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Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.

This week

Energy outlook

DEMAND SURGING: The International Energy Agency (IEA) published its annual World Energy Outlook report – a “comprehensive” summary of global energy trends – the New York Times reported. The outlet said, over the next decade, the world will add the equivalent of Japan’s annual electricity demand each year, driven by demand for new factories, electric vehicles, air-conditioners and data centres. (Axios said the IEA included a “reality check” about data centre demand, which would only make up a “small share” of growth by 2030.)

AGE OF ELECTRICITY: Reuters reported that the “world is on the brink of a new age of electricity”, with global fossil fuel demand set to peak by the end of the decade. The newswire added that “surplus oil and gas supplies could drive investment into green energy”. The Wall Street Journal said clean energy would grow faster than global energy demand, becoming the largest source of power in the mid-2030s, according to the IEA. Carbon Brief has just published an in-depth analysis of the report’s findings. (See Captured below.)

COP16 kickoff

BIODIVERSITY TALKS: The COP16 biodiversity summit begins in Cali, Colombia, on Monday. It will be the first set of UN biodiversity negotiations since the world’s nations agreed a landmark deal in 2022 to “halt and reverse” nature loss by the end of the decade.

MISSED PLEDGES: Joint analysis published on Tuesday by Carbon Brief and the Guardian showed that more than 85% of countries are set to miss the UN’s deadline to submit new nature pledges, known as national biodiversity strategies and action plans (NBSAPs).

WHAT TO WATCH: Carbon Brief’s team of journalists on the ground in Cali will host a webinar on Tuesday at 3pm UK time to discuss the key issues facing negotiators and answering questions. (Sign up for free.) Through the fortnight of the talks, they will also be scrutinising each new draft negotiating text as it lands, explaining areas of disagreement and updating Carbon Brief’s interactive text tracker.

After the storm

DEVASTATING DAMAGES: Hurricanes Helene and Milton are “likely” to each rack up costs of more than $50bn, the Associated Press reported. According to the newswire, “government and private experts” say the hurricanes could join the “infamous ranks” of Katrina, Sandy and Harvey – which are among the eight US storms to have ever caused damages of more than $50bn.

PAYOUTS: The US Small Business Administration has exhausted funds for its disaster loan program following increased demand from Hurricane Helene, Reuters warned. Officials said the program needs about $1.6bn amid heightened demand following Hurricane Helene, according to the Hill. The Financial Times estimated that Milton alone will lead to about $36bn of insurance payouts for the private sector.

Around the world

  • DIRTY ENERGY: Burning household rubbish to make electricity is now the “dirtiest way the UK generates power”, BBC News reported.
  • COP BID: Australia has launched a bid to host the COP31 climate summit in 2026 in Adelaide, according to the Guardian.
  • FINANCE FAIL: The EU unveiled its negotiating stance for the COP29 climate talks next month, but did not address how it will boost funding for developing countries, according to Bloomberg.
  • CURBING COAL: The US Supreme Court allowed the Environmental Protection Agency to move ahead with its plans to limit carbon emissions by power plants, despite a pending challenge from 27 mainly-Republican states, the New York Times reported.
  • WARNING MESSAGE: Activist group Friends of the Earth warned the UK government to drop its support for a Mozambique gas project “embroiled in allegations of abduction, murder and rape”, said Politico.
  • WIND POWER: A Chinese company developed the world’s “most powerful” floating offshore wind turbine with a capacity of 20 megawatts, state news agency Xinhua said.

60%

Global increase in forest fire carbon emissions over 2001-23, according to a new paper in Science.

Latest climate research

  • Recent floods that killed at least 244 people in Nepal were driven by rainfall made “about 10% more intense” by human-caused climate change, according to a rapid attribution study.
  • Drought and aridity are already having a “significant impact” on internal migration – especially in arid and “hyper-arid” regions of southern Europe, South Asia, Africa and the Middle East and South America – new research found.
  • Many people in the US are experiencing “psychological distress” from climate change, but those who do are more involved in collective climate action, a new study said.

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

Captured

Solar generation is set to quadruple by 2030, sending coal power tumbling

Electricity generation from solar is set to quadruple by 2030, sending coal power tumbling and becoming the world’s largest source of electricity by 2033, according to Carbon Brief analysis of the International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook. The report finds that global CO2 emissions are set to peak “imminently”, as the “age of electricity” sends fossil fuels into decline. See Carbon Brief’s in-depth coverage of the report.

Spotlight

Is global warming ‘accelerating’?

A recent “surge” in global warming is not statistically “detectable”, according to a study published this week. But does this mean it is not happening? Carbon Brief speaks to the lead author of the study and explores the debate on a warming acceleration.

Global temperatures are soaring. Last year was the hottest year on record, with global surface temperatures reaching 1.34-1.54C above pre-industrial levels. But 2024 is already setting blistering new records and is expected to knock 2023 off the top spot.

Against this backdrop of ever-worsening heat, a new study in Communications Earth and Environment used statistical methods to see whether an acceleration in global warming could be formally detected.

The authors find a “changepoint” in the rate of warming around the year 1970, but find no “statistically detectable” acceleration since then.

Dr Claudie Beaulieu is the paper’s lead author and an associate professor in the Ocean Sciences Department at UC Santa Cruz. She told Carbon Brief: “If an acceleration in global warming is occurring, the size of that acceleration is either too small or too recent to robustly detect it in globally-averaged surface temperature records.”

However, some scientists questioned the methods used in the study. Prof Richard Allan, a professor of climate science at the University of Reading, said the surface warming data used in this study is “influenced by natural variation”. He argued that “when all lines of evidence are scrutinised” – such as satellite data and ocean measurements – “it is apparent that climate change is accelerating rather than continuing steadily”.

Carbon Brief’s climate science contributor, Dr Zeke Hausfather, published a factcheck earlier this year on the acceleration in global warming. Assessing observations and climate model output, he concluded that “that there is increasing evidence of an acceleration in the rate of warming over the past 15 years”.

Beaulieu told Carbon Brief that present-day discussion about an acceleration in warming is similar to the debate over a warming “hiatus” about a decade ago. She continued:

“Back then, also using statistical methods, we showed that a ‘hiatus’ in warming was not detectable. With hindsight of more years of observations it is now obvious warming had just continued leading to the record heat of 2023. We need to keep monitoring.”

Dr John Kennedy is the co-chair of the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) expert team on climate monitoring and assessment and scientific coordinator for the annual WMO State of the Global Climate reports.

He warned that this statistical method can mean waiting many years for warming – or a lack of warming – to be detectable. In a blog post earlier this year, Kennedy wrote:

“One thing that became clear during the ‘hiatus’ is that this kind of analysis is the kind of thing you do when you’re set (for whatever reason) on being the last person to know there is a hiatus.”

He added: “There are good physical reasons to expect an increase in the underlying warming.”

Beaulieu does not refute that warming might be accelerating. She said that “the point of the paper is that it will take additional years of observations to detect a sustained acceleration”.

Watch, read, listen

CLIMATE LINGO: Author and climate change activist Genevieve Guenther joined the Drilled podcast to discuss her new book, The Language of Climate Politics, which digs into rhetorical devices that she says are being used to slow or block climate action.

FAILING SINKS: “Is nature’s carbon sink failing?” asked a feature in the Guardian. The article warned that forest, plants and soil absorbed almost no carbon in 2023, and asked whether this “could rapidly accelerate global heating”.

FARM SUBMERGED: A short video by BBC News follows Nigerian farmers discussing the impacts of climate change on their livelihoods and highlights possible solutions.

Coming up

Pick of the jobs

DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org.
This is an online version of Carbon Brief’s weekly DeBriefed email newsletter. Subscribe for free here.

The post DeBriefed 18 October 2024: IEA projects solar surge; US counts cost of hurricanes; Is global warming ‘accelerating’? appeared first on Carbon Brief.

DeBriefed 18 October 2024: IEA projects solar surge; US counts cost of hurricanes; Is global warming ‘accelerating’?

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Corpus Christi Cuts Timeline to Disaster as Abbott Issues Emergency Orders

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March 19, 2026

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The governor’s office said the city’s two main reservoirs could dry up by May, much sooner than previous timelines. But authorities still offer no plan for curtailment of water use.

By Dylan Baddour

City officials in Corpus Christi on Tuesday released modeling that showed emergency cuts to water demand could be required as soon as May as reservoir levels continue to decline.

Corpus Christi Cuts Timeline to Disaster as Abbott Issues Emergency Orders

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Climate Change

Middle East war is another wake-up call for fossil fuel-reliant food systems

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9 hours ago

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March 19, 2026

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Lena Luig is the head of the International Agricultural Policy Division at the Heinrich Böll Foundation, a member of the Global Alliance for the Future of Food. Anna Lappé is the Executive Director of the Global Alliance for the Future of Food.

As toxic clouds loom over Tehran and Beirut from the US and Israel’s bombardment of oil depots and civilian infrastructure in the region’s ongoing war, the world is once again witnessing the not-so-subtle connections between conflict, hunger, food insecurity and the vulnerability of global food systems dependent on fossil fuels, dominated by a few powerful countries and corporations.

The conflict in Iran is having a huge impact on the world’s fertilizer supply. The Strait of Hormuz is a critical trade route in the region for nearly half of the global supply of urea, the main synthetic fertilizer derived from natural gas through the conversion of ammonia.

With the Strait impacted by Iran’s blockades, prices of urea have shot up by 35% since the war started, just as planting season starts in many parts of the world, putting millions of farmers and consumers at risk of increasing production costs and food price spikes, resulting in food insecurity, particularly for low-income households. The World Food Programme has projected that an extra 45 million people would be pushed ​into acute hunger because of rises in food, oil and shipping costs, if the war continues until June.

Pesticides and synthetic fertilizer leave system fragile

On the face of it, this looks like a supply chain issue, but at the core of this crisis lies a truth about many of our food systems around the world: the instability and injustice in the very design of systems so reliant on these fossil fuel inputs for our food.

At the Global Alliance, a strategic alliance of philanthropic foundations working to transform food systems, we have been documenting the fossil fuel-food nexus, raising alarm about the fragility of a system propped up by fossil fuels, with 15% of annual fossil fuel use going into food systems, in part because of high-cost, fossil fuel-based inputs like pesticides and synthetic fertilizer. The Heinrich Böll Foundation has also been flagging this threat consistently, most recently in the Pesticide Atlas and Soil Atlas compendia. 

We’ve seen this before: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 sparked global disruptions in fertilizer supply and food price volatility. As the conflict worsened, fertilizer prices spiked – as much from input companies capitalizing on the crisis for speculation as from real cost increases from production and transport – triggering a food price crisis around the world.

    Since then, fertilizer industry profit margins have continued to soar. In 2022, the largest nine fertilizer producers increased their profit margins by more than 35% compared to the year before—when fertilizer prices were already high. As Lena Bassermann and Dr. Gideon Tups underscore in the Heinrich Böll Foundation’s Soil Atlas, the global dependencies of nitrogen fertilizer impacted economies around the world, especially state budgets in already indebted and import-dependent economies, as well as farmers across Africa.

    Learning lessons from the war in Ukraine, many countries invested heavily in renewable energy and/or increased domestic oil production as a way to decrease dependency on foreign fossil fuels. But few took the same approach to reimagining domestic food systems and their food sovereignty.

    Agroecology as an alternative

    There is another way. Governments can adopt policy frameworks to encourage reductions in synthetic fertilizer and pesticide use, especially in regions that currently massively overuse nitrogen fertilizer. At the African Union fertilizer and Soil Health Summit in 2024, African leaders at least agreed that organic fertilizers should be subsidized as well, not only mineral fertilizers, but we can go farther in actively promoting agricultural pathways that reduce fossil fuel dependency. 

    In 2024, the Global Alliance organized dozens of philanthropies to call for a tenfold increase in investments to help farmers transition from fossil fuel dependency towards agroecological approaches that prioritize livelihoods, health, climate, and biodiversity.

    In our research, we detail the huge opportunity to repurpose harmful subsidies currently supporting inputs like synthetic fertilizer and pesticides towards locally-sourced bio-inputs and biofertilizer production. We know this works: There are powerful stories of hope and change from those who have made this transition, despite only receiving a fraction of the financing that industrial agriculture receives, with evidence of benefits from stable incomes and livelihoods to better health and climate outcomes.

    New summit in Colombia seeks to revive stalled UN talks on fossil fuel transition

    Inspiring examples abound: G-BIACK in Kenya is training farmers how to produce their own high-quality compost; start-ups like the Evola Company in Cambodia are producing both nutrient-rich organic fertilizer and protein-rich animal feed with black soldier fly farming; Sabon Sake in Ghana is enriching sugarcane bagasse – usually organic waste – with microbial agents and earthworms to turn it into a rich vermicompost.

    These efforts, grounded in ecosystems and tapping nature for soil fertility and to manage pest pressures, are just some of the countless examples around the world, tapping the skill and knowledge of millions of farmers. On a national and global policy level, the Agroecology Coalition, with 480+ members, including governments, civil society organizations, academic institutions, and philanthropic foundations, is supporting a transition toward agroecology, working with natural systems to produce abundant food, boost biodiversity, and foster community well-being.

    Fertilizer industry spins “clean” products

    We must also inoculate ourselves from the fertilizer industry’s public relations spin, which includes promoting the promise that their products can be produced without heavy reliance on fossil fuels. Despite experts debunking the viability of what the industry has dubbed “green hydrogen” or “green or clean ammonia”, the sector still promotes this narrative, arguing that these are produced with resource-intensive renewable energy or Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), a costly and unreliable technology for reducing emissions.

    As we mourn this conflict’s senseless destruction and death, including hundreds of children, we also recognize that peace cannot mean a return to business-as-usual. We need to upend the systems that allow the richest and most powerful to have dominion over so much.

    This includes fighting for a food system that is based on genuine sovereignty and justice, free from dependency on fossil fuels, one that honors natural systems and puts power into the hands of communities and food producers themselves.

    The post Middle East war is another wake-up call for fossil fuel-reliant food systems appeared first on Climate Home News.

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    Climate Change

    Are There Climate Fingerprints in Tornado Activity?

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    March 19, 2026

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    Parts of the Southern and Northeastern U.S. faced tornado threats this week. Scientists are trying to parse out the climate links in changing tornado activity.

    By Kiley Price

    It’s been a weird few weeks for weather across the United States.

    Are There Climate Fingerprints in Tornado Activity?

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