospheric composition and ice-sheet geometry were all different in the Late Paleozoic. However, the physics of greenhouse warming and the existence of carbon feedbacks remain relevant. Ancient climate records reveal how a system that appears stable can respond nonlinearly when warming activates processes capable of releasing additional greenhouse gases.
The findings also place human history in a broader planetary context. All recorded human civilization has developed during the most recent ice age, despite the fact that the term can sound incompatible with today’s climate. In scientific usage, Earth remains in an ice age because substantial permanent ice sheets still exist in Greenland and Antarctica. The ancient warming episode matters precisely because it demonstrates that an ice age does not guarantee a permanently cold or stable climate. Even within an icehouse world, a small disturbance can trigger rapid and substantial changes when reinforcing feedbacks are engaged.
The research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, underscores why scientists closely monitor permafrost, polar ice and other climate-sensitive carbon stores. The ancient record cannot provide an exact forecast of future warming, but it shows that Earth’s climate has repeatedly responded to carbon disturbances with amplifying feedbacks. As modern emissions continue to raise temperatures at an exceptional rate, the geological evidence offers a clear message: the danger lies not only in the carbon released directly by human activity, but also in the natural carbon sources that warming can unlock.
Subject of Research: Ancient global warming, permafrost methane feedbacks, and climate tipping points during the Late Paleozoic Ice Age
Article Title: A transient global warming event during Earth’s penultimate icehouse
Web References: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2601643123
References: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2601643123
Image Credits: Andrew Higley, University of Cincinnati
Keywords: climate change, global warming, ice age, Late Paleozoic Ice Age, permafrost, methane, climate feedback, tipping point, paleoclimate, geology, volcanic activity, Earth’s climate history
It’s not just you — the United States is going through a record-bustingly hot summer.
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the contiguous US averaged 76.89 degrees Fahrenheit in July, which is even hotter than the July 1936 Dust Bowl, an environmental and agricultural disaster marked by devastating dust storms.
Much like the Dust Bowl, which was the result of both natural and human-made factors, this year’s record-breaking temperatures are the result of a strong El Niño — a naturally occuring weather pattern — exacerbating the calamitous effects of human-caused climate change.
“It’s not good when you’re breaking records from the Dust Bowl, which we are in this case,” Yale Climate Connections meteorologist Jeff Masters told the Associated Press. “And that was a crazy sort of situation where you put tens of millions of people in motion. You had this great migration because of the drought and the heat that hit the center of the US — just a cataclysmic event in US history.”
“If we’re exceeding records from the Dust Bowl, that says that we’re in deep trouble,” Masters added.
While the heat was more concentrated in the Midwest during the Dust Bowl, all 48 lower states experienced excessive heat this summer — at least one degree Fahrenheit warmer than the 20th century average.
And instead of focusing on ways to fight the effects of climate change, much of the country is moving in the opposite direction. The Trump administration is closely aligned with the fossil fuel industry and is actively seeking to reopen coal-burning plants. AI data centers powered by gas generators are compounding a major uptick in greenhouse gas emissions.
The result is a country literally on fire, while suffering the second-worst July drought conditions on record for the contiguous US, according to Yale Climate Connections. Per the US Drought Monitor, a whopping 71 percent of the contiguous US experienced abnormal dryness or drought during the first week of August, coming on top of billions of dollars in direct damages during the first half of 2026.
Meanwhile, major wildfires continue to burn across both the US and Canada, exposing millions to dangerous levels of air pollution and causing an estimated 4,000 premature deaths across the continent within a single week last month, according to The Economist.
The prognosis is just as grim as one might think.
“This may be one of the coolest years we’re gonna experience for the rest of our lives,” Masters told the AP.
To give humanity a fighting chance we need to “stop burning so many fossil fuels,” he added. “We also need to be spending money to adapt to the new climate that we’ve put in place.”
More on climate change: AI Data Centers Are Causing Unfathomable Amounts of Air Pollution, and It Gets Worse With Each New One They Build
The post It’s Official: This Is the Hottest America Has Ever Been appeared first on Futurism.
The Met Office has quietly axed its dedicated wind and storms chapter from its annual climate report – just as decades of data show UK wind speeds are falling. Funny that, says the Daily Sceptic's Environment Editor.
The post Cherry-Picking Met Office Drops Declining Wind Speed Chapter From Its Latest Annual Climate Report appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.
Water levels in rivers across Europe are reaching astonishing lows lately as a record heatwave continues to bake much of the continent.
Images captured by the European Union’s Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellite revealed the extraordinary extent of the drought, which is clearly desiccating Europe’s major waterways. Water levels in one of those rivers, the Danube, have become so low that ancient ruins are beginning to surface for the first time in centuries.
As Reuters reported, the portion of the Danube that flows through Bulgaria has slowed to a mere trickle, revealing foundations of the Constantine Bridge, a nearly 1,700 year-old structure that was opened for business back during the rule of Roman Emperor Constantine the Great in the year 328 AD.
Though the bridge is believed to have been destroyed just a few decades after it was finished, researchers regard it as among the longest bridges engineered by the Roman Empire, a marvel of ancient engineering. Though receding water levels come with plenty of downsides, Pavel Popov, a Bulgarian archeologist with the Pleven Regional Historical Museum told Reuters that the droughts do offer a unique opportunity to study the ancient wonder.
“For archaeologists, these moments are extremely valuable because nature briefly reveals an object that is hidden beneath the Danube for most of the time,” Popov explained. “It gives us a rare opportunity to observe, document and study it in its real environment.”
After the ruins surfaced, Reuters reports that local researchers used drones to survey the exposed ruins, with the low water levels offering a chance to trace the bridge’s physical footprint and evaluate the condition of the foundation materials.
Numerous other treasures have surfaced across the Danube, like the remains of a mammoth tusk in the Bulgarian village of Ryahovo, and a sunken Nazi warship near the Croatian town of Opatovac.
More on climate change: El Niño Already Killing Thousands in Europe
The post Droughts Are Getting So Intense That Ancient Ruins Are Beginning to Surface From Dried Up Rivers appeared first on Futurism.
The economist John Maynard Keynes once remarked, “In the long run we are all dead.” From an astronomical standpoint, this is true for the Earth itself. In roughly 5 billion years, the Sun will exhaust the hydrogen at its core and enter the next phase of its life as a Red Giant, where it will swell up large enough to engulf and destroy the Earth.
Currently, the Sun is still in its main-sequence phase, where it fuses hydrogen into helium in its core. Although it remains relatively stable during this phase, it will gradually grow brighter with time. As the Sun shines brighter, the increased heat and radiation will raise Earth’s surface temperature, potentially pushing it past the threshold for life to survive.
One of Earth’s geological processes that helps regulate its surface temperature is the carbon cycle. Over millions of years, carbon moves from the Earth’s interior into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide or CO2, where it functions as a greenhouse gas that traps heat. Plants take in this CO2 through photosynthesis and move carbon through the biosphere.
Meanwhile, rain and rock weathering draw carbon into the oceans and rocks. By pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere, the carbon cycle could mitigate Earth’s warming as the Sun brightens over time. Today, human activities are increasing atmospheric CO2 and warming the planet. However, over billions of years, the carbon cycle could gradually remove enough CO2 from the atmosphere that eventually too little would remain to support photosynthesis.
With these challenges to life on Earth in mind, the researchers Jacob Haqq‐Misra and Eric Wolf investigated how long Earth’s biosphere could last in the distant future. The team used computer models to calculate the balance of energy that Earth would receive and emit over time, accounting for the effects of increasing sunlight and changing atmospheric CO2 concentrations. They followed this up with calculations using the ExoCAM model to determine the temperature and atmospheric conditions of future Earth across different latitudes. They related these conditions to a habitability metric to determine their impact on the biosphere.
To estimate the biosphere’s maximum possible lifespan, the team conducted 29 simulations representing the planet’s conditions over the next 2 billion years. In one set of simulations, the Earth’s carbon cycle contributed little to regulating surface temperature, with the atmosphere’s CO2 concentration fixed at approximately modern levels of 400 parts per million (ppm) and surface temperatures continuing to increase. In another, the carbon cycle worked to keep Earth’s average surface temperature fixed at the modern average of approximately 59℉ (15℃), no matter how much it had to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere.
In the scenario with a fixed CO2 concentration, the team found that in 1.7 billion years, Earth’s surface reached an average of 122°F (50°C), which is too hot for most land plants. After 1.9 billion years, it reached 149°F (65°), becoming too hot for all land plants to survive as temperatures continued to rise.
They also found that in the fixed average surface temperature scenario, atmospheric CO2 dropped below the 150 ppm level that most plants require for photosynthesis within 500 million years. After 1.4 billion years, CO2 levels fell below 10 ppm, leaving only a few land photosynthesizers and aquatic plants alive. After about 1.8 billion years, atmospheric CO2 dropped to 1 ppm, leaving only microbes capable of photosynthesis.
The researchers’ findings generally extend the estimated lifetime of Earth’s future biosphere compared with earlier, simpler models that suggested maximum lifespans of 100 million to 1.5 billion years. However, they clarified that other scientists should verify their results by running tests with other models, especially under extreme conditions of high incoming solar radiation and low atmospheric CO2.
Lastly, Haqq‐Misra and Wolf noted that their model did not account for major evolutionary changes that could help life adapt to future conditions. Over time, plants could evolve to tolerate higher temperatures or lower atmospheric CO2 levels. Future humans or another intelligent species might also engage in large-scale geoengineering projects to prevent the end of life on Earth. If life on Earth proves adaptable enough, the biosphere may endure until a Red Giant fills the daytime sky.
The post The long-term fate of Earth’s biosphere appeared first on Sciworthy.
Mount Toba was the biggest volcanic eruption in the last 2.6 million years, and some have suggested it nearly wiped out humanity. Around 74,000 years ago, a caldera on what is now Sumatra emptied thousands of cubic kilometers of magma in about two weeks, roughly a thousand times more than Mount Pinatubo spewed out in 1991. “People thought it might have caused massive cooling of the planet, and hence threatened the survival of our ancestors,” says Jinheum Park, a geoscientist at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany.
Park and his colleagues went looking for the records of that catastrophe in the mud taken from the bottom of a small crater lake on the Kenya-Tanzania border. They found instead that the effects of the Mount Toba eruption lasted under two years and amounted to perhaps half a degree of cooling.
Volcanic eruptions inject sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, where it becomes a haze of tiny droplets that reflect sunlight back into space. Bigger eruptions eject more sulfur dioxide and, in principle, cause more cooling. But this trend stops working when the eruption exceeds a certain magnitude. “Bigger sulfate aerosols settle quickly, because they are heavier,” Park explains. This quick settling makes them less effective in scattering incoming solar radiation.
© Wikimedia Commons
Mount Toba was the biggest volcanic eruption in the last 2.6 million years, and some have suggested it nearly wiped out humanity. Around 74,000 years ago, a caldera on what is now Sumatra emptied thousands of cubic kilometers of magma in about two weeks, roughly a thousand times more than Mount Pinatubo spewed out in 1991. “People thought it might have caused massive cooling of the planet, and hence threatened the survival of our ancestors,” says Jinheum Park, a geoscientist at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany.
Park and his colleagues went looking for the records of that catastrophe in the mud taken from the bottom of a small crater lake on the Kenya-Tanzania border. They found instead that the effects of the Mount Toba eruption lasted under two years and amounted to perhaps half a degree of cooling.
Volcanic eruptions inject sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, where it becomes a haze of tiny droplets that reflect sunlight back into space. Bigger eruptions eject more sulfur dioxide and, in principle, cause more cooling. But this trend stops working when the eruption exceeds a certain magnitude. “Bigger sulfate aerosols settle quickly, because they are heavier,” Park explains. This quick settling makes them less effective in scattering incoming solar radiation.
© Wikimedia Commons
Antarctic guides walked away from their dream jobs after tourism’s environmental damage became impossible to ignore. “You’d see massive glacier calvings, and you’d just want to cry. But all the guests would be cheering. And you’d be like … ‘Can you not put two and two together?’” Those are the words of a former Antarctic [...]The Met Office has confirmed that its June temperature 'record' of 37.7°C came from a junk site. But rather than dropping it, it has upped it to 38°C! This not a serious scientific organisation, says Paul Homewood.
The post The Met Office is No Longer a Serious Scientific Organisation appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.
Weather extremes may be contributing to an unusually quiet summer for Britain’s ecologically important social wasps. A summer picnic often feels complete only when a wasp arrives to investigate the food. Common social wasps are familiar warm-weather visitors, whether they are circling outdoor meals or building an unwanted nest in the loft. Summer 2026, however, [...]Temperatures in Japan have gotten so extreme that zoo animals are dropping dead — though this may be as much an indictment of the conditions that the animals are made to live in as it is climate change.
On Monday, Tokyo’s Tama Zoological park announced that three of its female lions had died of what’s suspected to be heat-related illness. Their deaths occurred within five days of each other, as the country is gripped by a grueling spell of intense heat.
Per multiple reports, preliminary autopsies showed that the lions, named Mugi, Ichigo, and Ruena, had suffered from systemic dehydration and multiple organ failure before dying.
“We believe heat stress was a contributing factor,” the zoo said in a statement.
Japan experienced its first “cruelly hot day” toward the end of July, in a historic heat wave that caused multiple cities to be scorched with temperatures over 104 degrees Fahrenheit. Tokyo’s average daily temperature that month was 90 degrees Fahrenheit, which would feel like 110 degrees when accounting for humidity.
The “cruelly hot day,” by the way, was introduced by Japan’s meteorological agency this year in anticipation of a sweltering summer. It’s no exaggeration to say that it’s now so hot in Japan that the country invented a new word for it: “kokushobi.”
On the first day to receive this official designation, at least 260 people in Tokyo were taken to the hospital, according to local reports. Between July 20 and 26, some 18,600 people across Japan were hospitalized for heatstroke, with 45 of them pronounced dead on arrival, the country’s Fire and Disaster Management Agency said.
While temperatures have temporarily fallen, the overall heat hasn’t relented, as this Wednesday Japan’s Environment Ministry issued a heatstroke alert for most of western and southern Japan, per the Associated Press.
It’s brutal for humans, and no less so for animals in captivity. According to the Tama zoo, one of the lions, the three year old Mugi, began showing signs of appetite loss in mid-July and was unable to stand the day after the symptoms appeared.
The zoo staff tried to cool her off by spraying her with water and providing her fluids with intravenous dips, but Mugi eventually died on July 28. The 11-year-old Ichigo died three days later, and 15-year-old Ruena two days after that.
Four other lions who were ill are showing signs of recovery, the zoo said, with six others that have appeared to be in good health throughout the ordeal.
Experts say that along with the extreme temperatures, it’s the high humidity that makes it difficult for the lions to stay cool. Rather than sweating, they regulate their body temperature by panting, pushing hot moisture out of their airways.
“Lions are more used to a dry heat environment,” Aaron Whitnall, a zookeeper in England who cares for 11 lions, told the New York Times, though he said it was to early to speculate on the exact cause of the lions’ deaths.
During spells of extreme heat and humidity, zoos should give lions ample shade, deploy cooling pads, and mist them with water, Whitnall said. At his Big Cat Sanctuary in England, zookeepers gave the animals popsicles made with frozen animal blood to help them stay cool.
The Tama Zoo has suspended its lion exhibit since last month, and hasn’t announced when it’ll re-open.
More on heat: Global Warming Is Rapidly Accelerating, New Paper Finds
The post It’s So Hot in Japan That Zoo Animals Are Dropping Dead appeared first on Futurism.
It’s a well-established fact that the Earth has been warming ever since the advent of industrialization. While climate skeptics have traditionally argued that the timing of this is merely a coincidence — that burning huge amounts of fossil fuels isn’t a significant factor contributing to long-term climate change — a new piece of research means they might have to come up with a new thesis, and fast.
The study, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, found that the rate of global warming is not merely chugging along at a steady clip. Instead, it’s accelerating at an astonishing rate. Scientists found that, between 2015 and 2025, the Earth warmed at rate of 0.35 degrees Celsius (0.63 degrees Fahrenheit), compared to an average of around 0.2 degrees Celsius (0.36 degrees Fahrenheit) per decade between 1970 and 2015.
Because of all the factors that impact climate data, it can be tough to say for certain whether our planet is actually warming at a faster or slower rate compared to previous eras. To cut through the clutter, the study authors looked at five global temperature datasets, controlling for non-human factors like El Niño cycles, solar patterns, and volcanic activity.
“We filter out known natural influences in the observational data, so that the ‘noise’ is reduced, making the underlying long-term warming signal more clearly visible,” study co-author and retired statistician Grant Foster explained in a press release.
Unfortunately, the acceleration came with a statistical certainty of over 98 percent — the first statistically significant evidence that the climate isn’t just getting warmer, it’s doing so at an increasingly faster clip.
In the release, the study’s other co-author Stefan Rahmstorf warned that the faster warming puts us at a major risk of blowing past the 1.5 degree Celsius limit before 2030, a threshold that experts have warned would have huge consequences for planet Earth (indeed, other studies show we may have already blown past it.)
“If the warming rate of the past 10 years continues, it would lead to a long-term exceedance of the 1.5 degree C limit of the Paris Agreement before 2030,” Rahmstorf explained. “How quickly the Earth continues to warm ultimately depends on how rapidly we reduce global CO2 emissions from fossil fuels to zero.”
More on climate change: A Staggering Number of People Are Dying Because of Record Heatwaves
The post Global Warming Is Rapidly Accelerating, New Paper Finds appeared first on Futurism.
Forecasters are warning that the ongoing El Niño is likely to become supercharged in the coming months and inject potentially unprecedented heat into our already warming world.
El Niño is the warm phase of a multiyear natural climate pattern, but models suggest this year's cycle will be exceptionally intense. Super El Niño conditions could contribute to temperature extremes until next year, but scientists are warning that it may also pose longer-term threats.
Jong-Seong Kug, a professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Seoul National University in South Korea, uses observational data and artificial intelligence to model El Niño events.
Kug has found that super El Niño events can drive sudden, dramatic and even irreversible climate regime shifts. Live Science spoke with Kug to learn more about climate regime shifts and the long-term threats posed by this year's ongoing El Niño.
Patrick Pester: Last year, you published a study that found super El Niño events significantly increase the likelihood of potentially irreversible climate regime shifts. With a super El Niño now looking very likely, how concerned should we be?
Jong-Seong Kug: We should be concerned but not alarmist, because our study does not suggest that every super El Niño inevitably causes a climate regime shift. Rather, a super El Niño can push an already-stressed climate ecosystem across a critical threshold. If a system is near a critical threshold, then strong forcing can induce irreversible change.
Current forecasts indicate a very strong El Niño is increasingly likely later this year. We need to watch vulnerable regions closely, particularly those that are already experiencing severe warming, drying, ecosystem degradation or ocean stress.
PP: What kind of climate regime shift do you fear most?
J-S K: I am particularly concerned about the persistent shift in major ecosystems, such as the Amazon rainforest moving toward a much drier and degraded state. You know, a long time ago the Amazon was a savannah area, so we are now approaching this kind of tipping point. Also, in the Amazon, this drying can weaken [or] even reverse the forest's role as a carbon sink.
The Amazon is a carbon sink, but imagine it becomes drier and drier, and there's some die-back of the forest. Now, [carbon] sink becomes source. This could amplify global warming long after an El Niño event.
PP: Is there anything we can do to mitigate the threat of extreme climate and weather events in the coming months?
J-S K: We cannot stop El Niño. But we can greatly reduce its human impact or ecosystem impact. Governments should use precision forecasts to strengthen our heat health plan, water and food management and flood and wildfire preparedness. In the long term, a rapid reduction in greenhouse gas emissions remains essential because every additional degree of warming increases this possibility that an extreme natural event will trigger lasting damage.
PP: Do you think a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions is likely, given where we are now?
J-S K: I don't think so. It's very difficult.
PP: So, where does that leave us?
J-S K: I don't know. There are some additional techniques we may use at a critical point. Have you heard about climate engineering? Like stratospheric aerosol injection [reflecting solar radiation back into space]. If we cannot do anything, then we have to choose that kind of technology. I don't want this kind of situation, but maybe in the near future we have to decide.
There are two kinds of climate engineering. One is carbon mitigation, just direct air capture [taking carbon out of the atmosphere]. That is a safe way. The other is solar energy management. We can deflect more solar energy from the surface.
So, the easiest way is just to inject an aerosol into the stratosphere; then this aerosol reflects solar radiation, and then global temperatures will decrease. It's like a volcano: After a big eruption of a volcano, the global mean temperature drops by about 0.6 degrees [Celsius, or 1 degree Fahrenheit] because there is volcano aerosol [in the atmosphere]. Instead of volcano aerosol, artificially we can inject aerosol into the stratosphere. Then global temperature can easily decrease.
But there are many side effects. Some we already know, but some we don't know. Like climate inequality. If we artificially decrease temperatures, then some countries will have a drought or a flood. And then how will we compensate?
Obviously, if you want some kind of climate mitigation, we need a kind of consensus across the countries.
PP: Is there anything else you'd like to add that we haven't covered?
J-S K: This year, super El Niño is developing in an already exceptionally warm climate. We are already seeing widespread heat waves this year, so we cannot attribute every individual event to this El Niño. But El Niño will intensify toward the end of this year, so it is likely to further increase the risk of extreme events in many regions, so we need to prepare.
Editor's note: This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
The first study of its kind shows that ecosystems experience far more cumulative heat than standard measurements reveal. A marine heatwave may have an official beginning and end, but the warm water affecting an ecosystem often does not. Like a pot that continues absorbing heat over time, coastal waters can remain unusually warm for weeks [...]Just when it looked like Net Zero sceptics were winning the argument, the green lobby hit back. But David Turver says scratch beneath the headlines and the data simply doesn't stack up.
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Climate change's impacts are being felt everywhere, from health and food security to extreme weather, sea level rise and collapsing ecosystems. World leaders have been slow to adapt to the warnings, despite an ever-growing body of evidence showing the compounding risks of greenhouse gas emissions.
But despite fossil fuels remaining the world's primary source of energy and emissions continuing to rise, there are changes afoot.
In his book "Despite it All" (Granta, 2026), author and journalist Fred Pearce looks at the shifts that have taken place over the last 40 years, highlighting how far humanity has come in the green transition. He believes this progress gives us reason to hope that we can eventually overcome the challenges we face today.
Pearce spoke with Live Science about his book, which has been shortlisted for the 2026 Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize.
Hannah Osborne: There are a lot of positive environmental stories throughout the book, including those that aren't necessarily being told. Do you think that there is a growing appetite for positive climate news now? And will it help us?
Fred Pearce: I detect a kind of desire to be told something other than it's all hopeless and there's nothing we can do. Some people are therefore saying, "Well, what can I do?" And they're very sort of personal stories about how they can contribute. But also people who think more, if you like, strategically: What can the world do, what can governments do, what, how can we influence that?
I try not to write what I think people want to read. I try to write what I want to say. And it seems to me that we do so many things so badly, whether it's managing our resources or water or handling forests or the climate, or pollution or whatever. We do things so badly that there is a great deal of scope for doing things a lot better. So, we need optimists and we need pessimists. We need pessimists to point out the problems. We need optimists to come up with some solutions or suggest where [there are] half open doors that we can push open.
I wrote this book in that kind of spirit to say "Look, yes, things are bad, yes, I'm not denying that they're bad, but there's an awful lot that we can do about it and in some cases are doing about it." That then divides into whether we're talking about human activity, our technical solutions to climate change. Tech fixes are good, not bad, which is something that can be a hard sell in the environment community sometimes, so I want to stress that.
I went to the Earth Summit 30 years ago where they agreed [upon] the original climate change convention. Back then they said we [need to] prevent dangerous climate change, but they really didn't know much about how to do it. Wind turbines were just, you know, a few masts on a hill in California. Nobody was dealing much in solar power because it was just so expensive. It had been developed for powering satellites and electric cars. Nobody was talking about [it].
We have made quite a lot of progress and it's not fast enough and CO2 emissions are stable, they're not going down. We need to do a hell of a lot more and we may have passed climate tipping points. I'm not denying any of that, but rather than throwing up our hands or saying it's hopeless, let's get on with the tech, let's also recognize that nature is very good at recovering. You destroy a forest, a rainforest, it doesn't mean that it's destroyed forever. It will, given the chance, come back if we give it room. So let's give forests room to recover.
In large parts of the world it's already happening — in Europe, even in North America. Agricultural land is being abandoned, and when it's abandoned nature comes back and not necessarily in the sort of ways that we might think. But nature does come back, stuff regrows. We can see how evolution is being kickstarted, if you like, by the chaos that we're creating. That's not to say we shouldn't stop creating the chaos, but we can see how nature recovers.
These are things that we can recognize and respond to; giving nature room to recover, rewilding projects, therefore I'm all in favor of [them]. We're not rewilding where we're trying to garden nature to get back to some sort of perfected past, a pristine system where we thought that everything was great — pre-industrial revolution or before Europeans arrived in North America or whatever it might be. But, we can give nature room to evolve and adapt and change. We can see that nature's doing that all the time, with or without climate change and with or without humans. Nature is constantly, if you like, remaking itself.
I'm not saying nature always comes back in ways that we approve of. Let's recognize the distinction between our sort of slightly romanticized idea of what nature should be and what nature actually is.
HO: You talk about rewilding and letting nature take its course, but how do humans fit in with this? Can we adapt our own perceptions of what nature is allowed and what's not?
FP: I think we can probably forget about what's allowed and what's not. Nature will do what it wants to do. We pride ourselves on our ability to garden nature in a way, or manage ecosystems. We're not really very good at it. Nature will very often take over and do what it wants to do.
Some of the world's biggest rewilding projects have gone quite badly wrong because we haven't quite thought it through. The one I'm thinking of really is the large project in the Netherlands where they're trying to sort of recreate ancient European ecosystems and they ended up with mass deaths of animals because their conception of the ecosystem didn't quite figure out. They then largely abandoned the project because they didn't like to see large numbers of animals dying.
A hardline rewilder would say let nature take its course. I see the case for that, and often I would support that, but we have our own sensibilities and our own concerns and we are living in a world where we are very much in charge of what's going on. So while I'm in favor of standing back and letting nature take its course, we have our own sensibilities, and it's not wrong for us to want to intervene sometimes.
HO: There's a chapter on human population and fertility rates, and how this is very much a climate change story as well. We're now seeing a lot of the rhetoric around this, and rights being stripped back and taken away. What's it like for you, having seen the changes from the UN International Conference on Population in Mexico in the 80s, to Cairo in the 90s to now?
FP: It's an extraordinary story. I've been working on these issues for 40 years now so I've seen a number of changes. Some of the changes I've seen are how technical fixes somehow became a reality when they seemed very distant a while ago.
But our perceptions change too on many things. We are, in many ways, more attuned to environmental issues now than we were 30 or 40 years ago. One of the big changes that I've seen is the notion of the population bomb, which for much of the 20th century was seen as the number one issue. People would say, "Well, there's no point in fixing the climate, there's no point in reducing our pollution because there are more and more people on the planet, and we're kind of doomed for that reason."
Well, it hasn't [happened]. When I went to my first international conference, which was the UN Population Conference in Mexico City in 1984, that was all the rage. They gave the UN Population prize to the mastermind of China's one child policy, which — in terms of human rights and what I would regard as acceptable human behavior — was dreadful. But such was the concern about population issues that they wanted to give a prize to the operator of that program.
A lot has changed. A feminist agenda, if I could put it that way, and I would say that approvingly, has taken over in reproductive politics. I saw it at a UN population conference in Cairo in 1994, 10 years after the Mexico event, that we need to assert reproductive rights. Many environmentalists said that's a cop out. It was all "it's feminist perspective, but it's dooming us."
Well, it didn't, because what we found was that by and large, women wanted to have smaller families because their children got to grow up. Medical improvements meant that you didn't have to have four or five children to secure the next generation. Two would usually do, sometimes you just wanted one. Women wanted to have lives outside the home. The population people seemed to be a bit surprised by that.
The environmental agenda was a very male-dominated one for a long time. So that came as a bit of a surprise, but the net result is that we've halved our fertility rates. They're more or less down to replacement levels [of reproduction] now globally.
I'm not just talking about Europe or North America. I'm talking about almost everywhere except Africa, and African levels have come down. Sometimes they're coming down to super low levels, so that people are now talking about not having enough babies and how we can encourage people to have babies. There are parts of the world where we're down to one child per woman and even a bit less.
My argument is that we need to carry on. Not take a sort of Elon Musk approach [or] send the women back to the home and [do] reproduction and that's what their job is. We need to complete the feminist revolution so that women have more rights, can make better choices, and indeed couples can make more and better choices about the family size that they want. We can arrange things so that it is possible to have children and a career, or make it easier to do that, and at that point probably reproduction levels will come back up.
What I'm really saying is that the agenda is now vastly different from what it was as recently as the 1980s and, and into the 1990s. The population bomb is being defused, to put it simply, there's a residual momentum effect which means that our numbers will carry on going up a bit. Sure, that creates strains on the planet, but we're not now talking about double the world population every 30 years, which is what was being talked about back in the mid 20th century. It's tailing off.
We now have, if you like, a consumption bomb more than a population bomb. The global issue is consumption in the rich world, and that's what's stressing the planet now — not too many babies in poor parts of the world.
It's important to level up, but also level down from the obscene riches that we see among a small number of individuals
HO: Inequality between the super rich and people in developing countries is becoming more and more stark. How do we bridge the gap to make sure there's a reasonable living standard for regular people without a huge cost to the environment?
FP: The truth is, and the numbers have been done by a number of different people, a reasonable standard of living for everybody on the planet is perfectly feasible without destroying the planet.
We need to do some things better, we need to have better technology, but for me, right up there with climate change is an issue of global inequality. When I was young, it was taken [that] inequalities were diminishing and it was taken almost as read that they would carry on diminishing, and a lot of aid policies were directed towards that. That's kind of disappeared since the sort of Reaganomics of the 1980s, all the changes in the finance system and perhaps the fall of the Berlin Wall, which meant that the sort of socialist or, or equality-based agendas collapsed politically.
We're now finding increased inequality, and that, it seems to me, is a threat to the lives of millions and billions of humans, but also to global stability and our ability perhaps to manage.
Serious global issues like climate change and many others are all undermined by the political stresses and economic stresses created by rising inequality. I see them going together.
It's also clear that it's important to level up, but also level down from the obscene riches that we see among a small number of individuals, who seem to be accumulating a greater share of the world's wealth, whether we're talking about dollars or natural resources.
HO: You have a whole chapter on renewables and how they're outpacing fossil fuels. They're the cheaper alternative. How do you see the political opposition to clean energy panning out over the next five to 10 years?
FP: It's fizzling out. It's a weird political backlash and yes, any big social trend or economic trend, they all have backlashes and it feels to me like this is it. What we see in the real world is that the U.S. — not just the U.S., but principally the U.S. — are in a state of near denial about climate and they're wanting to go back to fossil fuels.
In the rest of the world, if you look at it in terms of geopolitics of [the] U.S. versus China, then the U.S. is pushing this rather old agenda of fossil fuels, and China is absolutely going to reap the benefits in many, many ways in its drive towards renewables. China has been a really bad story in the past with its coal burning — and it's still building a few coal-fired power stations. But the really big story is how China has been principally responsible for bringing down the costs of renewable energy, particularly solar power.
You can now go to the most remote corners of rural Africa and you find people putting up their solar panels to recharge car batteries so that they can run their lights in the evening or whatever it is. And then you've got megacities operating using increasing amounts of solar power. India is getting on the bandwagon as well. It's got the fastest growing solar energy economy in the world.
In the real world, renewable [energy] is mostly cheaper than fossil fuels. It is also quicker to install, you don't have to build a huge power station, you can do it in bits and pieces, bolt bits on.
Yes, there are grid issues and they need to be addressed, and there are limits on operating. There are challenges, but renewables are just growing so fast, and it is growing so fast because it is so cheap.
And it's become so cheap, to put it very simply, because the Chinese 20 or 30 years ago decided this is what's going to happen. While everybody else was sort of talking about it and fussing about it and doing it in research labs, the Chinese kind of got to grips with it. I remember back in the 1990s talking about people who were going into China and coming back and telling me stories about how the Chinese are really serious about renewable energy. To be honest, I didn't quite believe them, but they were right, and 30 years on, the world is living with the benefits. That's true whether you're talking about Europe or rural Africa or big cities in Asia or wherever. It's coming.
There will be different solutions in different places and there are undoubtedly things that are harder to do than, you know, running our national grids on renewable energy, which is becoming really quite easy and something that everybody wants to do. The cement industries, fertilizers perhaps, some of these industries will take some more technical innovation. But it's happening, these are technical fixes that are working in the real world. Will we do it in time? Well, we're a bit late on the case, but we are on the case.
HO: We're now seeing a massive rise in AI data centers as well. Is this bad tech, shall we say?
FP: It's a serious issue. Partly because they're growing so fast — they can't just plug into the grid because the grid really can't deliver, so these companies are developing their own energy systems. Even in the U.S. they are very often renewable systems because they're cheaper. If you've got a data center out in Texas, then you're going to use wind power or solar power because it's cheaper and you're in control of it.
I suppose we reach a point where [we have to decide], do we want to reduce our use of energy or have almost as much energy as we want, but just green it and green it very fast. It is true that if all the renewable investment is going into electricity for data centers, that leaves less investment for other sectors of the economy, so I'm sure there are trade-offs, and I'm not saying that we should embrace data centers. But they can be a driving force for adoption of different forms of energy, renewable energy, and for perhaps changes in the grid systems as well.
I think we can have both. I think we need to have both because we're probably not going to stop the data engines, so we've got to find ways of greening them. There are issues and there are challenges ahead, and I don't want to diminish any of those, but you know, let's, let's be hopeful.
The title of the book uses the word hopeful rather than optimist because I don't want to sound Panglossian, but I do want to inject some hope.
HO: When you started writing the book, what did you hope people would take from it, and did that change after you'd finished?
FP: Well it kind of evolved. It began as an idea to sort of [be a] retrospective of my reporting, and then the publisher said, "Well, the story changes rather a lot along the way, so rather than just showcasing your reporting over 40 years, why don't you showcase the change, and be hopeful in the context of how things have changed over the last 40 years?"
That was [the] kind of starting point, and we sharpened up on it, as we went along it did become "Despite It All" and you know, the title is important, and not diminishing the "All." There's a lot of bad stuff out there, but despite it all we can have hope and we can find, develop and demand solutions.
HO: Did you find anything during the process of writing the book that surprised you?
FP: As I say, it started as a sort of retrospective project and going through it, [there were places I went years ago] and it did look bad, then I checked up on what had happened over the intervening years and suddenly things looked a lot better.
I went to Alaska and saw how the conflicts over managing caribou herds and the huge migrations that go on and it felt like that was doomed. I was talking to people who were hunting the animals and they were trying to protect them because they wanted to hunt them, therefore they wanted them still to be there, which is kind of counterintuitive for many environmentalists, but you know, they were the best defenders of the caribou because they ate them.
But it felt doomed, and yet 20 years later I checked out the numbers and the population of that herd has doubled and tripled. So stuff does happen and I suppose my surprise was how much good change I found when I looked into it further. Maybe that's me being better at looking for good news stories. I've written quite a lot of "bad news" books over the years and done a lot of "bad news" journalism over the years, so I certainly don't discount that. But if you step back and you think, well did good stuff happen? Well, yeah, sometimes it did.
The bison herds are coming back on the plains of parts of North America, if you go to Montana. The ranches are disappearing and big areas are being set aside for bison, and I've been seeing how farmland in parts of southern and eastern Europe has been abandoned over the years. It's not necessarily good news that we're abandoning farmland, but again, the way that nature comes back and woodlands are growing, there are more forests in Europe than there have been for probably centuries.
There's a lot of bad stuff to say. But it does seem to me that we have to not just cling onto, but embrace good stuff and try [to] take it forward.
Something I really hadn't thought about till I went back was what were the big issues in the 1980s, 1970s when I started out. Well, all our industrial rivers in Britain were filthy. Now our industrial rivers are relatively clean. It's our agricultural rivers that are filthy, so, I mean, there's been a big change there.
Nobody has to talk much about the ozone layer now. That was the number one issue in the mid 1980s, and the absolutely terrifying prospect if we hadn't fixed that. But it's been fixed.
We banned the chemicals that were doing it.
Remember acid rain, lead in petrol. They were hot topics, headline news, part of the rise of the environmental agenda in the 1980s — and they're the ones that we don't have to talk about anymore.
Now we're talking about climate change. I think there are other things coming up. I think the issue of nitrogen pollution is a fast growing one, and we need technical solutions to that.
The green revolution of crops, the high-yielding crops, which got us out of a cycle of ever worsening hunger and famines in the mid 20 century. That was a solution which created new problems. Those crops grew very well, but they required large amounts of inputs, including water, and water is now a growing issue — finding enough irrigation water, but also fertilizer and other agrichemicals. We're now reaping some of the bad effects of that, and we need to solve that. Scientists I know are working on, if you like, high-yielding crops that don't require so much fertilizer and don't require so much water.
It's doable because as I think I said at the start, we do a lot of things really very badly, but that does give us a lot of scope to do things a lot better, so let's get on with it.
This interview has been condensed and edited lightly for clarity.
In "Despite it All," Fred Pearce looks at the positive environmental changes that have taken place over the last four decades, from the defused population bomb to the unstoppable rise of renewables. While acknowledging there is still an enormous amount of work to prevent the worst impacts of climate change, Pearce shows there is hope for the future — HO
Biodiversity loss has been recognized as a threat to global stability for decades. The decline in overall diversity of species on our planet, either through extinction or a fall in abundance, can culminate in ecosystem collapse.
But in this excerpt from "Despite it All" (Granta, 2026), author and journalist Fred Pearce looks at the remarkable resilience of nature. If we can put aside our notions of what should and shouldn't be in a given environment and leave nature to adapt and thrive, we may begin to see the gains needed to support a healthy biosphere.
"Despite it All" has been shortlisted for the 2026 Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize.
If we are serious about rewilding, then we need to accept that it will take its own course.
Often invasive species are just the first stage of an ecological resurgence. They are the first movers, and their infestations are short-lived. In time, diversity usually returns — even if it's not always the same diversity as was there before. We should recognize that. We need to be as adaptable as nature itself, and jettison our more romantic notions about biodiversity and pristine environments.
So do many oldschool ecologists, says Chris Thomas, an ecologist at the University of York. They too often simply ignore any bits of nature that do not meet their expectations of what "should" be present. "The establishment of successful species in new locations is commonly interpreted as further evidence that the Earth's system is departing from a more desirable state," he told me.
So when biodiversity assessments are conducted, "alien" species lurking in the undergrowth are simply not counted. As outsiders, they are deemed not to belong to the ecosystem they inhabit. Thomas says that, in Britain, official records show biodiversity in decline, even though, if we add all losses and all gains together, "it is unequivocally true that the total number of species in Britain is increasing."
Most of the gains — the weeds, pests and alien species — are kept off the biodiversity books. This amounts to an ecological catch-22. Biodiversity can only ever decrease, as new species are seen as inimical to the local environment, and each year millions of pounds, dollars and euros are being spent to eliminate them.
Of course, it sometimes makes practical sense to eradicate invaders. I don't say we shouldn't try to keep out pests that cause short-term ecological mayhem and economic damage. But if we choose to get rid of new species, we can't then hold up our hands in horror at declining biodiversity. And besides, ecologically as much as socially, migrants can stir things up to good effect. They interact with other species — eating or being eaten, pollinating, and rotting after death to nurture new organisms.
We should embrace novel ecosystems that contain both what we regard as native species and the feral, opportunistic interlopers that find their new environment congenial. In his book about weeds, British naturalist Richard Mabey celebrated what he called these "outlaw plants" and showed how they have had a hand in shaping not only our landscape but our civilization, becoming crops, medicines and sources of beauty and creative inspiration.
It is easy to be nostalgic about past ecosystems as a golden age. But what we imagine to be the perfect ecological state — a supposedly natural order of things that often gets called "the balance of nature" — was mostly itself a passing phase. Nature is always moving on. And more often than we realize, humans have had a hand in what we now like to regard as natural.
We should be careful not to let our reverence for the pristine blind us to the environmental potential of today's wastelands
Environmental scientist Erle Ellis, who runs the Anthroecology Lab of the University of Maryland, argues persuasively that most of the planet has been heavily influenced by human activity for thousands of years, including places such as the Amazon that we often think of as untouched. We have, in effect, long lived on a "used planet," and humans and nature have not historically been at odds. The most biodiverse places are often those where people have lived the longest. By constantly tending the land, past civilizations created ever-changing mosaics of habitats where more species thrived than in places with less human interference.
So, we should be careful not to let our reverence for the pristine blind us to the environmental potential of today's wastelands, backwoods, abandoned fields, scrublands and no-go areas. In a Good Anthropocene we are likely to need more of them.
There is a final reason for believing that nature is equipped for recovery from almost anything we can throw at it. The apparent chaos of the Anthropocene is turbocharging evolution itself. Every perturbation of our environment creates an opportunity for existing species to adapt or for new ones to evolve, says Chris Thomas.
I first met Thomas in 2004, when he had just published an influential paper warning that climate change could wipe out a quarter of the world's species this century. He called it "terrifying." It was headline news. Two decades later, he has not changed that forecast, but he has added an important rider. Despite the coming extinction holocaust, he told me, "the Anthropocene could raise biological diversity."
His research is showing that evolution in the twenty-first century is speeding up to fill the gaps left by the extinctions — delivering new and better-adapted species. "The seeds of recovery are already visible," he told me. "Genes are jumping around. New species are beginning to emerge." Rob Dunn, an ecologist at North Carolina State University, agrees. In his book "A Natural History of the Future," he says that this evolutionary spurt is happening fastest in urban landscapes, where species are adapting to city life with almost as much alacrity as newly arrived humans.
This urban ecological renaissance resembles the story of the finches on the Galápagos archipelago, which Charles Darwin observed to have evolved different beaks to match the food on the different islands. In modern cities, house mice have evolved to produce saliva with a chemical make-up better able to digest the carbohydrates available in urban food; cockroaches and bedbugs have developed resistance to pesticides and even learned to avoid sugar-impregnated bait; London's pigeons have learned to commute on the Underground. We have clothes moths and carpet beetles.
Such natural innovations may not always be cuddly, but they do show that nature is on the prowl in the Anthropocene. So where is biodiversity headed? It is undeniable that most species of plants and animals are currently in numerical decline in a human-centric world.
This global disturbance is favouring some generalists — so-called superspecies — that can occupy a wide range of habitats, displacing local, rare and specialist species. Locally, however, biodiversity has sometimes increased substantially, especially in the rich kaleidoscopes of gardens, parks, toxic brownfield sites, roadside verges and so on that humanity has helped create.
Such places may become crucibles for a biodiversity rebound. Understanding this reality should change how we do conservation. We should not abandon nature to its fate. Some of our favourite species will pass into history unless we act to save them, and I'd vote for action any day. But it does mean embracing rather than rejecting the processes of change. Change in the Anthropocene is good. We should be grateful that nature is finding a way.
This is an extract from Despite it All by Fred Pearce, published by Granta.
In "Despite it All," Fred Pearce looks at the positive environmental changes that have taken place over the last four decades, from the defused population bomb to the unstoppable rise of renewables. While acknowledging there is still an enormous amount of work to prevent the worst impacts of climate change, Pearce shows there is hope for the future — HO
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