In 2030, if current projections hold, the United States will drill for more oil and gas than at any point in its history. Russia and Saudi Arabia plan to do the same.

They’re among the world’s fossil fuel giants that, together, are on course this decade to produce twice the amount of fossil fuels than a critical global warming threshold allows, according to a United Nations-backed report issued on Wednesday.

The report, which looked at 20 major fossil fuel producing countries, underscores the wide gap between world leaders’ lofty promises to take stronger action on climate change and their nations’ actual production plans.

A nationwide survey released Wednesday shows a "worrying lack of basic Holocaust knowledge" among adults under 40, including over 1 in 10 respondents who did not recall ever having heard the word "Holocaust" before.

The survey, touted as the first 50-state survey of Holocaust knowledge among millennials and Generation Z, showed that many respondents were unclear about the basic facts of the genocide. Sixty-three percent of those surveyed did not know that 6 million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, and over half of those thought the death toll was fewer than 2 million. Over 40,000 concentration camps and ghettos were established during World War II, but nearly half of U.S. respondents could not name a single one.

But the drought also has far-reaching implications for the Earth’s climate. As the extreme heat and water shortage kills trees and sparks fires, the forest begins to release its enormous stocks of carbon dioxide, fuelling the process of global warming that scientists say was an important factor behind the drought in the first place.

“It is starting a vicious circle that will destroy forest,” said Philip Fearnside, a scientist at the National Institute for Amazonian Research in Manaus.

“Because of this huge stock of carbon in the forest, the Amazon is at the centre of this question of global warming escaping from human control. If just a fraction comes out, it would be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. And there is an increasing risk of that happening.”

Targeted support to enable hydrogen as a clean energy solution is valuable; unbridled hydrogen enthusiasm is not. The risks are twofold: First, that it distracts from the pressing priority of directly displacing fossil fuels with renewable electricity throughout the economy; and second, that it fails to tailor hydrogen production processes and end uses to those that are truly beneficial and climate-aligned.

Severe consequences will follow from a reckless start to the clean hydrogen economy. That’s because missing on hydrogen by a little actually means missing by a lot, quickly flipping the gas from a valuable tool for climate progress to an outright reverser of climate gains. As the Biden administration finalizes the details for these two policies, which could fundamentally shape whether and how hydrogen contributes to the clean energy transition in the time ahead, it must get them right.

During the past year, the needles on the climate dashboard for global ice melt, heatwaves, ocean temperatures, coral die-offs, floods and droughts all tilted far into the red warning zone. In summer and fall, monthly global temperature anomalies spiked beyond most projections, helping to drive those extremes, and they may not level off anytime soon, said James Hansen, lead author of a study published today in the journal Oxford Open Climate Change that projects a big jump in the rate of warming in the next few decades.

But the research was controversial even before it was published, and it may widen the rifts in the climate science community and in the broader public conversation about the severity and imminence of climate impacts, with Hansen criticizing the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for underestimating future warming, while other researchers, including IPCC authors, lambasted the new study.

The research suggests that an ongoing reduction of sulfuric air pollution particles called aerosols could send the global average annual temperature soaring beyond the targets of the Paris climate agreement much sooner than expected, which would sharply increase the challenges faced by countries working to limit harmful climate change under international agreements on an already treacherous geopolitical stage.

In the 2021 study, researchers Rebecca Forkner and Alexis Garretson found that modern trees that lost their leaves later than historical ones showed more signs of stress and disease, National Geographic reveals.

The long-term outcome could be disastrous. Forkner told National Geographic that it would have “consequences for the lifespan” of each tree. Some fruit trees won’t produce a harvest if they don’t go through this cycle correctly, too. Georgia just lost 90% of its expected peach crop that way.

Meanwhile, according to National Geographic, it’s unclear whether trees under this kind of stress remove as much heat-trapping carbon from the atmosphere. It’s possible that a shorter fall means we’re not getting as much climate benefit from forests as we could.

Earth’s “vital signs” are worse than at any time in human history, an international team of scientists has warned, meaning life on the planet is in peril.

Their report found that 20 of the 35 planetary vital signs they use to track the climate crisis are at record extremes. As well as greenhouse gas emissions, global temperature and sea level rise, the indicators also include human and livestock population numbers.

Many climate records were broken by enormous margins in 2023, including global air temperature, ocean temperature and Antarctic sea ice extent, the researchers said. The highest monthly surface temperature ever recorded was in July and was probably the hottest the planet has been in 100,000 years.

The scientists also highlighted an extraordinary wildfire season in Canada that produced unprecedented carbon dioxide emissions. These totalled 1bn tonnes of CO2, equivalent to the entire annual output of Japan, the world’s fifth biggest polluter. They said the huge area burned could indicate a tipping point into a new fire regime.

The world has to add or replace 49.7 million miles of transmission lines by 2040 in order for countries to meet their climate goals and to achieve energy security priorities, according to a new report published by the International Energy Agency on Tuesday.

This remarkable scale up in the construction of transmission lines across the globe will require the annual investment in electric grids of more than $600 billion per year by 2030, which is double what current global investment levels are in transmission lines, the IEA says.

There are currently 1,500 gigawatts of renewable clean energy projects that are in what the IEA calls “advanced stages of development” that are waiting to get connected to the electric grid around the world. (A mid-size city needs a gigawatt of electricity.)

Four of the projects (the Appalachian, Gulf Coast, Heartland and Midwest hydrogen hubs) that the DOE announced as winners will use fossil fuels to produce hydrogen. (In the bipartisan infrastructure law, Congress required that at least one hub “demonstrate the production of clean hydrogen from fossil fuels.”)

“There are so many ways hydrogen can go wrong. … We’re really concerned with the number of projects that rely in part or in whole on fossil fuel-based hydrogen production,” said Julie McNamara, a deputy policy director at Union of Concerned Scientists’ climate and energy program. “For hydrogen to be a clean energy solution, it has to be cleanly produced and it has to be strategically used.”

Schlissel and other critics also questioned the lack of details released by the Department of Energy about the projects, noting that much of the application materials have been treated as trade secrets by the states and the DOE. It’s unclear how the DOE scored the projects for funding, he added.

“How much hydrogen is going to be produced? What are going to be the CO2 emissions? How much CO2 is going to be captured? Then, where is it going to be used?” he said. “DOE and the applicants have taken the position that everything is confidential.”