Published

3 years ago

December 1, 2023

Alice Rush

Welcome to the first COP28 special edition of DeBriefed, an essential guide to all the key developments at the Dubai climate talks.

This is an online version of Carbon Brief’s weekly DeBriefed email newsletter. Subscribe for free here.

This week

COP28 kick-off

LOSS AND DAMAGE DEAL: The first day of COP28 in Dubai saw agreement on the details of a new “loss-and-damage fund” to help developing countries pay for climate impacts, the Financial Times reported. This comes after a year of “clashes” over “basic issues”, such as who should pay into the fund, the FT said. Several parties, including COP28 host UAE, Germany and the UK, immediately announced “more than $400m” to establish the fund, according to Climate Home News. (The Conversation noted annual loss-and-damage financial needs are “roughly 1,000 times” this amount.)

KING’S SPEECH: The second day of COP28 saw world leaders descend on the conference for the first day of the “World Climate Action Summit”. Opening the event, King Charles warned countries they were “dreadfully far off track” to meeting climate targets and urged them to make COP28 a “critical turning point for genuine transformational action”, the Independent reported. Ahead of his talk, UK prime minister Rishi Sunak told reporters he is “not in hock to ideological zealots” and issued a press release defending climate rollbacks.

COP TEXT TRACKER: After world leaders fly off home on Saturday evening, all attention will turn to COP’s crucial, yet infamously hard-to-follow negotiations. To help keep track of what is happening, Carbon Brief has just launched its traditional COP text tracker, but newly improved thanks to data-scraping wizardry from Dr Simon Evans and Dr Verner Viisainen.

Oily influence

‘OIL-AND-GAS DEALS’: Despite early progress at the summit, a shadow was cast by a series of investigations alleging that the fossil fuel industry could be influencing proceedings. An investigation by BBC News and the Centre for Climate Reporting alleged that the UAE planned to use its role as COP host to strike “secret” oil-and-gas deals behind the scenes of the summit. Journalists at the Centre for Climate Reporting obtained briefing documents from the UAE’s COP28 team that indicated plans to discuss fossil fuel deals with 15 different countries.

‘CAUGHT RED-HANDED’: On Twitter, former UN climate chief Christiana Figueres said the COP28 presidency had been “caught red-handed” and “will be under public scrutiny like no other ever before”. The UAE’s COP28 team at first refused to deny the allegations to BBC News and said that “private meetings are private”. After the story’s release, COP28 president Sultan Al Jaber released a statement saying that the allegations were “false, not true, incorrect and not accurate”, Bloomberg reported.

SAUDI’S OIL PLAN: The Centre for Climate Reporting also released a second investigation alongside Channel 4 News alleging that Saudi Arabia has a plan to “artificially” boost oil consumption in African and Asian countries. In an undercover sting operation, journalists from the Centre for Climate Reporting posed as oil investors and asked officials from Saudi’s ministry of energy whether the country had plans to boost oil demand in certain markets. In response, an official said: “Yes…It’s one of the main objectives that we are trying to accomplish.” Representatives from Saudi’s government refused requests for comment.

Around the world

MIND ON METHANE: The US and China plan to hold a joint summit on methane and other non-CO2 greenhouse gases during COP28, the South China Morning Post reported. This follows a pledge from the two countries to “jointly tackle global warming” by “ramping up” renewables.
DECARBONISING CLUB: Germany and Chile are set to launch a “club of governments” to help developing nations invest in cutting industry emissions, particularly from “hard-to-abate sectors” such as steel and cement, according to Reuters.
KENYA FLOODS: At least 76 people have died and 40,000 have been displaced since heavy rains and flash floods began “pounding” Kenya in October, the Associated Press reported.
INFLUENCING AFRICA: Climate Home News obtained leaked documents and interviewed multiple people about the alleged influence of the US consultancy firm McKinsey on Africa’s first climate summit.
PHASE-OUT: Sunak was warned by the UK’s oil and gas regulator that his plan to introduce annual North Sea licensing rounds was “not necessary” to boost production, the Financial Times reported. Former prime minister Theresa May told the Times she disagreed with Sunak’s oil-and-gas push.

84,101

The number of registered delegates at COP28, the biggest UN climate summit in history, according to newly released Carbon Brief analysis.

Latest climate research

Accounting for the long-term impacts of tropical cyclones increases the “social cost of carbon” – a metric that assesses the societal costs of CO2 emissions – by more than 20%, according to a new study in Nature Communications.
Global warming could intensify heavy rainfall more than expected, according to a Journal of Climate study using high-resolution climate models.
There is “little trade-off” between alleviating extreme poverty and limiting global warming, with ending extreme poverty expected to have a “negligible impact” on emissions, according to a Nature study.

(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)

Captured

The UK's contribution to climate change is nearly doubled when accounting for emissions under colonial rule

The UK’s contribution to climate change since the start of the industrial era is almost twice as high when its activities in former colonies are taken into account, according to new Carbon Brief analysis covered by the Guardian. This is illustrated in the graphic above, which shows CO2 emissions caused by the UK both within its own borders (blue) and in colonised countries under British rule (red). The story is part of a wider Carbon Brief investigation into how considering colonial rule radically shifts responsibility for climate change globally, covered by the Hindustan Times in India and the NRC newspaper in the Netherlands, among others.

Spotlight

Key issues to watch at COP28

This week, Carbon Brief’s team of COP28 reporters break down the key issues to watch as the summit’s first days unfold.

Fossil fuels

As delegates gather in a petrostate made luxurious by fossil-fuel wealth, all eyes are on how COP host UAE will deal with growing calls for countries to commit to phasing out fossil fuels.

The need to “phase down unabated coal” use was mentioned in a COP legal text for the first time at the end of COP26 in Glasgow two years ago. At last year’s talks, COP27 host and oil-and-gas producer Egypt ignored repeated calls for the “phase out” of all fossil fuels to be discussed as part of the summit’s final agreement.

Ahead of COP28, allegations that the UAE planned to use COP to make “secret” oil and gas deals (see above) raised significant doubts about the presidency’s impartiality.

However, during the summit’s opening press conference on Thursday, COP28 president Sultan Al Jaber indicated that he would support including fossil fuels in negotiating texts in the context of tackling climate change – and an early stage negotiating text for the global stocktake (see below) released on Friday morning does make reference to “fossil fuels”. It is yet to be seen whether such references will survive the days to come.

Global stocktake

The “global stocktake” (GST) is the first major review of countries’ progress towards meeting the goals of the Paris Agreement, with an aim of encouraging nations to take more ambitious action.

The two-year process is set to wrap up at COP28. At the first press conference of the talks, Al Jaber told reporters he was “laser-focused” on delivering an ambitious GST. “I’m determined to demonstrate that this presidency is different,” he added.

While the GST’s “technical” phase finished with a report that spelt out the clear shortfall of climate action, finance and capacity to cope, states still have to sign off on political takeaways to deliver faster emissions reductions.

The GST decision is likely to be the main landing zone for language around phasing out fossil fuels, while providing guidance to countries on the next round of climate pledges and how they can course-correct against the 1.5C limit.

The first bare-bones draft of this decision text was published on Friday and mentions peaking global emissions, fossil fuel phase-out or phase down, as well as phase down of unabated coal power. While this is an early-stage draft that could see many iterations and cuts, observers expressed tentative optimism about its contents.

Climate finance

The most high-profile climate-finance outcome of COP28 will undoubtedly be the agreement on the loss-and-damage fund (see above). Yet, with so much climate action depending on scaling up finance for developing countries, the issue permeates the whole event.

On the first day of COP, Canada and Germany assured attendees that developed countries “likely” hit their outstanding $100bn annual climate finance goal last year. But, with the numbers to support this claim still unavailable, developing countries are unlikely to drop the issue. A decision on the new goal to replace the $100bn is not expected until next year.

For the past couple of years, there has been growing pressure on development banks and the private sector to fund more climate action. Building on this, on day two of the conference, 10 countries including the US, the UK, Kenya and Barbados banded together with a “leaders declaration” on a new framework for financial system reform.

Funding for climate adaptation still lags far behind support for emissions-cutting technologies. There are hopes that negotiations on the global goal on adaptation and the global stocktake could both provide venues in which to remedy this.

Food systems

Historically not garnering as much attention at COPs as fossil fuels, the world’s food systems – which account for a third of all human-caused emissions – are on the menu in Dubai. COP28 is the first to designate an entire thematic day for food and agriculture, taking place next weekend.

During the World Climate Action Summit on Friday, UAE environment and climate change minister Mariam Almheiri announced the Emirates Declaration on Sustainable Agriculture, Resilient Food Systems and Climate Action. Some 134 countries signed the agreement at the time of the announcement. The declaration included a recognition of the impacts that the agricultural sector is already experiencing due to climate change and an intention to integrate food systems into national climate plans (called “nationally determined contributions” or NDCs) and other national strategies before COP30 in Brazil.

Most of the new announcements on food systems at COP28 will occur through pledges, rather than negotiated outcomes. Expect to see new funding and new promises from both governments and non-state actors over the next week and a half.

Watch, read, listen

COP OVERVIEW: The Guardian has released a podcast on “everything you need to know” about COP28.

EXTRA READING: Hardy COP watchers at the Third World Network have released an update on what to expect at the Dubai talks.

EXTRA EXTRA READING: The daily summaries from observers at the Earth Negotiations Bulletin are a must-read for COP attendees. Pay attention to the “in the corridors” section for a sense of how behind-the-scenes negotiations are progressing.

Coming up at COP28

1-2 December: World Climate Action Summit and high-level segment for heads of government
2 December: High-level party event: nation-states join forces to pursue a fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty negotiating mandate
2 December: Leaders’ event: protecting nature for climate, lives, and livelihoods
3 December: 2023 high-level ministerial dialogue on the new collective quantified goal on climate finance, online
5 December: Eliminating methane emissions by 2030

Pick of the jobs

University of Oxford, postdoctoral research fellow in environmental economics | Salary: £45,585-£54,395. Location: Oxford, UK
Proof, investigative climate reporter | Salary: $2,000 a week. Location: Remote (EST time zone)
Covering Climate Now, associate audience editor | Salary: $65,000-$72,000. Location: Remote

DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org

The post COP28 DeBriefed 1 December 2023: Countries strike loss and damage deal; Oil influence; Key issues to watch appeared first on Carbon Brief.

COP28 DeBriefed 1 December 2023: Countries strike loss and damage deal; Oil influence; Key issues to watch

Climate Change

On the Historic Route From Selma to Montgomery, an AI Cloud Looms

Published

11 hours ago

June 10, 2026

Alice Rush

In this rural Alabama community, some residents can’t flush their toilets. Developers want to build a state-of-the-art data center next door.

By Lee Hedgepeth

HAYNEVILLE, Ala.—When Alabamians marched from Selma to Montgomery in 1965 to demand voting rights for African Americans, Highway 80 became their path toward freedom.

On the Historic Route From Selma to Montgomery, an AI Cloud Looms

Climate Change

Guest post: How a record-high ‘energy imbalance’ is driving global warming

Published

14 hours ago

June 10, 2026

Alice Rush

The planet is heating up more quickly than ever before.

For decades, greenhouse gas emissions caused by human activity have been building up in the atmosphere and trapping ever-higher levels of heat.

The resulting asymmetry between incoming solar energy and energy radiated back out into space – known as “Earth’s energy imbalance” – provides a direct measure of the extent to which humans are disrupting the Earth’s climate system.

This imbalance is growing and in 2025 its 10-year average reached a record high, indicating that global temperatures could increase at even higher rates in the future.

This is among the headline findings of the latest “indicators of global climate change” (IGCC) report, published in the journal Earth System Science Data, which tracks changes in the climate system on an annual basis.

The report, now in its fourth iteration, has been produced by dozens of scientists from around the world.

Its findings are designed to fill the gap between Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) science reports, which are published every 5-7 years.

In this article, we unpack the IGCC report, which explores how human activity is driving a growing energy imbalance and why monitoring systems to track global climate are so crucial.

(For more on previous IGCC reports, see Carbon Brief’s coverage in 2023, 2024 and 2025.)

Greenhouse gas emissions remain at an all-time high

Global greenhouse gas emissions are continuing to increase, mostly as a result of the use of fossil fuels. However, deforestation, agriculture and industrial processes also play an important role.

Glossary

CO₂ equivalent: Greenhouse gases can be expressed in terms of carbon dioxide equivalent, or CO2e. For a given amount, different greenhouse gases trap different amounts of heat in the atmosphere, a quantity known as… Read More

Over the most recent decade (2015-24), emissions stood at the equivalent of 54.6bn tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (GtCO2e) per year. In 2024, the most recent year for which we have complete data, emissions reached 56.8GtCO2e.

As the chart below shows, these emissions have pushed up atmospheric levels of CO2, methane and nitrous oxide. In 2025, concentrations of these gases reached 425.6 parts per million (ppm), 1936.3 parts per billion (ppb) and 339.4ppb, respectively.

This represents a rise of 3.8%, 3.8% and 2.2%, respectively, since the 2019 levels reported in the IPCC’s sixth assessment report (AR6).

Atmospheric concentrations of CO2 (yellow), methane (blue) and nitrous oxide (green) over 2000-25. The grey-shaded region represents continuing changes since AR6. Note the different vertical scales for each gas. Credit: Forster et al. (2026)

At the same time, declines in emissions of aerosols such as sulphur dioxide, partly as a result of efforts to tackle air pollution, are increasing the Earth’s energy imbalance. This is because aerosols have a cooling effect on the Earth’s climate, counteracting warming from CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions.

(Tackling sulphur dioxide, alongside other particulate emissions, remains critical because the immediate health and environmental damage they cause far outweighs their short-term cooling effect on the climate.)

The Earth’s energy imbalance is rising rapidly

The Earth’s energy imbalance has long been recognised as a key indicator of how the climate is being affected by human activities.

However, it is only in the last few decades that scientists have been able to record temperature changes deep enough in the ocean to accurately quantify it.

Earth’s energy imbalance measures how quickly excess heat is accumulating in every part of the Earth system, primarily in the ocean, but also in land, ice and atmosphere.

Through this accumulation of heat, the energy imbalance influences the rate of sea level rise and ice melt across the world, as well as increasing the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, such as storms, floods and droughts.

Without human influence, the Earth’s energy imbalance would be close to zero.

But, as greenhouse gas emissions have built up in the atmosphere, the imbalance has been growing since the 1970s. Recent increases to Earth’s energy imbalance have outpaced those projections made by climate models — indicating the planet could see more warming than expected in the future.

As the right-hand chart below shows, the imbalance is now at a record high, having more than doubled over the past two decades.

It has increased by around 40% since 2019, from an average 0.79 watts per square metre (Wm2) over 2006-18, according to IPCC AR6, to 1.12Wm2 over 2013-25.

The left-hand chart shows how heat is accumulating in the ocean (blues), ice (grey), land (orange) and atmosphere (purple).

Left: Observed changes in the Earth heat inventory for the period 1971-2020. Right: Estimates of the Earth energy imbalance for successive overlapping 20-year periods and the most recent decade (right). Shaded regions indicate the very likely range (90-100 % probability), while the stars show the CERES (NASA Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System) estimates for comparison. Credit: Forster et al. (2026)

Global temperature rise

The excess heat building up in the climate system from the energy imbalance is pushing up global temperatures at a record rate of 0.27C per decade.

We estimate that human-induced warming – the amount of observed global surface

temperature increase attributable to both the direct and indirect effects of human activities – reached 1.37C in 2025. This has risen from 1.0C in 2017, as reported in IPCC AR6.

While natural variability in the climate system – such as El Niño or La Niña events – can also influence temperatures year-to-year, the upward temperature trend we are seeing is being driven by the persistent imbalance in energy.

We now expect global temperatures to exceed the Paris Agreement limit of 1.5C above pre-industrial levels around the year 2030.

This is significant because 1.5C has been identified as the critical dividing line between manageable climate risks and catastrophic, potentially irreversible damage to global ecosystems and human societies.

Heat accumulating throughout the Earth system

While heat is accumulating throughout the Earth system, it is not being distributed evenly around the globe.

Since the 1970s, around 90% of this heat has been taken up by the ocean, affecting marine ecosystems, ocean circulation patterns, sea level rise and climate extremes.

For example, the number of marine heatwave days – periods of unusually high sea surface temperatures – has more than tripled globally since the early 1990s. The year 2025 alone saw 65 days of marine heatwaves – meaning they occurred, on average, more than one day a week.

Meanwhile, the cryosphere – the portion of the Earth made up of frozen water, including glaciers, ice sheets and permafrost – is experiencing widespread ice loss and thawing in response to the growing energy imbalance. This affects ecosystems, sea level rise and infrastructure in polar and high-latitude regions.

Rapid warming has also resulted in record extreme temperatures over land, with average maximum temperatures for any single day over 2016-25 around 1.92C above pre-industrial levels). This is an increase of almost half a degree compared to the previous decade (2006-15).

Sea level rise and the energy imbalance

Sea level rise provides one of the clearest long-term signals of a changing planet.

It is closely linked to Earth’s energy imbalance. As heat accumulates in the ocean, water expands, raising sea levels. Meanwhile, a warming land and atmosphere means addition of water to the oceans through melting of glaciers and ice sheets, also adding to sea level rise.

Over the long-term, sea levels have been rising, on average, at a rate of around 1.8mm per year since 1901, totalling a record 23cm in 2025. This is increasing the risk of coastal flooding, erosion and habitat loss in many low-lying areas around the world.

This rise can be seen in the left-hand chart below, which shows observed global sea level changes from tide gauges (grey and blue dashed lines) and satellites (red dashed lines) since 1901. The solid lines indicate the average across multiple datasets.

Sea level rise is accelerating consistent with the observed increase in Earth’s energy imbalance. Over 2006-25, sea levels have risen at a rate of 3.67mm per year – more than double the rate of 1.69mm per year seen over 1976-95.

This increasing rate is shown in the right-hand figure below, which shows four successive overlapping 20-year periods and the most-recent decade.

(Last year’s transition from El Niño to weak La Niña conditions affected global rainfall patterns and led to a small and temporary fall in global average sea level in 2025. This explains the slight decrease in rate of sea level rise for the most recent decade, which is affected more than the 20-year period 2006-25.)

Left: Global average sea level rise over 1901-2025, relative to a 1995-2014 baseline. Individual timeseries are shown with dashed lines, while the black solid line shows the average (from tide gauges and satellites) used in AR6 and the solid red line shows the 1993-2025 average from satellites. Right: Global mean sea-level rates (in mm per year) for four successive overlapping 20-year periods and the most-recent decade. The shading indicates the very likely range. Credit: Forster et al. (2026)

The bigger picture

Despite greenhouse gas emissions not increasing as rapidly as in the 2000s, this year’s IGCC findings continue to show how far and how fast the climate is changing due to human activity.

A significant increase in decarbonisation efforts in the second half of this decade is required to slow down the rate of human-caused warming and limit the escalation of climate risks and impacts.

These findings, like many others produced by scientists across the globe, rely on international expertise, partnership and the maintenance and availability of global climate datasets and the global observing programmes that underpin them.

This year’s edition of IGCC used more than 40 global datasets produced by research teams around the world, including the NASA satellite record of the Earth’s energy imbalance and the ARGO deep ocean float network.

However, a number of long-term monitoring programmes could be threatened by funding decisions made by governments around the world, most notably the Trump administration in the US.

Local meteorological data and weather balloon measurement programmes in many countries have declined in recent years, especially in Africa, the west Pacific and South America. This reduces scientists’ ability to monitor and understand key indicators of climate change.

This is not just an issue for climate science. Many of these observations are key to weather forecasts and systems that provide early warning for extreme weather. For example, media reports have suggested that recent reductions in weather balloon measurements in Alaska led to a lack of warnings for a recent winter storm.

The continuity and integrity of the climate observations that scientists use to understand how the climate is changing depends on effective and sustained coordination by international organisations, such as the Global Climate Observing System, the World Meteorological Organization and World Climate Research Programme.

Without this data and its coordination, future assessments will be much more difficult at a time when urgent climate action is needed.