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climate emergency
Scientists Warn 'Garbage' Models Underestimate Risk of Economic Collapse From Climate Crisis
Current models "assume the future will behave like the past, even as we push the climate system into uncharted territory," said the lead author of a new report that's based on input from dozens of experts.
Feb 05, 2026
In a report published Thursday, UK experts highlighted the "growing gap between real-world climate risk and the economic analysis used to guide policy, supervision, and investment," while also warning that because the "window for preventing catastrophic warming" is narrowing, ambitious action "cannot await perfected models."
Various scientific institutions concur that 2025 was among the hottest years on record—and the ongoing failure of governments across the globe, particularly the Trump administration, to enact policies that would significantly cut planet-heating emissions from fossil fuels is pushing the Paris Agreement's 1.5°C and 2°C goals for this century further out of reach.
The new report from the University of Exeter and the think tank Carbon Tracker Initiative, titled Recalibrating Climate Risk, incorporates the expert opinions of 68 climate scientists from Australia, Austria, Canada, China, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
"Our expert elicitation reveals a fundamental disconnect: Climate scientists understand that beyond 2°C, we're not dealing with manageable economic adjustments," said Jesse Abrams, lead author and senior impact fellow at Exeter's Green Futures Solutions, in a statement.
"The climate scientists we surveyed were unambiguous," he explained. "Current economic models systematically underestimate climate damages because they can't capture what matters most—the cascading failures, threshold effects, and compounding shocks that define climate risk in a warmer world and could undermine the very foundations of economic growth."
Abrams said that "for financial institutions and policymakers relying on these models, this isn't a technical problem—it's a fundamental misreading of the risks we face, which current models miss entirely because they assume the future will behave like the past, even as we push the climate system into uncharted territory."
Current economic models miss the mark on climate risks, warning that catastrophic tipping points and extreme weather could crash the global economy, far worse than 2008.As said many times before delaying action will be far costlier than cutting emissions now.www.theguardian.com/environment/...
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— Ian Hall (@ianhall.bsky.social) February 5, 2026 at 12:46 AM
Communities around the world are already contending with devastating droughts, fires, and storms—and, as another report from researchers at Exeter and the UK's Institute and Faculty of Actuaries (IFOA) pointed out last month, "above 1.5°C, we enter the danger zone where multiple climate tipping points may be triggered, such as the collapse of ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, permafrost melt, Amazon dieback, and changes in ocean circulation."
The IFOA report "warned that when cascading and systemic risks are taken into account, warming of 2°C by 2050 could result in a 25% hit to projected GDP, rising to a halving of projected economic growth between 2070 and 2090," BusinessGreen editor-in-chief James Murray reported Thursday. "Similarly, a report from consultancy Boston Consulting Group calculated a third of the global economic output could be lost under a scenario where temperatures reach 3°C above preindustrial levels by 2100."
"The studies stand in stark contrast to some mainstream economic models that have suggested warming of 2°C or more will only reduce projected economic growth by a few percentage points—analyses that have been seized upon by opponents of climate action to argue that decarbonization policies can be dropped or delayed," Murray noted.
Abrams told the Guardian that some current economic models "are saying we'll have a 10% GDP loss at between 3°C and 4°C, but the physical climate scientists are saying the economy and society will cease to function as we know it. That's a big mismatch."
Your periodic reminder that the economic models that suggest climate change will knock a couple of percent of future GDP - models that are used widely by governments, investors, and businesses - are almost certainly complete garbage. www.businessgreen.com/news/4525211...
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— James Murray (@james-bg.bsky.social) February 5, 2026 at 7:08 AM
Laurie Laybourn, a Carbon Tracker board member and executive director of Strategic Climate Risks Initiative, cited another recent report that provides a bleak picture of the current moment and what lies ahead.
"As the UK government's landmark security assessment of ecosystem collapse showed last week, we are currently living through a paradigm shift in the speed, scale, and severity of risks driven by the climate-nature crisis," she said. "Yet, beyond this report, there has not been a corresponding paradigm shift in how regulators and government as a whole assess these risks."
"Instead, they're routinely underestimated if not missed entirely, meaning many regulations and government action are dangerously out of touch with reality," she continued. "This threatens disaster when that reality catches up with us. So, it's critical that policymakers change course, providing clear signals and guidance to markets that these risks should be priced accordingly, rather than downplayed."
And, as the experts emphasized Thursday, it's not just policymakers—investors are also still relying on "flawed economic advice," said Carbon Tracker founder and CEO Mark Campanale. The result is "widespread complacency... with many investors viewing climate scenario analysis as a tick-box disclosure exercise."
"Until the gap between scientists and economists' expectations of future climate damages is closed and government bodies act to ensure the integrity of advice upon which investment decisions are made," he added, "financial institutions will continue to chronically underprice climate risks—meaning that pension funds and taxpayers will remain dangerously exposed."
Hetal Patel, head of sustainable investment research at Phoenix Group, the UK's largest and retirement and savings business, said that her firm "supports the report's call for a more robust and coordinated approach to climate‑risk modeling. Underestimating physical risk doesn't just distort financial analysis and investment decisions, it underplays the real‑world consequences that will ultimately affect customer outcomes and society as a whole."
The new report stresses that addressing the "fundamental disconnect between what climate scientists understand about climate impacts and how these impacts are represented in economic models" would require "research investments spanning years," but rather than simply waiting for better modeling, decision-makers "must proceed on the basis of precautionary risk management, physical climate science, and observed impacts."
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'Regulators Should Remember': Louisiana Pipeline Blast Shows Risks of Methane Boom
The explosion "starkly illustrates the dangers of fossil fuel infrastructure, particularly its impact on vulnerable communities," one environmental justice leader said.
Feb 04, 2026
A pipeline explosion in Cameron Parish, Louisiana—a coastal community in the epicenter of the liquefied natural gas buildout—offers an object lesson in the immediate dangers posed by oil and gas expansion, frontline advocates warned.
The explosion occurred at around 11:00 am Central time on Tuesday on the Delfin LNG pipeline, injuring one worker, forcing nearby Johnson Bayou High School to shelter in place, and sending a wall of smoke and flame into the sky.
Community activist Roishetta Ozane of the Vessel Project of Louisiana said the blast "starkly illustrates the dangers of fossil fuel infrastructure, particularly its impact on vulnerable communities. This incident is a chilling reminder of the environmental injustice that disproportionately affects people of color, low-income populations, and especially fishermen."
Environmental justice campaigners and local residents, including fishers, have been pushing back in recent years against an LNG export boom in the Gulf South that threatens their local ecosystems, health, and livelihoods—not to mention the stability of the global climate.
"Today’s explosion and ongoing fire are a stark reminder that what they’re selling is highly combustible methane gas—a volatile fossil fuel.”
"This is a prime example of why we are fighting against this," Fisherman Involved in Sustaining Our Heritage (FISH) wrote in a post on Facebook in response to the news.
Cameron Parish is home to the largest LNG terminal in the country—Cheniere Energy's Sabine Pass—as well as Venture Global's controversial Calcasieu Pass terminal, which violated its air permits more than 2,000 times during its first year of operation. Residents say the pollution is harming their health and that dredging and export tankers are destroying habitat for local fisheries. The situation is only set to deteriorate, as last year the Trump administration approved construction of a second Venture Global terminal and allowed the company to increase exports from its first as part of its push to ramp up fossil energy production.
Delfin is part of the LNG expansion. It is constructing an offshore terminal consisting of three vessels connected to preexisting pipelines which will eventually be able to produce 4 million tons of methane gas. Preliminary actions were being performed on the line when it exploded Tuesday, Ashley Buller, assistant director of Cameron Parish's emergency preparedness department, told The Advocate.
The cause of the explosion is not yet known, though the Louisiana State Police have promised an investigation, but for watchdog groups documenting fossil fuel expansion in the state, it does not come as a surprise.
“Every minute of every day, countless corporations pump oil, gas, and chemicals across Louisiana via pipeline. That means at any given moment, a Louisiana community could be faced with a leak; an explosion; or contamination of their air, land, or water," said Anne Rolfes of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade. "The industry likes to use marketing terms like 'natural gas' to make their products seem benign, but today’s explosion and ongoing fire are a stark reminder that what they’re selling is highly combustible methane gas—a volatile fossil fuel.”
Ozane noted: "Fossil fuel pipelines pose significant risks due to leaks and explosions, exposing nearby residents to hazardous pollutants linked to severe health issues, including respiratory disorders and cancer. Often, these pipelines are placed in marginalized neighborhoods, a product of systemic inequities that prioritize corporate profit over community safety. The cumulative effects of pollution exacerbate existing health disparities, leaving these communities more vulnerable to chronic illnesses."
"The dangers extend beyond immediate incidents," she continued. "The entire lifecycle of fossil fuel extraction and consumption contributes to environmental degradation and climate change, disproportionately impacting marginalized groups. Furthermore, the rise of energy-intensive data centers, often powered by fossil fuels, adds another layer of pollution, perpetuating a cycle of harm."
"They don't only export the gas, they export the profits too."
FISH also pointed to the lingering effects of fossil fuel pollution, and criticized the official line reported in local media that there were "no off-site impacts from the explosion," calling it "one of the most disturbing industry lies."
"The air, the water, and our wetlands are impacted far beyond their chain link fences," the group wrote. "The people are not protected by chain link fences and concrete barriers."
FISH executive director Robyn Thigpen also emphasized to The Advocate that Cameron Parish's hospital had not reopened since it was damaged by Hurricane Laura in 2020, increasing the potential danger of pipeline explosions.
"It's really important that people understand they never reopened a hospital," she said.
The worker who was injured was transported to a facility in Port Arthur, Texas.
The climate crisis increases the chances of powerful storms like Laura and Rita, a 2005 hurricane which devastated the area and started a trend of long-term population decline, providing an example of how the fossil fuel industry threatens the people of Cameron Parish in multiple ways. Yet while it increases risks, the LNG boom has not brought greater prosperity to ordinary citizens of the parish.
"We are the largest exporter of natural gas in the world, and to look around this place, you would not know the wealth," For a Better Bayou Director James Hiatt told The Advocate. "Because they don't only export the gas, they export the profits too."
Community activists called on local and national leaders to reassess their reliance on fossil fuel energy sources and move toward safer renewable alternatives.
“Before approving the next pipeline, LNG export terminal, or [carbon, capture, and storage] project, Gov. [Jeff] Landry and state regulators should remember today’s incident and what these projects cost our communities," Rolfe said.
Ozane concluded: "Each explosion not only results in loss of life and property but also inflicts lasting trauma on families and communities. It is imperative to advocate for the cessation of new fossil fuel projects and demand clean energy alternatives. We must address the systemic inequalities that put vulnerable populations at risk, ensuring that no community is sacrificed for corporate gain."
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How Climate Denial Greased Trump's Ascent to Fibber-in-Chief
Where the GOP learned to lie as a matter of course is an interesting question, and as a long-time climate activist I’ve had a front row seat: It’s the climate fight, more than anything else, that taught them to regard reality as optional.
Feb 03, 2026
The past stretch of days—say, since the murder of Renee Good—has been marked by brutality, but also by a dishonesty so deep and stupid that it’s begun to finally turn on the liars. Following the execution of Alex Pretti, for instance, various White House officials were quick to start just plain lying: He was an “assassin” and a “domestic terrorist” who "wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement."
As many videos emerged in the course of the day, those lies were shown for what they were. Pretti was, at worst, trying to help a woman who was being unnecessarily gassed; for his pains he was executed once he’d been disarmed; the only “weapon” he’d “brandished” was a cell phone. Oh, and instead of being a domestic terrorist he was a VA nurse who treated former soldiers with compassion and dignity.
Politicians, it goes without saying, have sometimes engaged in dishonesty, often with hideous consequences. The Gulf of Tonkin “attacks” that gave America an excuse for war in Vietnam were at least in part fabrications; the “weapons of mass destruction” weren’t in Iraq and there was no compelling reason to think they were. Hell, we had a president—Richard Nixon—known as Tricky Dick for the smears and fibs that marked his whole career, from his first congressional race to the last days of Watergate. But the presidents who told those lies generally attempted to manufacture cover stories or cloud them in enough shadows that they might pass for mistakes. By now, however, we’ve reached a point where the president and his party just recite up-is-down lies constantly. Consider this reckoning of President Donald Trump's first term:
When The Washington Post Fact Checker team first started cataloguing President Donald Trump’s false or misleading claims, we recorded 492 suspect claims in the first 100 days of his presidency. On Nov. 2 alone, the day before the 2020 vote, Trump made 503 false or misleading claims as he barnstormed across the country in a desperate effort to win reelection. This astonishing jump in falsehoods is the story of Trump’s tumultuous reign.
By the end of his term, Trump had accumulated 30,573 untruths during his presidency—averaging about 21 erroneous claims a day. What is especially striking is how the tsunami of untruths kept rising the longer he served as president and became increasingly unmoored from the truth. Trump averaged about six claims a day in his first year as president, 16 claims day in his second year, 22 claims day in this third year—and 39 claims a day in his final year.
Put another way, it took him 27 months to reach 10,000 claims and an additional 14 months to reach 20,000. He then exceeded the 30,000 mark less than five months later.
The second term, obviously, is far worse than the first. At this point, it would be far easier for the Post to assign a reporter to list the true things the president says—a list as short as his… temper. (And of course the second-term Post wouldn’t do this, since its owner has castrated one of America’s great papers in an effort to curry favor with the fibber-in-chief). Every lie he tells is then repeated by his satraps in the administration and Congress—the closest they come to shame is when they lie and say that they haven’t heard his latest lies so they don’t have to publicly swallow them. Here at home we’ve gotten so used to this that the lies often barely register—but when Trump went to Davos and gave a speech literally filled with whoppers, European leaders were astonished. He was telling them things that they knew to be absurd—that China has no wind farms, say—and expecting them to go along.
Where the GOP learned to lie as a matter of course is an interesting question, and I’m afraid I’ve had a front row seat. I think it’s the climate fight, more than anything else, that taught them to regard reality as optional. And I think this because I remember the start of it all. When Jim Hansen first testified before the Senate that global warming was real, it caused a society-wide stir; running for the White House, the sitting vice-president George Herbert Walker Bush said he would combat the greenhouse effect with “the White House effect.” He made no attempt to deny it, or pretend it wasn’t a problem; it was reality, he wanted to lead the world, he had to at least pretend to deal with it.
And of course he could have—he could have resurrected Jimmy Carter’s plans (only eight years old) for a rapid solar research and development program, for instance. He seemed like he might; during the campaign he promised to convene a "global conference on the environment at the White House" during his first year in office. That didn’t happen, and it’s fairly easy to figure out why.
At about this same time—1989-1990—the fossil fuel industry was making a fateful decision. They were well aware that global warming was real; as a series of archival documents and whistleblowers have now laid out in excruciating detail, the big oil companies had conducted their own research programs, and reached conclusions just like Hansen’s. (Indeed, Exxon’s internal estimates of how hot the world would be by 2020 turned out to be even more accurate than NASA’s). We know that the executives of these companies believed their scientists—Exxon, for instance, began building drilling rigs higher to compensate for the rise in sea level they knew was coming, and plotting which corners of the Arctic to lease for drilling once it had inevitably melted.
It always has seemed to me that the worst fate would be to walk over this cliff without knowing it was there. Dignity demands understanding.
But they decided, across the industry, that the price of telling the truth would be too high. Inevitably it would mean having to leave at least some of their reserves of coal, gas, and oil in the ground, and those reserves were valued in the tens of trillions of dollars. And so they started forming the coalitions and councils, hiring the veterans of the fights over tobacco and asbestos and even DDT—they started lying.
Their lies were, at first, made concessions to some notion of plausibility. The science was “uncertain.” It was mostly China’s fault. Climate always fluctuates. Computer models are “unreliable.” And so on—these were never good-faith objections, they were always the arguments from selfishness. And as time went on they became more and more outlandish. Before the 1990s were over, the CEO of Exxon was telling a key crowd of Chinese leaders that the Earth was cooling and that it would make no difference if we waited a quarter century to start phasing out fossil fuels. Again, his scientists had assured him that this was nonsense years before.
It took a while for this to filter down through the entire GOP ecosystem. George W. Bush actually ran for president in 2000 promising to officially establish that carbon dioxide was a pollutant and to regulate its emissions. Shortly after taking office, however, his vice-president—oil-patch CEO Dick Cheney—held a series of private meetings with his industry brethren, and before long W. announced that he had made a mistake and that CO2 was not in fact a problem.
That was the signal for the rest of the Republican party—save for a few iconoclasts like John McCain—to fall in line, and by the time he ran for president even McCain had pretty much given up talking about global warming. The biggest donors by far to GOP campaign funds were the Koch brothers and the vast network they had assembled of right-wing billionaires—and the Koch brothers were the biggest oil and gas barons in America, owners of an unrivaled fleet of pipelines and refineries. The efforts of this group of oil-adjacent cronies became ever more extreme—eventually they were funding groups to put up billboards equating climate scientists with Charles Manson.
And eventually, inevitably, it produced a president who felt no compunction about just saying that climate change wasn’t real, and using all the power he could muster to kill off both the scientific effort that had alerted us to the crisis, and the policy effort to do something about it. His crew assisted in this cover-up in all the usual ways—we learned January 30, for instance, that a federal judge had ruled that the Department of Energy’s effort to produce a report pooh-poohing climate danger had violated all manner of federal law.
Judge William Young of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts said the Energy Department did not deny that it had failed to hold open meetings or assemble a balance of viewpoints, as the law requires, when it created the panel, known as the Climate Working Group.
“These violations are now established as a matter of law,” wrote Judge Young, who was nominated to the bench by Ronald Reagan. He said the Climate Working Group was, in fact, a federal advisory committee designed to inform policy, and not, as the Energy Department claimed, merely “assembled to exchange facts or information.”
What makes this campaign of deception all the more remarkable is that it’s happened even as the actual facts of global warming have become painfully clear. Back in 1988 it was still pretty much theory; now it’s flood and fire, storm and sea-level rise. We live on a planet losing the ice at its poles, and the vast coral reefs in between, where tens of millions of humans are already on the move because their homes can no longer support them. It’s also remarkable because in 1988 the solutions were hard—solar power was still the most expensive energy on Earth. Now it’s the cheapest. Most of the world has recognized these truths, coming together if fitfully to try and least talk about it. But whenever America is in the hands of Republicans it just walks away.
Perhaps, given this long history, I can offer a few hard-earned ideas about how to try and deal with Trump’s many assaults on the truth. They won’t do all that we might hope, but they’re nonetheless important.
- Don’t give up. Telling the the truth repeatedly actually can work. Because more than 80% of Americans saw the video of Alex Pretti’s execution, the lies backfired. And at least in part because 95% of Americans live in counties that have had a federally declared disaster since 2011, it’s hard to convince most people that there’s not something afoot. Indeed, polling demonstrates that public concern and understanding of climate change has held relatively stable for the last 30 years, with about two-thirds of Americans acknowledging that we’ve got trouble. And since it’s clear that about one-third of America is beyond the reach of fact or feeling, that’s not bad.
- More than ever we need to support independent media. Throughout Trump’s second term, it’s been as much Substackers, YouTubers, and others of this breed who’ve been keeping things straight as it has the ‘legacy media.’ (As one small example, check out this epic—in both content and length—rant about renewable energy’s benefits that appeared on YouTube over the weekend). That legacy media is increasingly craven and corrupted (see, for instance, CBS News), or just simply out of business—we now have big cities in America without daily newspapers. The administration clearly recognizes this trend—that’s why they’re trying to prosecute Don Lemon, Georgia Fort, and others covering the Minnesota debacle. Many of these independent journalists have a point of view—I certainly do. And I can tell you that, though I continue to work for and love brave institutions like the New Yorker, I’m also very grateful for things like Substack that are increasingly taking up the slack. (Tips on how to support Lemon and Fort here)
- Even on days when one despairs (and that’s an awful lot of days) it’s good to remind oneself that the truth has real value in and of itself. I’ve written more words than anyone else on the climate crisis—one motivation was to try and spur action, but another was simply to record and spread this news. It always has seemed to me that the worst fate would be to walk over this cliff without knowing it was there. Dignity demands understanding.
I have no idea if I’ll live to see the day when the truth regains a strong footing in our culture, but I do have a certain amount of faith it will happen eventually, if only because reality reality ultimately trumps (not Trumps) political reality. Physics and chemistry are functional truth, despite their liberal bias. I remember the week after Hurricane Sandy hit New York shutting down the financial district, and the cover of Business Week magazine was simply a big block of text: “It’s Global Warming Stupid.” Eventually that message will get through; our job is to see if we can make that happen before the damage is any worse than it has to be.
Oh, and word on the street is that Immigration and Customs Enforcement is going after Springfield Ohio this week—home of the biggest lie of the last election campaign. Haitians are not eating cats and dogs. ICE is killing good people. The last three years are the hottest on record. Pass it on.
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