Our paper in Nature, published 26 January 2026. In it we propose replacing the central focus on 1.5C – a goal which is being missed – with a new metric based on the rapidity of the clean energy transition.
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International waters, also known as the high seas, make up 61% of the ocean and cover 43% of Earth’s surface — amounting to two-thirds of the biosphere by volume. They have been exploited since the seventeenth century for whales, and from the mid-twentieth century for fish, sharks and squid, depleting wildlife. Now, climate change is reducing the productivity of the high seas through warming and through depletion of nutrients and oxygen. Proposals to fish for species at greater depths and mine the sea bed threaten to wreak yet more damage, putting the ocean’s crucial role in maintaining the stability of Earth’s biosphere at risk.
[I’m a co-author on this Nature piece, which is open access and can be read here.]
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This is actually the epilogue from my book, extracted in Geographical magazine. A trip to Hiroshima past Mount Fuji, some karaoke and oysters, memories of 6 August 1945, and a dream of a world without nuclear weapons.
For the whole thing, see Geographical magazine.
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The good news is that we might be about to solve the Fermi paradox. Many have long suspected that the reason why there don’t seem to be millions of talkative aliens out there in space is because when an intelligent civilisation develops the technology to enable interstellar communication it also develops weapons that enable it to quickly destroy itself.
So far, we’re matching exactly this trajectory. We’ve sent probes far beyond the solar system – and vast quantities of electronic data fizzing in all directions at the speed of light – but we’ve also got thousands of thermonuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert that can in just a few hours reduce our entire world to a dark, freezing wasteland.
Whether or not we can confound the apparent inevitability of this doomsday outcome is perhaps the ultimate test of our species-level intelligence. But the omens aren’t good. Russia and the United States currently have 1,500 fully deployed nuclear warheads and over 5,000 each in their total arsenals. China is racing to reach nuclear parity by 2030. The current geopolitical instability raises the risk of superpower world war to perhaps the greatest level since the hottest periods of the Cold War.
America’s ‘launch-on-warning’ posture means that ICBMs (inter-continental ballistic missiles) must be out of their silos and in the air while the incoming missile attack is still blips on a radar screen. Once launched ICBMs cannot be recalled, nor can their targets be altered. When warning is received of imminent attack, the US president has as little as six minutes to decide whether to launch an all-out retaliation that would destroy most life on Earth.
A major thermonuclear exchange would likely kill about 770 million people in blasts and city firestorms across the major combatant powers. Technical language can obscure the reality here: this means several hundred million people – women, children, men, the elderly – being burned alive. Many more would quickly die from radioactive poisoning, but the biggest killer would come after: a decade-long worldwide nuclear winter that would starve billions more to death and wreck our civilisation beyond repair.
And all for what? Nothing matters this much; not any current-day flashpoint or contested piece of territory. The probability of nuclear war in any single year is small, probably around 1%, but this compounds to a two-thirds risk over a century. We have been extremely lucky with past near-misses, from Black Saturday of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 to the notorious ‘3am phone call’ incident in 1980 when President Carter was nearly woken in the night when 2,200 incoming Soviet missiles were erroneously displayed on warning screens.
We would be unwise to trust to luck forever. It should be obvious that nuclear weapons and human civilisation cannot co-exist together long-term. Either we abolish them or they abolish us. To do so we will need to build a citizens’ movement singularly focused on the goal of total abolition. This will need to be very different from the anti-nuclear movements of the past: we can learn a huge amount from both the successes and failures of CND and other previous campaigns. Nor is it about abolishing nuclear power, which is a vital technology to tackle the climate crisis and can even help remove warheads from our world by burning them up as fuel.
Nor can we be unilateralist, because the process can only work via simultaneous trust-building disarmament by all the nuclear nations. This new movement must involve millions of people of all political persuasions in every country of the world whose only reason for participation is that they want to survive. We have a good head start in the 2017 UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, already signed by 93 countries. In other words, almost half the world’s nations are now on board with the drive towards abolition.
This should be an easy decision. Collective suicide is in nobody’s interest. We don’t need to burn alive millions of men, women and children, and usher in a nuclear winter that destroys the biosphere. But the first step is to break out of the fatalistic denial that views nuclear weapons as inevitable and the aim of abolishing them as impossible. That way the Fermi paradox can remain unanswered, and humanity can continue to flourish on our beautiful, living planet.
For the full published version see the NewScientist magazine.
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By Mark Lynas and Ted Nordhaus
First published in the Wall Street Journal, 15 May 2025
The world is on the brink of a climate apocalypse—not one caused by gradual greenhouse emissions but by a sudden exchange of nuclear weapons, a possibility made more salient by the current conflict between India and Pakistan. While the long-term effects of emissions are uncertain, we know that a nuclear war would result in an immediate nuclear winter.
When we think about nuclear apocalypse, we tend to think of the immediate effects: thermonuclear explosions that incinerate cities and vaporize populations. But the worst consequences unfold long after the weapons have detonated. A major thermonuclear exchange would shroud the atmosphere in soot, plunging the world into darkness and ushering in a decadelong winter. While hundreds of millions of people would likely be killed in the initial conflagrations, most of the human population—including those in the combatant nations—would likely die in the subsequent winter famine.
It’s comforting to think that an exchange of nuclear warheads in a regional conflict such as that between India and Pakistan might be more limited. The death toll from the detonation of a few dozen weapons might only number in the low millions, and there would be little effect on planetary temperatures.
But if India bombed Islamabad and Pakistan bombed Mumbai in retaliation, it would be hard to prevent further escalation. Moreover, once intercontinental ballistic missiles are in the air, it’s virtually impossible for other nuclear-armed nations to determine where they’re headed. Leaders in Washington, Moscow and Beijing would need to make decisions in a matter of minutes about whether to launch their own weapons.
Midrange scenarios involving a few hundred weapons would cool the climate enough to decimate global food production and trade and would likely kill hundreds of millions.
Under worst-case scenarios, droughts and crop failures would quickly spread across the globe. Hundreds of millions of refugees would cross continents in search of food, safety and shelter. Some would die of disease and illness, most of starvation. Human civilization would be over.
In comparison, there’s no conceivable global-warming scenario that would kill off most of the world’s population in only a few years. Climate change damages natural systems such as coral reefs and the Arctic and will increasingly stress human societies, but it’s not an existential risk akin to nuclear war.
Unless we reduce and ultimately eliminate greenhouse gas emissions, global temperatures will continue to rise. Climate change could also lead to abrupt changes in earth’s ecosystems, such as irreversible melting of the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica. While these changes will be fast on geological time scales, they’ll be slow on human time scales, unfolding over decades and centuries. Humanity will have time to adapt food production to climate change and become more resilient to extreme weather and sea-level rise. We also have many available off-ramps, from nuclear energy to solar geoengineering, that can limit future warming.
Nuclear winter, by contrast, would destroy civilization beyond repair within months or years. Yet unlike climate change, which has preoccupied activists for decades, it is largely ignored. Politicians, journalists and activists don’t travel by the tens of thousands every year to attend conferences on the threat of nuclear annihilation. Philanthropists such as Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos don’t spend billions on efforts to eradicate the threat. There’s no nuclear equivalent to Greta Thunberg lecturing the United Nations General Assembly about its failure to assure our survival. The antinuclear movement has bizarrely focused on eliminating clean power-generating nuclear reactors instead of city-incinerating nuclear weapons.
Arguably, President Trump is the most prominent figure warning of nuclear war, with his frequent invocations of World War III. Mr. Trump was also an advocate for arms control in the 1980s.
The arms control regime that world leaders painstakingly built during the latter stages of the Cold War is in tatters. The New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), an accord signed in 2010 that limits Russia and the U.S. to 1,550 deployed warheads each—still plenty to destroy civilization—expires next February. Russia and the U.S. each hold more than 5,000 additional warheads in reserve. China, meanwhile, is rapidly building its nuclear inventory.
Against this backdrop of rising economic and geopolitical instability, the contrast is stark between the genuinely existential—but largely ignored—threat of nuclear warfare and the immense amount of attention and political effort lavished on the climate issue. Climate change is real, and there’s much that we can and should do about it. But nuclear war is the far more imminent threat.
Whatever else one thinks about the current administration’s novel approach to longstanding geopolitical alliances, President Trump deserves some credit for pushing Russia and Ukraine to agree to a cease-fire and appears to have played a significant role in brokering a cease-fire between India and Pakistan over the weekend.
Conflicts between nuclear-armed adversaries remind us that no other risk to human societies remotely rivals nuclear warfare. Zero nuclear weapons may be as much a pipe dream as net zero, but there should be no higher priority for politicians, philanthropists and civil society leaders, whatever their political stripe, than to de-escalate that threat.
Mr. Nordhaus is director of the Breakthrough Institute. Mr. Lynas is author of “Six Minutes to Winter: Nuclear War and How to Avoid It.”
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The day of the war dawns like any other. There is no warning, and across New York people are beginning their daily routines. No air raid sirens wail and no early-warning messages flash on screens. Cars are being backed out of garages in the suburbs, while kids wearing colorful backpacks wait for school buses outside the shops. Harassed moms stuff sandwiches into packed lunches while a million espresso machines grind on kitchen counters. Outside an inner-city school, a group of 10-year-old girls wait to cross the road.
Looking up at the sky, one of the girls sees a brief metallic flash high up near the sun, far above the chrome spire of a Midtown skyscraper. She does not know it, but she has seen a re-entry vehicle from a 5 megaton (Mt) intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) and has only a few seconds left to live. Thinking about an upcoming maths test she has been working hard for, she looks down when the road-crossing signal turns to green. The girls are not even halfway across when the bomb explodes.
For the full extract, see LitHub
To buy the book, visit Bloomsbury Sigma
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At least the hoping is over. This morning the United States of America, the most advanced and successful nation our world has ever seen, has re-elected an authoritarian demagogue who admires dictators, demonises minorities, promotes fear and hate, and already once tried to overthrow democracy in an election he lost.
And not just by a small margin. Trump won handily, in almost all the so-called ‘swing’ states. If the Republicans hold the House, this puts the political Right – arguably the far Right – in charge of all parts of US government: presidency, Congress and Supreme Court. There are no checks and balances with the same party, now controlled by one man, in charge of the executive, legislative and judiciary branches at once.
There will be plenty of time for post mortems. How could American citizens vote for a sex-abuser felon con-man with no political programme to speak of other than his own narcicissm and petty grievances? Not once, but twice? The answer is the one that those of us who believe in science, democracy, truth and rule of law are most reluctant to face: that in much of the world ordinary people have lost trust in the very institutions that we most value.
To make smart choices we need an evidence-based worldview. What could be further from the Trump mentality? He lies constantly, and the authenticity he radiates is wrapped up with his determined and proud ignorance: he is a perennial anti-elitist because he knows nothing and cares less. For voters alienated by modernity, this toxic and reactionary worldview has enduring appeal. But it’s the opposite of everything we are working for.
Whether Trump is a capital ‘F’ fascist is arguable; a debate that will likely be resolved one way or another by events over the next four years. But his schtick is very much ‘triumph of the will’, belief over evidence, feeling over reason, and distrust in any notion of objective, observable truth. Trump says you can’t trust the media, the scientists, the government – anyone but him. And when he changes his mind from one day to the next, and spouts random nonsense, you must do likewise if you are not to become the enemy within. You must follow the Leader.
There have been lots of pronouncements about what Trump might mean for clean energy or the climate. I feel these are missing the point. Trump is only pro-fossil fuels because the elites are green, and renewables are woke. His acolyte Elon Musk made his name with Tesla after all, and certainly did more to advance the EV revolution than any environmental NGO, whatever he now seems to have become. The issue with Trump is something deeper and darker than merely his stance on the environment, and we need to understand what that is.
Yes Trump is a danger to the climate, but more importantly in the short term he is a danger to freedom. He does not value democracy, except where it can provide him with a path to power. He is a true authoritarian, and has never made any effort to disguise this: he sided openly with Putin from the get-go, and has managed to get the entire Republican party to fall in line. If American institutions allow it, he would doubtless prefer not hold another free and fair election in four years.
This should remind us that freedom is never a given. It always has to be fought for. Once taken for granted for long enough, it ebbs away like water through sand. Trump is a disruptor, but only against institutions that constrain his power and act to protect the rule of law. Authoritarian populists can be defeated at the ballot box, as we have seen in Poland and Brazil. They can be defeated on the streets too, as pro-democracy revolutions have shown. People will fight and die to defend their freedom, as the Ukrainians do every day. Freedom isn’t granted from above, it’s seized from below and once won must be perenially renewed and defended.
But freedom depends on truth. How can you hold free elections if there is no truth and you don’t know who to believe? Trump has vowed to put anti-vaccine quack Robert Kennedy Jnr in charge of America’s health service. There could be no better emblem of what he represents than that. RFKJr opposes all evidence-based medicine. But remember where he came from – the environmental movement. With post-modernism and later wokery it was the Left that began the attack on institutional trust that the Right is now taking to a destructive extreme. We must look in the mirror too when we seek to analyse what Trump represents and where he came from.
There have been periods of darkness before in human history, sometimes very long ones. Absent a nuclear war – and Trump will, from 20 January next year, have sole launch authority over America’s nuclear missiles – there will be an end to this nightmare. Our task is not to despair, and not to give in to hopelessness or nihilist extremism of our own. We must keep the light burning. Objective reality cannot simply be wished out of existence, and sooner or later science will win out and truth will return.
When that day dawns is not up to Trump, it is up to us.
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News is coming in that the scientific community and government institutions in the Philippines are prepared to fight Greenpeace all the way back to the Supreme Court in order to defend Golden Rice. Motions for reconsideration were filed in early May at the court of appeals in Manila asking the court to reconsider its decision, and pointing out that the justification for the verdict was a misapplication of the precautionary principle not a reasoned examination of the scientific evidence.
If the court of appeals refuses to back down, then the scientists can and likely will appeal to the Supreme Court, where all this nonsense started with the petition by the activists for a Writ of Kalikasan and Continuing Mandamus. (This is a uniquely Filipino legal thing about harm to Mother Earth.) There is no set timeframe but a response is expected from the appeals court within a couple of months, with a possible move back to the Supreme Court thereafter.
What we know is that hundreds of tonnes of Golden Rice remain in limbo at various PhilRice stations, with the agency now seeking legal advice over whether the vitamin A-enhanced rice can still be consumed by the intended beneficiaries (malnourished children) or whether, thanks to Greenpeace et al, the healthier rice will now have to be destroyed. The court only rescinded the cultivation permit, so the food safety permit remains intact – but not surprisingly the agency is keen not to look like it is in contempt of court.
A number of Golden Rice crops remain to be harvested, and seeds from these crops will be kept in humidity-controlled storage so that cultivation can hopefully resume when the Filipino legal system comes to its senses. It should be noted that more months or even years of delay are exactly what Greenpeace and the other anti-science groups want – they do not need a definitive judgement, just endless legal blockages and uncertainties, which raise costs and make it more likely the scientists will eventually throw in the towel.
Meanwhile, international outrage is mounting at Greenpeace, whose successful court action to block Golden Rice in the Philippines (because it’s genetically modified, and no other reasons) will potentially lead to the deaths of thousands of vitamin A-deficient young children in the country, as well as elsewhere in Asia and the wider Global South. Last weekend liberal media bastion The Observer published a blistering editorial which panned the “dangerous mindset” of anti-GM groups like Greenpeace, which by ignoring all “scientific evidence to the contrary” risk “causing widespread harm” in countries like the Philippines. Bravo!
This followed an article in the Guardian by science editor Robin McKie which led with the warning by scientists that “tens of thousands of children could die” in the wake of the decision by the Philippines court of appeal to stop Golden Rice, which Greenpeace for its part described as a “monumental win”. (I wrote about the issue a couple of weeks earlier in the Spectator.)
Sadly the International Rice Research Institute (which runs the Golden Rice project) seems to be maintaining its tight-lipped no comment policy, refusing to give quotes to the media or stand up for its own project in public. Duh. This is sci-comms 101, and I hope that those in charge at IRRI realise that successful communications does not mean simply leaving the ground clear for the anti-science opposition to get its messages out. Let the voices of science be heard too!
There is also more than Golden Rice at stake, and even the anti-GMO crowd seems to have realised that their wide-ranging court judgement is an own goal that risks harming overall food security in the country. In point 8 of their April 17 decision the three appeals court justices enjoined “any application for contained use, field testing, direct use as food or feed, or processing, commercial propagation, and importation of genetically modified organisms”.
This sounds like it blocks all importation of soy and corn, which are important in animal feeds and without which the farming sector will be harmed and food prices rise for everyone in the country. Needless to say, Greenpeace-driven rises in food prices for an entire nation of 115 million people – and remember high food prices hit the poorest hardest – is a bit of a PR nightmare for Greenpeace.
Bt corn is also grown fairly extensively in the Philippines (containing a gene against the stem borer, thereby reducing pesticides) so the anti-science groups may have just inadvertently destroyed that sector of Filipino national farming too. It would be funny if it weren’t so tragic.
Now there is a danger that this farce will spill over into neighbouring countries also. Bangladesh, for inexplicable bureaucratic reasons, has sat on a Golden Rice approval now for six years already, and the authorities are no doubt nervously watching developments in the Philippines. For now it is important that the Bangladeshi government understands that the Filipino court judgement was deeply flawed, and has no bearing on food safety issues for Golden Rice.
If Bangladeshi regulators are spooked by Greenpeace’s Philippines debacle, it will add more years of unnecessary delay. Each year of delay costs uncountable thousands of lives of the poorest and most vulnerable in society: malnourished children.
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As a writer and campaigner who has spent 25 years working on climate change, there is something I feel I need to say about the fossil fuels divestment campaign targeting Hay and other literary festivals. I’m saying it – after speaking to lots of writers and festival staff who shall remain nameless – because it seems like no-one else can. It would be much easier for me to keep quiet and say nothing too. But that’s precisely the problem.
Some background for those who have missed the controversy. A climate divestment activist group called Fossil Free Books has asked writers and artists at literary festivals, starting with Hay, to de-platform themselves in protest at these festivals’ sponsorship by Baillie Gifford, an investment management company with a very small proportion of investments (around 2% according to them) in fossil fuels-related assets.
It’s a clever campaign because it immediately puts writers and other performers scheduled to appear at Hay in a dilemma. If they sign the statement as demanded and withdraw from the festival they lose the chance to present their work to an engaged audience at a festival with a high profile and a proud history as the world’s premier books event.
If they don’t sign, and go ahead with their event regardless, they risk looking like they don’t care about climate change and don’t support the brave activists who are trying to de-legitimise fossil fuels. Hay’s a pretty liberal-lefty event, so no-one wants to be seen to refuse to take a moral stance when it is demanded that they do so in public.
Moreover, to keep the pressure on, the activists also threatened “escalation” (yes they used that word), meaning disruption of events, with speakers potentially faced with being shouted down by campaigners wielding banners. I’ve had this happen to me and it isn’t fun. So lots of writers withdrew, and last night the festival capitulated and said it would no longer be asking for sponsorship from Baillie Gifford.
Is this a success for the campaign to stop the escalating climate emergency? Not in my book. Hay was targeted not because they are a bad actor, but because they are an good one. When Charlotte Church accused the festival of “rank hypocrisy” because of the Baillie Gifford sponsorship, she was simply echoing the favourite refrain of the right-wing media, who love to shout ‘hypocrisy’ at anyone who is making an effort, from Greta Thunberg to Coldplay.
Hay has done a huge amount to reduce its own carbon footprint, and to encourage its attendees to do likewise. But because they’re not perfect, they can be called hypocrites. It’s a nasty and self-defeating charge, because the only way to avoid it is to do nothing and say nothing on climate. It’s a disempowering tactic which merely encourages fatalism and plays into the culture wars narrative of the political right.
Let’s face it, we’re all hypocrites. Everyone who lives in the modern world is complicit in the continuing use of fossil fuels. I expect the activists from Fossil Free Books probably use the odd petrol station themselves. No doubt most have also been on an aircraft. That’s fine – I’m not calling anyone a hypocrite. We have to decarbonise the entire energy system here – it’s going to take decades, lots of technology and even more money, and in the meantime we’re all going to stay fossil fuels-consuming hypocrites for a little longer.
More broadly, we need to stop attacking our allies. Hay was chosen as a soft target, in a campaign primarily relying on peer pressure and public moral intimidation, because the activists knew the festival management would have to give in, and so this was a campaign that could be won. But who really wins here? Not a dime has been divested from fossil fuels. Not a gram of CO2 has been reduced.
All that’s happened is that literary festivals now have huge holes in their budgets which will mean they have to raise ticket prices (excluding those on lower incomes) or maybe go out of business. Who would risk sponsoring now, given what has happened? You sponsor a cultural event because you want good publicity, not public shaming in the Guardian.
As a writer, I support literary festivals on principle, and it is heartbreaking to see Hay pilloried by people who say they care about climate change. Hay is not the problem, and indeed has made huge efforts to be part of the solution. To target them because they have done so much, and accuse them of hypocrisy, is not attacking injustice – it is in itself an injustice, one that lots of fine writers and artists have now been made complicit in.
We need climate activism to continue to push for political change, and I stand with those who are devoting their time and effort to tackling the climate emergency in so many different ways. But campaigns should target enemies, not friends. They should right wrongs, not commit new ones. They should pick hard targets, not soft targets. They should not bully and intimidate. They should seek to generate empathy and solidarity rather than division and bitterness. This is a sad day for Hay and a sad day for climate activism. I hope we can learn from it.
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First, a word of warning. If you donate money to Greenpeace, you might think you’re helping save the whales or the rainforests. But in reality, you may be complicit in a crime against humanity. Last week, Greenpeace Southeast Asia and several other NGOs managed to stop the cultivation and use of vitamin A-enhanced rice in the Philippines, after the country’s court of appeal ruled in their favour.
In doing so, Greenpeace have blocked a multi-year, international, publicly-funded effort to save the lives and the eyesight of millions of children in some of the world’s poorest countries.
For the full article, see the Spectator (no paywall).