The summer of '26: A turning point for the climate crisis?

Hello, and welcome back to Independent Thinking, the weekly podcast from Chatham House. I'm Bronwyn Maddox. It has been a long, hot, deeply worrying summer across Europe and much of the world, and it's not over yet, though we are recording on a day after a night's rain in London, but that has not taken away the sense of fear about this summer of dryness and heat. Apocalyptic fires spread across France, Spain, now suburban Britain. The French President Emmanuel Macron called the fires in the north and south of the country the most severe situation for the country since World War II. Europe is heating up twice as fast as other continents. Some 10,000 excess heat-related deaths were recorded in Europe during the June heatwave alone. Across the world, this year was the joint warmest July on record, tying with July 2024, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Have we left it too late to rescue the climate from a spiral of uncontrollable warming? What is the right mix of adaptation to mitigation? In layman's terms, that means how much do we adjust our lives and communities to this extreme new reality, or do we focus on tackling the causes of global heating? How can climate change change our lives? How can we deal with the new challenges presented to food supply, water, migration, and international cooperation? Here to talk it over, we have a panel of excellent experts from Chatham House and beyond. Beatrice Mosello is an international water and climate expert who's written widely on issues of water supply, and she's one of our research fellows in our Environment and Society Center. Welcome. Beatrice Mosello: Thank you, Bronwyn. It's great to be here. Bronwyn Cunningham: Great to have you, first time on the podcast. Patrick Schroeder is one of our senior research fellows, also in the Environment and Society Center, and he specializes in climate change and sustainability, and is one of the scientists on the International Science Council, looking particularly at the plastics agreement, whether one can be reached. Very good to have you here. Patrick Schroeder: Thanks for having me on the program. Beatrice Mosello: Patrick came in very modestly, carrying someone else's book, the book of our third guest, The Economist's Planetary Affairs Editor, formerly Chief News Editor at Nature magazine. That's Oliver Morton, who specializes in the energy business, climate science, and policy, and other green issues. Oliver, welcome. And I have to say, I love your job title. Oliver Morton: Yes. Well, it was given to me by one of our podcast hosts, and I've kind of relished it ever since. So, I'm not sure. It's not yet on my business cards, but we'll see. Beatrice Mosello: You set me wondering whether we should be the Royal Institution of Planetary Affairs. Oliver Morton: Oh, no, I don't need the competition. Beatrice Mosello: Let's plunge into this. Oliver, I wonder if I can start with you. We look at the scale of the problem, what this summer has told us. Oliver Morton: This summer has told us that the world has got a good bit hotter. What it hasn't told us is that the world has gotten a little bit hotter. What it hasn't told us is that we've reached some sort of new normal, because the forcing on the climate is continuing to increase. So, although this summer feels very, you use the word apocalyptic, by the standards that people are used to, it's not that apocalyptic by the standards to come, and actually, especially by the standards of next summer, which, given the growing El Niño, is going to be an extraordinary event. Beatrice Mosello: Just explain El Niño. Oliver Morton: El Niño is part of a system. It's a system whereby the atmosphere and ocean in the tropical Pacific exchange energy with each other, and in the El Niño phase, the energy ends up in the atmosphere and things get hotter. El Niño has recently started, you can see this from temperatures in a particular part of the Pacific, and it's going like gangbusters. There are reasons to think that next year as a whole will be about as hot as a year in the mid-2030s if the current trend continues. Beatrice Mosello: We have started off with exactly the tone of fear that I would have expected, but not right in the first minute, perhaps. Beatrice, what for you is the significance of this summer? Beatrice Mosello: I think for me, what this summer has really shown us, at least in the UK and in Europe, is that climate change is no longer a problem far away in time that will eventually happen one day or another, or that is happening in faraway countries to people living in vulnerable situations. It's happening on our doorstep, and not only we have to do something about it. In terms of reducing the amount of emissions that are driving these changes in our climate, but also we need to do something about adapting to this and building our resilience as societies, as countries, and as regions, really. Beatrice Mosello: And Patrick, you've been writing quite a bit about food and other things. What are the implications of what has happened this summer in the Northern Hemisphere? Patrick Flaherty: I think what was maybe a key lesson that we should learn, and I think this is what people experience. It seemed that we've lost control over the situation. Forest fires, infrastructure failing, massive water shortages, facing food crises. I think people feel, as you said, also this fear, and that's, I think, now the moment where we need to see really some action. Beatrice Mosello: Would you agree that this is a change in public perception, it really coming home to people? Patrick Flaherty: I think it is for most people. Obviously, there are some people who say it's a Mediterranean climate now. You can just get used to it, but I don't find that particularly helpful. So I think people have worked out that this has been an extraordinary summer. And you've seen many people saying, "Well, this is the sort of weather that must make us recommit to net zero." I think the disconnect in people's minds is that net zero, while being in many ways a very admirable policy, has its effects after 2050, 2060, 2070. It does nothing about next year or the years after. It really has very little effect until the middle of the century. And I think people haven't yet put together that, although this should make us care about climate change, caring about climate change by mitigation, by cutting emissions, is not going to be a short-term help, vital though it is. Beatrice Mosello: So we're talking then about ways of adapting this. I still want to dig in a bit to the implications of the warming that we're seeing at the moment, and just look at this question of food and water, because we've heard panicked cries from farmers, and I think we've heard in Wales last week, of having to start feeding animals their winter feed right now because there has been no silage or hay to gather. What does this do to the patterns of how we've been using food and water? Laura Mar: I think what this summer has shown us, and actually also past summers, because I was reading the other day, we had three of the worst harvests in the UK happening over the last five years. And it's showing, first of all, the vulnerability of food production in the UK. But also it's showing how the system is vulnerable to climate change happening in other countries as well. The UK imports 84% of its fruit, 50% of the vegetables that we buy in the supermarkets are imported. Overall, more than 40% of the food we consume is imported. So it's not just about the vulnerability of the food system because of the water scarcity or the heat that we experience here in the UK. But it's also the impacts that the climate change is having on other regions. So it's exposing this systemic vulnerability at home and abroad in terms of food security. And Patrick, in Britain and Europe, which kind of foodstuffs and crops might be under threat? Patrick Shepard: Yeah, when I did some background research for the expert comment I wrote, I was also trying to look at some of the food impacts. Which everyone should read, it was a very good one. Patrick Shepard: Okay, hopefully, yeah. There's one number I came across is 9 million tonnes of grains have been destroyed already across Europe, which is a massive amount. Danielle Pletka: By destroyed, you mean burnt or not produced because of lack of water? Patrick Shepard: Partly, yeah. I think burnt, but also lack of water. I think that's both impacts there. And then, in addition to that, there's also impacts on corn production. Types of vegetables are struggling. And I've seen numbers, reductions of 30% to 40% for various types of vegetables. Fruit has also been impacted. Apples have also been impacted. Pills in the UK being sunburned and not able for consumption. And we've also heard from farmers and the dairy industry that there's been impacts on milk production. So it's quite significant across the board. Danielle Pletka: We'll link to that excellent expert comment in our show notes. Oliver, I wonder if you could give us the bigger, more global picture on this, about the strains this is putting on, let's call it food and water more generally. And I'm thinking, of course, we're talking while the Iran conflict is still going on. With all the disruption to fertilizer that that has meant, and including for some of the poorest countries. Oliver Young: Yes, I was going to say that it all sounds terrible. And at least we don't have anyone jacking up the prices of fuel and fertilizer. But of course we do. The troubles do not come singly. It's bad all over. The monsoon was somewhat late and a little fitful, very high temperatures in India earlier in the year. Obviously, there were problems with grain exports from, I think, Ukraine and Russia. And we haven't yet seen what will be, I think, one of the powerful things this year, which is that as well as fires in Europe, we will see fires in Indonesia and Australia as the El Nino I referred to starts to take hold. And although that won't necessarily have much of an effect on agriculture, it's worth remembering that it will have an effect on human lives. In terms of actual mortality from extreme events, the inhalation of smoke from fires is far and away the biggest at the moment. And what about food supplies? For example, I'm thinking of Eastern Africa needing, for fertilizer-leading rain, already a degree of war and conflict in the Sahel? I don't know what I can say other than it's really rough. I think I heard on the radio this morning that the malnutrition rates in Sudan are already quite high, over 14%. You can't imagine that those things aren't going to get worse over the rest of the year because, again, East Africa is an area that's hit by El Ninos. In general, what you really want here, and I'm very much putting my economist hat on, is you want people to be able to get the food from where it is actually being produced to anywhere else where it's actually needed. But that trading system is also somewhat debilitated at the moment. If anyone's looking to me here for the good news, I can't offer it. Oh, I can offer one bit, actually. Some of the changes in yields will be due to the fact that farmers are, in fact, adapting. Some farmers will have chosen to grow things other than what they would normally grow because they saw the summer coming. But that's slightly at the margins. But it does recognise the fact that farmers do and can adapt, and sometimes with extraordinary ingenuity. And that's a wonderful thing about humanity, but it's not necessarily a thing to bet the farm on, as the phrase has it. It does. Thank you for that. Resurrecting that bit of problem-solving, if not optimism, that we looked at the economist for. Patrick, you were making an interesting point in this expert comment about the heat and drought potentially changing the nature of war. Yes, and changing also maybe the nature of armed forces and militaries, because we've already seen across Europe the civilian services were overwhelmed. Militaries had to step in to help. Climate change is often described as a threat multiplier, so it affects other security issues, makes them worse. And I think Europe is becoming a lot more vulnerable through the climate change. So being in a tinderbox, and we've seen already lots of cases of arson. There have been arrests in France, et cetera. So without wanting to give people a bad idea, but that could be potentially a new way of acts of terrorism that we see, asymmetrical warfare, and that could extend to other things around also water provision and infrastructure. Patrick, is there any evidence of that? Because it does sound like the sort of things that hostile intelligence agencies do. Any evidence that that's actually happening? I didn't see any online. The intelligence agents might have some evidence, but they haven't shared it with us yet. But yeah, I'd be worried about this. Interesting phrase, yes. But it speaks to the vulnerability, whether or not there are agents out there trying these things at the moment, this sense of vulnerability to very old-fashioned threats of fire and lack of water, as well as all the new ones about cyber, this and that, that we spend a lot of time talking about. Beatrice, could you take us into the wider picture about what this is doing to water supply? I think it's a very important issue. I was chatting with my daughter four years old she has absolutely no idea where the evacuation route of her school is so it's quite a conversation to have with a four-year-old yeah I tend to go into professional topics with her sometimes and we were talking about wildfires and I just came up with this question and she didn't know where the evacuation route is you know which points to the fact that we need to invest in preparedness much more than we currently are I thought yeah it was good to receive the message I think the text information was good I wasn't so happy about the sound maybe that could be the buzzing the buzzing because I didn't that create maybe the sense that there's an immediate emergency in my location but I think of all the information on the fire risk etc. It was the first big national communication from a new prime minister it did get attention let's go on more broadly though to what can be done Oliver you've written extensively including in the book that Patrick brought in the planet remade how geoengineering could change the world you've written extensively about some of the technical responses that humanity in all its brilliance might bring to bear on this yes and at this point of the conversation I should declare the interest that I am as well as a journalist I'm a trustee of a charity the degrees or initiative which funds research into geoengineering in the global south not in an effort to promote geoengineering as a global south but in an effort to promote geoengineering as a global south but in an effort to promote geoengineering as a global south but in an effort to promote geoengineering as a global south but in an effort to promote geoengineering as a global south but in an effort to promote geoengineering as a global south but in an effort to produce a body of expertise in the global south that can be brought to discussions of it um just tell us what geoengineering might mean uh geoengineering is referred to is refers to technologies which try and change the climate without necessarily changing emissions and the most important of those in terms of sort of like policy respectability is the idea of simply sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and that's very expensive and an alternative of vision of geoengineering is that one might put little particles into the atmosphere that reflect sunlight away and before anyone says well that's ludicrous that is in fact what uh humankind has been doing for the last 100 years and especially the last 50 years or so by burning fossil fuels that are high in sulfur which produces sulfate particles in the atmosphere which reflect away sunlight and one of the reasons why the earth seems to be now heating up rather more quickly is that in order to save the global south it's going to have to produce a lot of fossil fuels that are high in sulfur which produces sulfate particles in the atmosphere which reflect away sunlight and one of the reasons why the earth seems to be now heating up rather more quickly is that in order to save the lungs of millions of people which is a goal i absolutely endorse we have reduced the amount of sulfur being emitted into the atmosphere and thus reduced the amount of little particles that are reflecting the sunlight and that is having an effect on warming rates so there is an idea that maybe you should use technology to replace the cooling effect that's being removed and instead add a much smaller amount of particles much higher up in the atmosphere where they last much longer it's extraordinarily controversial the idea of individual actors at a national or multinational multinational level taking it on themselves to cool everybody's climate which would have knock-on effects on the water cycle and all sorts of things quite ones that are quite hard to foresee quite yes uh they are quite hard to foresee and uh the effects of global warming are quite hard to foresee as well and it's the same sorts of computer models that one uses to foresee both um i think one of the real difficulties is that we have such a and this applies to many other much more mundane responses i prefer responses to solutions um get politicized notice that you know so like a heat pump that works in one direction is bad and woke and a heat pump that works in the other direction which is to say an air conditioner is a great innovation that the government is keeping from us and this is the debate that you're having in many different parts of europe and so i think it's a great idea to do that and i think it's a great idea to do that and in that sort of like politicized environment the idea of rational discussions even of quite minor climate interventions is kind of fraught and for something as large scale and um out of context as geoengineering i think it could be enormous patrick just if you could set out for us the state of global discussion on concerted action across countries to do something about emissions to do something about emissions or to do something about climate change effects so let's take them both i mean we are we are dealing with both here now obviously we have the cop process under un triple c so there's national contributions the ndc's since paris so lots of countries get together the u.s uh very markedly taking itself out of it at the moment no exactly so yeah that's a process that's ongoing that goes on and what weight should we what hope should we put on that process some hope but not all hope so i think it's a great idea to do that and i think it's a great idea to do that but not all our hope um because of that actually there's been a another process that just recently started a plurilateral initiative co-organized together by the government of colombia before the last election with the government of the netherlands to convene a group of i think 50 60 countries to talk about phasing out fossil fuels which has just been banned let's say from the formal cop negotiations and in addition to that there's a lot of other initiatives happening so there's room for some some hope and even if it isn't global there's room for sort of partial agreement yes yeah and in relation to the geoengineering bit i've uh because i'm following also the united nations environment assembly there have been multiple attempts by countries and i think especially switzerland to get a resolution um not to do geoengineering but just to establish an expert group within the un system to discuss these topics but that resolution has repeatedly failed and i think it's a great idea to do that and i think it's a great idea to do that um so just highlighting oliver's point so these political discussions not only on national level but international level are are very complicated and politicized and coming down to the the second group of things of international agreement on how to respond what about that so the adaptation part is also within the unf triple c um so their discussions around loss and damage and um that's gaining more importance especially also how to finance and invest in adaptation measures i'm going to put it very very bluntly but poor account of the un f triple c and the un f triple c countries saying, well, richer ones pay them for some of the costs of. Yeah, that's also one of the underlying dynamics, which makes it complicated, because there's historical responsibility. But obviously, public budgets are constrained. Beatrice, you spend your working life very much in this territory of looking at international agreements. Yes, I wanted to come in on the adaptation point, actually, because the COP that is coming up in Antalya in November, COP 31, the Conference of Parties of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, is supposed to be focusing quite a lot on adaptation. And it is going to be a critical one to bring forward the conversations and the agreement that happened at the previous COP in Belém in Brazil, around this new collective quantified goal for climate finance of 1.3 trillion to be spent by 2035. And also the other kind of goal on adaptation finance specifically, that was agreed on as being triple compared to the current levels. So very key conversations happening in November, pushed by the co-presidency of the COP with Australia and the Pacific Islands, for which obviously, adaptation and resilience are on top of the agenda. So this has really raised the salience of the topic, which in the past has been a bit of the kind of Cinderella, the second cousin in the negotiations compared to. mitigation, emissions reduction, and so on. So definitely a space to watch. All right, you're sounding a little bit more hopeful than Oliver and Patrick on this. You think there's an urgency in this that may get some results? I am. And I think also seeing what has happened last year at COP, but also some of the movements we've seen in June, London Climate Action Week, obviously, it's not a multilateral space there. But I think climate diplomacy is moving out of these large multilateral processes that require consensus in order to move forward. And it's becoming a bit more pragmatic in terms of creating coalitions of the willing, smaller countries keen to work together, middle powers hopefully taking the lead on specific issues. Electrification is one of them. Can I add a few more notes of hope, contrary to my reputation? I'm not going to stop you. Looking at adaptation, as Beatrice was talking about, and looking at carbon dioxide mitigation, emissions reduction, as Patrick was talking about, are both very important. But there are also some slight marginal things that can take a little bit of weight. It's 10 years since the Kigali Protocol, which used the powers given by the Montreal Protocol to control gases which destroy the ozone layer, to also control gases which don't destroy the ozone layer, but do do similar gases which have a very high global warming potential. That's 10 years old. And I know that the government is very keen that at the 10th anniversary of this, people make a big new push to speed the reduction in these pollutants, and also to make the coolant systems that they are used in much more efficient. And that in itself could be a small but significant step. Then there's also the global methane pledge. And one of the things that makes methane different from other things is that you can really see where it's coming from, because we now have a number of satellites, one sadly was lost this year, but a number of satellites which can show where methane is coming from. And that means that you can really target things as long as you can get the people emitting methane to actually take responsibility for it. And perhaps when they're transnational oil companies, that might eventually be possible. And then a little fringe one, but was just yesterday, it was announced that the British government is funding a large scale trial of reducing the number of contrails left over the Atlantic, something called rather charmingly Operation Blue Skies. And if that works as it is meant to, again, contrails are not a huge amount of warming, but there's something like half of the warming due to aviation. And if you can reduce them by say 70% worldwide, you could get another significant bit of cooling. So around the edges, there are good things that you might wish for. It's that central problem of reducing carbon dioxide emissions that remains the really tough nut. And of course, some people worry that by looking at the fringy things, you are taking your eye off that very important ball. So let me just ask you as we're wrapping up now about, what do you call it? Fringy things. Is Britain in a sense a fringy thing, producing about 1% of emissions? You've got China doing a huge amount about green technology, but still with a lot of emissions. You've got the US with the current position that it has. What is the argument for small countries doing something at this point, if the big ones, could include India and that, are still contributing enormously? I think that if we move into a world where multilateral talks do matter, there's a matter of bona fides there. That if you're not cutting emissions at home, who are you really to talk to anyone? But that is very easily, again, looking back at the politicisation of all this, it's fairly easy to spin demonstrating good faith as signalling virtue. And I'm sure that that is the way that these things will be taken. I think that the UK is showing that it is possible to decarbonise, could decarbonise at levels of consumption, not just at the levels of production. I think some of the ways it's doing so. That's meaning taking into account, even if we buy the stuff from overseas. Embodied emissions and stuff that the UK imports. And I think there are some ways that this has been done unhelpfully. I think putting so much of the price onto electricity bills has obviously not been politically astute. But in general, there's a certain degree, I mean, it's a certain degree of decarbonisation, but it's a certain degree of decarbonisation. It's a certain degree of decarbonisation. It's a genuinely hard problem. There's a certain degree of sort of like fighting despair. And although you, as I was saying earlier, reducing emissions now doesn't cool the planet now, not reducing emissions now is fundamentally nihilistic. We are going to have to stop there. I often say this at the end, but this particular subject is endless and we will be returning to it. Huge thank you to my guest, Beatrice Marcello. Thank you very much for having me. Oliver Morton. Lovely to be able to join you. I'm very glad to be here. Glad you could. And Patrick Schroeder. Thank you very much. Who is travelling so much to so many places. It's rare I have the pleasure and privilege of sitting right next to him in Chatham House. We hope you have all enjoyed this edition. We're out every Friday, so don't forget to follow us and do look at chathamhouse.org where lots of our work in this not quiet August is still going on. See you next week. Thank you.