Donald Trump may have only recently re-entered the Oval Office, but his radical anti-climate ideas are on the march across the globe.
A CORRECTIV investigation can reveal that politicians, think tanks, and economists are now spreading Trumpâs ideologies in Germany â right up to the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its leader Friedrich Merz, the front-runner in the race to be Germanyâs next leader, with federal elections due to take place on 23 February.
Itâs a late summer morning at the Alte Münze complex in Berlin-Mitte. The Prometheus Institute, a libertarian German think tank, and one of its founders, Frank Schäffler, have organised an event that they describe as a âFreedom Summitâ.
Schäffler is a member of the German Bundestag (parliament) for the Free Democrats (FDP) and is a self-described climate sceptic. The event is aimed at young people up to the age of 35 who, according to the eventâs advertising, should consider the institute to be a âhome for freedomâ.
On a table in a workshop held in the summitâs âThatcher tentâ lies a collage of the Statue of Liberty with Argentinian President Javier Mileiâs head, wielding his trademark chainsaw. Itâs a symbol of his intention to cut the state down to the bone. Growing numbers of FDP politicians have been publicly backing Milei in recent months, with party leader Christian Lindner saying on a talk show in November that we should dare to be a little more like Milei.
At first glance, the summit appears to be a colourful mix of talks, drinks, and free market projections of the future. But thereâs much more to it, as CORRECTIVâs research shows.
We have tracked financial flows and investigated political and economic connections that extend from the U.S. and Hungary to the top echelons of German politics.
Our findings show that this network not only includes Schäfflerâs Prometheus Institute. A number of politicians from the FDP and CDU, and groups closely associated with these parties, are also closely linked to controversial anti-climate organisations in the U.S. â with some of them benefitting financially.
Indeed, Trump and Mileiâs election victories are fuelling an alliance between conservative and libertarian think tanks in the U.S. and Germany, joined by politicians and corporate lobbyists. (...)
Abstract: Global temperature leaped more than 0.4°C (0.7°F) during the past two years, the 12-month average peaking in August 2024 at +1.6°C relative to the temperature at the beginning of last century (the 1880-1920 average). This temperature jump was spurred by one of the periodic tropical El Niño warming events, but many Earth scientists were baffled by the magnitude of the global warming, which was twice as large as expected for the weak 2023-2024 El Niño. We find that most of the other half of the warming was caused by a restriction on aerosol emissions by ships, which was imposed in 2020 by the International Maritime Organization to combat the effect of aerosol pollutants on human health. Aerosols are small particles that serve as cloud formation nuclei. Their most important effect is to increase the extent and brightness of clouds, which reflect sunlight and have a cooling effect on Earth. When aerosols â and thus clouds â are reduced, Earth is darker and absorbs more sunlight, thus enhancing global warming. Ships are the main aerosol source in the North Pacific and North Atlantic Oceans. We quantify the aerosol effect from the geographical distribution of sunlight reflected by Earth as measured by satellites, with the largest expected and observed effects in the North Pacific and North Atlantic Oceans. We find that aerosol cooling, and thus climate sensitivity, are understated in the best estimate of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Global warming caused by reduced ship aerosols will not go away as tropical climate moves into its cool La Niña phase. Therefore, we expect that global temperature will not fall much below +1.5°C level, instead oscillating near or above that level for the next few years, which will help confirm our interpretation of the sudden global warming. High sea surface temperatures and increasing ocean hotspots will continue, with harmful effects on coral reefs and other ocean life. The largest practical effect on humans today is increase of the frequency and severity of climate extremes. More powerful tropical storms, tornadoes, and thunderstorms, and thus more extreme floods, are driven by high sea surface temperature and a warmer atmosphere that holds more water vapor. Higher global temperature also increases the intensity of heat waves and â at the times and places of dry weather â high temperature increases drought intensity, including âflash droughtsâ that develop rapidly, even in regions with adequate average rainfall.
Polar climate change has the greatest long-term effect on humanity, with impacts accelerated by the jump in global temperature. We find that polar ice melt and freshwater injection onto the North Atlantic Ocean exceed prior estimates and, because of accelerated global warming, the melt will increase. As a result, shutdown of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) is likely within the next 20-30 years, unless actions are taken to reduce global warming â in contradiction to conclusions of IPCC. If AMOC is allowed to shut down, it will lock in major problems including sea level rise of several meters â thus, we describe AMOC shutdown as the âpoint of no return.â
We suggest that an alternative perspective â a complement to the IPCC approach â is needed to assess these issues and actions that are needed to avoid handing young people a dire situation that is out of their control. This alternative approach will make more use of ongoing observations to drive modeling and more use of paleoclimate to test modeling and test our understanding. As of today, the threats of AMOC shutdown and sea level rise are poorly understood, but better observations of polar ocean and ice changes in response to the present accelerated global warming have the potential to greatly improve our understanding.
ProPublica/NYT How Climate Change Could Upend the American Dream Americans have long accumulated wealth by owning their homes, but a new study predicts that spiking insurance rates and climate disasters now herald an era of widespread losses.
Houses in the Altadena and Pacific Palisades neighborhoods were still ablaze when talk turned to the cost of the Los Angeles firestorms and who would pay for it. Now it appears that the total damage and economic loss could be more than $250 billion. This, after a year in which hurricanes Milton and Helene and other extreme weather events had already exacted tens of billions of dollars in American disaster losses.
As the compounding impacts of climate-driven disasters take effect, we are seeing home insurance prices spike around the country, pushing up the costs of owning a home. In some cases, insurance companies are pulling out of towns altogether. And in others, people are beginning to move away.
One little-discussed result is that soaring home prices in the United States may have peaked in the places most at risk, leaving the nation on the precipice of a generational decline. Thatâs the finding of a new analysis by the First Street Foundation, a research firm that studies climate threats to housing and provides some of the best climate adaptation data available, both freely and commercially. The analysis predicts an extraordinary reversal in housing fortunes for Americans â nearly $1.5 trillion in asset losses over the next 30 years. (...)
The upending of the standard idea of The American Dream: Staying in one place for 30+ years. Decades-long work for the same company has gone the way of the Dodo - layoffs and gig work have replaced loyalty to company. Perhaps a more nomadic lifestyle may need to be reconsidered: Homes 'On Wheels' that can quickly move out of harm's way, into less climate risk areas and where jobs are. Tiny Homes/Trailors might be able to do a climate change work-around while making shelter more affordable. Plug in your car and home in areas with access to utilities in 'undeveloped' areas? Temporary homesite for 5, 10, 15 years?
ProPublica/NYT How Climate Change Could Upend the American Dream Americans have long accumulated wealth by owning their homes, but a new study predicts that spiking insurance rates and climate disasters now herald an era of widespread losses.
Houses in the Altadena and Pacific Palisades neighborhoods were still ablaze when talk turned to the cost of the Los Angeles firestorms and who would pay for it. Now it appears that the total damage and economic loss could be more than $250 billion. This, after a year in which hurricanes Milton and Helene and other extreme weather events had already exacted tens of billions of dollars in American disaster losses.
As the compounding impacts of climate-driven disasters take effect, we are seeing home insurance prices spike around the country, pushing up the costs of owning a home. In some cases, insurance companies are pulling out of towns altogether. And in others, people are beginning to move away.
One little-discussed result is that soaring home prices in the United States may have peaked in the places most at risk, leaving the nation on the precipice of a generational decline. Thatâs the finding of a new analysis by the First Street Foundation, a research firm that studies climate threats to housing and provides some of the best climate adaptation data available, both freely and commercially. The analysis predicts an extraordinary reversal in housing fortunes for Americans â nearly $1.5 trillion in asset losses over the next 30 years. (...)
A triple whammy of climate impacts boosted the risk of the ferocious fires that recently ravaged Los Angeles, a scientific study has shown.
Firstly, the hot, dry and windy conditions that drove the fires were made 35% more likely by the global heating caused by fossil fuel burning. Secondly, the low rainfall seen from October to December is now about 2.4 times more likely than in the preindustrial past, before the climate crisis. Rains during these months have historically brought an end to the wildfire season around LA.
Thirdly, conditions of high fire risk have extended by more than three weeks in todayâs heated climate, now reaching into January. This means fires have more chance of breaking out during the peak Santa Ana winds, which can blow small fires into deadly infernos. (...)
I am utterly devastated by the Los Angeles wildfires, shaking with rage and grief. The Altadena community near Pasadena, where the Eaton fire has damaged or destroyed at least 5,000 structures, was my home for 14 years.
I moved my family away two years ago because, as Californiaâs climate kept growing drier, hotter and more fiery, I feared that our neighborhood would burn. But even I didnât think fires of this scale and severity would raze it and other large areas of the city this soon. And yet images of Altadena this week show a hellscape, like a landscape out of Octavia Butlerâs uncannily prescient climate novel âParable of the Sower.â
One lesson climate change teaches us again and again is that bad things can happen ahead of schedule. Model predictions for climate impacts have tended to be optimistically biased. But now, unfortunately, the heating is accelerating, outpacing scientistsâ expectations. (...)
The guy has a point in terms of media hype and the swings in public doom-mongering (ice age vs. global warming, etc.). Nevertheless, I don't trust his implied premise, which is don't trust any of the warnings. Skepticism is certainly called for, but inaction is just as stupid as jumping blindly on the bandwagon. Remember when air pollution was a thing? Legislation changed that.
Very much for the better IMHO.
Humans have an incontrovertible impact on the environment. We need to discuss what kind of world we want to live in and adjust our behaviour to suit.
Climate science as we know it today did not exist in the 1960s and 1970s. The integrated enterprise embodied in the Nobel Prizewinning work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change existed then as separate threads of research pursued by isolated groups of scientists. Atmospheric chemists and modelers grappled with the measurement of changes in carbon dioxide and atmospheric gases, and the changes in climate that might result. Meanwhile, geologists and paleoclimate researchers tried to understand when Earth slipped into and out of ice ages, and why. An enduring popular myth suggests that in the 1970s the climate science community was predicting âglobal coolingâ and an âimminentâ ice age, an observation frequently used by those who would undermine what climate scientists say today about the prospect of global warming. A review of the literature suggests that, on the contrary, greenhouse warming even then dominated scientists' thinking as being one of the most important forces shaping Earth's climate on human time scales. More importantly than showing the falsehood of the myth, this review describes how scientists of the time built the foundation on which the cohesive enterprise of modern climate science now rests.
The guy has a point in terms of media hype and the swings in public doom-mongering (ice age vs. global warming, etc.). Nevertheless, I don't trust his implied premise, which is don't trust any of the warnings. Skepticism is certainly called for, but inaction is just as stupid as jumping blindly on the bandwagon. Remember when air pollution was a thing? Legislation changed that.
Very much for the better IMHO.
Humans have an incontrovertible impact on the environment. We need to discuss what kind of world we want to live in and adjust our behaviour to suit.
there's certainly been some over-reaction on both sides of this issue
here's a really direct twelve minute presentation by a relative nobody
The guy has a point in terms of media hype and the swings in public doom-mongering (ice age vs. global warming, etc.). Nevertheless, I don't trust his implied premise, which is don't trust any of the warnings. Skepticism is certainly called for, but inaction is just as stupid as jumping blindly on the bandwagon. Remember when air pollution was a thing? Legislation changed that.
Very much for the better IMHO.
Humans have an incontrovertible impact on the environment. We need to discuss what kind of world we want to live in and adjust our behaviour to suit.
(...) But there are biggerâfar biggerâfactors at play in the disaster, factors that have less to do with local politics and institutional preparedness and more to do with the existential matter of a planet grown sickly from climate change. A crisis that is feeding more and bigger storms and causing more and greater destructionâdestruction that lawmakers and other leaders, here and around the world, still seem unable to muster the will to address. Here is the reality: The very metabolism of the Earth has been thrown off by an atmosphere choking on greenhouse gasses, and it will take more than political bickering to set things right. Another reality: Fixing the problem first requires understandingâand, even more fundamentally, acceptingâthe science. Only then can we implement policies and put in place protocols that help us both reduce the likelihood of more such crises and minimize the death and destruction when they ultimately do occur.
Itâs long been established that climate change turbocharges wildfires, with droughts, persistent heat, dried vegetation, and lightning storms all worsening in a warming world and all contributing to out-of-control blazes. Thatâs just one reason a new report from the European Space Agencyâs Copernicus Climate Change Serviceâa report that landed on Jan. 10, while L.A. still burnedâarrived as such bad news. According to the release, 2024 was the first year global mean temperatures exceeded pre-industrial levels by 1.6°C (2.88°F). That blows past the benchmark established by the 2015 Paris Climate Accord, which sought to limit future warming to well below 2°C in the 21st century, with a preferred target no higher than 1.5°C. Doing so would help limit the impact of a hotter planet. (...)
Scientists sounded the alarm long before last year ended that 2024 would become the hottest year on record and almost certainly the first to surpass the 1.5C limit to global warming, set out as a goal in the Paris Agreement. Now both of those milestones are expected to be confirmed on Thursday and Friday in official statistical releases from scientific agencies, including the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the UK Met Office.
Whatâs puzzled scientists is the clear acceleration in rising temperatures, even as the evidence of the fast-warming atmosphere became impossible to miss.
The hottest day ever recorded happened on July 21, 2024 â a record that held until July 22. The planetary heatspike was made 2.5 times more likely by greenhouse gases, according to researchers. Typhoon Gaemi in Asia and Hurricanes Helene and Milton in the US, similarly juiced by climate change, killed hundreds of people and caused colossal damage. There was flooding across Africaâs Sahel and in southeastern Spain; drought in southern Italy and the Amazon River basin; wildfires in central Chile; and landslides in northern India.
Hottest-year status, awaiting confirmation, would put 2024 in rarefied company. The warmest year up to now, by a substantial margin? 2023. (...)
I guess I always assumed they did something like this everywhere. But I guess it's easier to look at history and try to plot the next few years without the political layer of climate change. At least here if your maps and predictions try to take climate change into account, there will be a lot of howling.
They already do... but your insurance company is keeping that very quiet.
My area is showing a slight decrease in predicted fire risk that I think is due to shifting weather patterns increasing summer rain. Still a high risk area with all the areas of bushland within the city and especially on the urban fringe. Nothing like the > 50% increase seen between Sydney and Brisbane.
I guess I always assumed they did something like this everywhere. But I guess it's easier to look at history and try to plot the next few years without the political layer of climate change. At least here if your maps and predictions try to take climate change into account, there will be a lot of howling.
My area is showing a slight decrease in predicted fire risk that I think is due to shifting weather patterns increasing summer rain. Still a high risk area with all the areas of bushland within the city and especially on the urban fringe. Nothing like the > 50% increase seen between Sydney and Brisbane.
