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Rula Khalaf, editor of the Financial Times, picks her favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Talk about unfortunate timing. Early last week, the head of the world's largest oil company, Saudi Aramco, received applause when he told the CERAWeek energy conference in Houston that it was time to “abandon the fantasy of phasing out oil and gas.” Amin Nasser said the world instead needed to invest in fossil fuels to meet demand at a time when the transition to clean energy was “clearly failing on most fronts.”
A day later, the head of the United Nations World Meteorological Organization, Celeste Saulo, received no applause for issuing a report that showed that climate records had not only been broken, but were broken in 2023, the hottest year on record. More than 90 percent of the world's oceans have suffered heatwaves, glaciers have lost the most ice on record, and the extent of Antarctic sea ice has fallen to the lowest levels ever measured.
It is tempting to think that we have been here before. Oil, gas and coal executives have spent years insisting they must meet the demand for fossil fuels that still drive the global economy. More recently, relatively more green-minded European oil companies have weakened their climate targets in the wake of rising energy prices, and major investors have backed away from climate action initiatives they had only recently joined. UN agencies have warned all the time that these fuels are the biggest cause of increasingly severe global warming.
However, when it comes to the physical state of the climate, we are not quite there at all. To an extent that is not widely appreciated, the world is now warming at a pace that scientists did not expect and, worryingly, do not fully understand. At a Financial Times conference this month, Jim Skia, head of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said that last year's temperature rise was “faster than we all expected.”
“It was a surprise,” he said. “The ocean temperatures were out of range in terms of historical records. It was very unusual and we still need to do more work to explain it.”
The troubling implications of these findings were outlined last week by Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City. In an article in the journal Nature, Schmidt warned that the data may imply that global warming is “radically changing how the climate system works.” He said the 2023 warming “came out of the blue” and revealed that an “unprecedented knowledge gap” had opened up for the first time since satellite data began giving scientists a real-time view of the climate system around it. 40 years ago.
This gap may mean that our understanding of what lies ahead is shakier – a worrying matter when it comes to predicting drought and rainfall patterns that are already exacerbating food shortages. Theories for the unexpected warming range from rising solar activity ahead of expected solar maximum to new rules on clean shipping fuels aimed at cutting sulfur emissions. Sulfur compounds in the atmosphere have a cooling effect.
But a full explanation remains elusive, which underscores the compelling echo of history. Schmidt's position at NASA was once held by another scientist, James Hansen, whose 1988 testimony before the US Congress alerted the world that global warming had begun.
The world did not completely ignore Hansen's warnings for the thirty-six years that followed, but it did not take them seriously enough. Oil company bosses may prefer to preach the message that it is business as usual. But neither they nor anyone else can once again downplay the importance of science showing us that a climate threat is now moving into uncharted territory.
