Report: Losing Ground on Climate Change, US at Fault. Is there a Silver Lining?

AP reports the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) has a new evaluation of global efforts to mitigate climate change, and the US is failing.

Associated Press:

If all the countries do what they promise to reduce heat-trapping emissions, Earth will likely still warm another 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit (1.2 degrees Celsius) above current temperatures, according to Wednesday’s update of climate calculations by the United Nations Environment Programme. That’s about two-tenths of a degree Fahrenheit (0.1 degrees Celsius) more than last year’s projections by the same science team.

“This is a worse outcome than expected last year, as a result of the formal withdrawal of the United States of America from the Paris Agreement and revised estimates of historical emissions,” the report said. The report also blames the United States for increased emissions last year, saying all the other top 20 major economies reduced their carbon pollution or at least slowed the growth in how much carbon dioxide was spewed from the burning of coal, oil and gas.

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That said, probably worth noting that Donald Trump’s catastrophic war in the Persian Gulf has jump started a global renewable transition. Ok, it’s not the way I would have done it, but it’s been pretty damn effective.

The Financial Times reported this week that President Trump is losing his battle with green energy.

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Nuclear Siting is a Heavy Lift. This Messaging Might Not be Helpful

Ambitious.

I’m wondering about this messaging, which is pretty explicit visually and in the script above about the connection to Data Centers.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

The Nuclear Company:

The Nuclear Company today announced Prosperity One, a proposed nuclear energy campus in Lewis County, Kentucky, that could accommodate up to six Westinghouse AP1000 reactors generating approximately 6.6 gigawatts of electricity.

Located along the Ohio River in eastern Kentucky, the proposed development would become the largest nuclear power campus in the United States and one of the largest in the world if fully constructed. The project answers President Trump’s call to accelerate American energy production and represents a major step toward restoring America’s ability to build nuclear power at scale while bringing a new generation of industrial investment, skilled jobs, and long-term economic opportunity to a region that helped power the nation for more than a century.

The Nuclear Company, which has site control in the area, will partner with local landowners and community leaders in Lewis County to advance the proposed campus. The company plans to begin site development activities and pursue the federal approvals necessary to begin construction in 2028.

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OK, There is a Use Case for AI Slop, When it’s This Funny

Above, send up of our most recent and short tenured White House Press Secretary, done with AI, and you have to give credit where due, pretty damn funny,

For balance, and also pretty damn funny, Josh Johnson below.

BBC El Niño Update: Impacts are Now Global

Reports from Asia, Africa.

Some good explanatory graphics.

Gives climate context at the end. Climate change is not established to make stronger El Nino’s, but each new El Niño is riding on top of a warming world.

That said, new research is suggestive of a connection.

University of Michigan:

As an El Niño of historic proportions is taking shape in the tropical Pacific, a University of Michigan study has found that El Niño variability has become nearly 40% stronger in the last 40 years than in the preindustrial era.

In fact, the study, which examined modern and ancient corals in the Galápagos Islands, found that El Niño events in the last four decades were stronger than any in the 1,000 years prior to about 1850, when humans began impacting the climate with greenhouse gases.

“We don’t see a time in the past where El Niños have been as strong as today, and we show that the strength of El Niño changes in parallel with the warming of global temperature,” said lead author Julia Cole, professor and chair of the U-M Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences. “Our findings tell us that the big El Niño events of the last 40 years are not normal in the context of the last thousand years.”

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TV Meteorologists Silenced by Trump, FCC, Corporate Stations- Time to Blow the Whistle

Long time readers here will be familiar with Chris Gloninger and his story.

As Chief Meteorologist for KCCI Des Moines, Chris was a national leader in putting his weather stories into climate context – until the death threats started, and, he tells me now, the Station management that had previously encouraged science coverage lost their courage, and pulled support.

Now, he’s working on a documentary about his experience and what it says about our media landscape. He needs help to get it done, and you can contribute here, and below.

There will be a fundraising Zoom with director Sarah Gibson, Dr. Jeff Masters, and Chris, this Wednesday, October 21, at 7:30 PM ET, you can RSVP and get an invite at WeatherUnderFire@gmail.com

Jeff Masters in Yale Climate Connections:

The best climate change documentary I’ve ever seen needs your help to get to the finish line. Aiming for a release in early 2027, “Weather Under Fire” follows meteorologist Chris Gloninger as he reports on the link between extreme weather and climate change on Iowa’s local news station, KCCI — until he upsets powerful special interests. He and his family receive death threats, forcing him to abandon his dream job. Now in its final editing process, the film has exhausted its funding and needs donations to pay for the creation of the finished product.

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NOAA Winter Outlook Has El Niño Looming

NOAA:

  • Warmer-than-average temperatures are favored for northern California, the Pacific Northwest, Midwest, Mississippi Valley, much of the East, Alaska and for Puerto Rico / U.S. Virgin Islands.
  • Near-normal temperatures are most likely for parts of the Southeast including Florida.
  • Hawaii and much of the Southwest have equal chances of below-average, near-average or above-average seasonal mean temperatures.

Not Everyone Will Dig Divisive “Digger”

Digger is that Tom Cruise Climate Catastrophe movie you might not have been expecting. I watched the trailer a few months ago and was not clear this was a “climate change movie”.

In fact, that’s kind of what bugs me.

Climate change is a fact. It’s not just settled physics, it’s happening all around us, causing some of us to flee our homes, some of us to choke on the air outside, and all of us to wonder what is happening to the weather and the seasons. The drive to transition to clean energy, and the global fossil fuel oligarchy’s desperation to hold on to its power, (think Ukraine, Iran, and the fossil fuel takeover of the Republican Party) is the underlying lens to understand most of the headlines that we see day today.

It is as real a historical fact, (much more long lasting and consequential in my mind) as World War II, the Depression, the Cold War, or the Space Race.

All of those things have been the subject of movies, but moreover, any movie that pretends to set up a “real” world has to include those historical facts as background reality.

But Climate Change, the most important underpinning fact not just of our moment, but of the geological epoch, is relegated to being the subject of “a climate change movie” – as if it were some kind of separate world of speculative fiction. We’ve had a few of those movies, but what we have not had is a general agreement in setting the story of our moment, that climate change exists, and is a fundamental underlying driver of human events in this time.

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Wall Street Week on the US Battery Boom

White House policy under the Trump administration has dealt a massive, and I would argue, possibly fatal financial blow to the US auto industry by cancelling tax incentives for EV sales, even after US companies had invested heavily in that space.

But incentives remain for BESS – Battery Energy Storage Systems – that back up and power the electric grid, and companies have pivoted hard into that space, resulting in a flood of grid storage, and dropping the price for firm renewable energy. The graph below is from the July 2025 Shareholders report from NextEra, the largest US builder of power systems.

It shows that current wind and solar systems, even with battery storage, are cheaper than Natural gas, or nuclear, both of which have serious availability issues.

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