The Clock Is Slowing: How Climate Change Is Lengthening the Day - Lethal Heating Editor BDA

New research traces the lengthening of Earth's day
to unprecedented levels not seen in 3.6 million years,
adding a planetary dimension to the climate crisis.

Key Points

Climate change is lengthening Earth's day at a rate of 1.33 milliseconds per century, driven by melting polar ice redistributing mass toward the equator.1 This rate of change is unprecedented in 3.6 million years of Earth's climate history, exceeding any naturally occurring fluctuation in the Quaternary period.2 Researchers reconstructed ancient day-length variations using the chemical signatures locked in benthic foraminifera fossils and a physics-informed deep learning algorithm.3 The physics mirrors a figure skater slowing their spin by extending their arms, as mass moves away from Earth's polar axis toward the equatorial bulge.4 Even millisecond shifts in Earth's rotation can disrupt GPS systems, satellite navigation and global financial networks that depend on atomic-clock precision.5 If emissions remain high, scientists warn that climate change could overtake the Moon's gravity as the dominant force shaping Earth's rotation by century's end.6

For as long as civilisations have measured time, the 24-hour day has seemed immutable. It is not. 

A study published in March 2026 in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth finds that Earth's days are growing longer at a rate unmatched in 3.6 million years, and the primary driver is human-caused climate change.¹

The finding connects two phenomena that seem, at first, to belong to entirely different realms: the melting of polar ice sheets and the rotation of the planet itself. 

Yet researchers at the University of Vienna and ETH Zurich have shown they are inseparable. 

As greenhouse gas emissions accelerate the melting of glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica, the resulting meltwater flows into the oceans and spreads toward the equator, making Earth slightly wider at its middle. That subtle redistribution of mass is enough to slow the planet's spin.²

A Millisecond That Matters

The change is not perceptible to a person going about their day. Between 2000 and 2020, climate-related factors lengthened each day by the equivalent of 1.33 milliseconds per century.¹ 

A millisecond is one-thousandth of a second. But in the world of precision timekeeping, even that fraction carries consequences.

Coordinated Universal Time, or UTC, is set by atomic clocks and must be periodically adjusted to match Earth's actual spin. These adjustments, called leap seconds, are added or subtracted to keep clocks aligned with the planet's rotation. The global financial system, GPS navigation, power grids and internet infrastructure all depend on this synchronisation.⁵

Duncan Agnew, a geophysicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego, documented in Nature in 2024 that ice melt had pushed back the need for a timekeeping adjustment by roughly three years, from 2026 to around 2029.⁸ 

Many computer systems can add a leap second, but far fewer are programmed to subtract one. That asymmetry, Agnew noted, represents a genuine technical risk.

The Physics of the Spin

The mechanism at work is a fundamental principle of physics: the conservation of angular momentum. Any spinning body resists changes to its rotation. When its mass is concentrated close to the axis of spin, it rotates quickly. When that mass spreads outward, the rotation slows.

Scientists at ETH Zurich describe it in terms every sports fan can visualise. A figure skater executing a pirouette pulls her arms tightly to her body to spin faster. When she extends them outward, her rotation slows immediately.⁴ 

Earth works the same way. Ice stored at the poles is positioned close to the planet's rotational axis. When it melts and flows into the oceans, that mass migrates toward the equator. Earth's waistline widens, and the spin decelerates.

Since 1993, global sea levels have risen by roughly 10 centimetres on average.⁴ 

Scientists project a rise of at least 60 centimetres by the end of this century under high-emissions scenarios. Each increment of sea level rise adds to the equatorial bulge. Each addition slows the rotation a fraction more.

Reading the Deep Past

To understand whether today's changes are unusual, the research team needed to compare them against millions of years of history. That required a novel form of detective work rooted in ocean sediment.

The scientists turned to benthic foraminifera, microscopic single-celled organisms that live on the seafloor and build calcium carbonate shells. When they die, those shells accumulate in ocean sediment, preserving a chemical record of the water conditions at the time of their formation.¹ 

By analysing the oxygen isotope ratios locked inside fossil foraminifera shells, researchers can infer ancient sea levels, and from those sea levels, calculate how Earth's rotation must have changed.

"From the chemical composition of the foraminifera fossils, we can infer sea-level fluctuations and then mathematically derive the corresponding changes in day length," said Mostafa Kiani Shahvandi, the study's first author and a climate scientist at the University of Vienna.¹

Paleoclimate data of this kind carries substantial uncertainty. Fossil records are incomplete, and the signals preserved in ancient shells can be distorted by diagenesis, the chemical alteration of sediment over geological time. To account for these complexities, the team applied a probabilistic deep learning algorithm, a physics-informed diffusion model designed to extract meaningful patterns from noisy data.² 

The model was constrained by the known physical laws governing sea-level change, lending it greater credibility than a purely statistical approach.

Unprecedented in 3.6 Million Years

The results were stark. During the Quaternary period, spanning roughly the past 2.6 million years, natural ice ages caused Earth's ice sheets to advance and retreat in cycles driven by orbital variations in the planet's path around the Sun. These cycles produced measurable fluctuations in day length.² They were, however, comparatively gradual.

The current rate of 1.33 milliseconds of additional day length per century stands outside that entire range of natural variation. Going back further, to the Late Pliocene some 3.6 million years ago, the researchers found no comparable period of change.² 

The closest historical parallel involved deglaciation events after major ice ages, but even those transitions, driven entirely by natural orbital forcing, did not produce a rate of rotational change equal to what is occurring today.

"The current rapid rise in day length can thus be attributed primarily to human influences," said Benedikt Soja, Professor of Space Geodesy at ETH Zurich and a co-author of the study.⁶

A Planetary System Responding to Human Activity

Earth's rotation is not governed by a single force. The Moon's gravitational pull exerts tidal friction on the oceans, and that friction has been the dominant driver of rotational slowing over geological timescales. 

Simultaneously, the slow rebound of Earth's crust following the last Ice Age, a process called glacial isostatic adjustment, shifts mass back toward the poles and tends to speed the planet's rotation. Both processes are predictable and relatively constant.⁴

A fourth factor, fluid motion within Earth's molten outer core, can temporarily accelerate or decelerate the spin over periods of 10 to 20 years. Right now, core dynamics are causing a slight countervailing speed-up that partially offsets the climate-driven slowing.⁶ 

The interplay between these forces demonstrates how tightly Earth's internal processes and its surface climate are linked.

NASA-funded research, published in separate papers in 2024 in Nature Geoscience and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that climate-related mass redistribution, including groundwater depletion and glacial melt, accounts for roughly 90 per cent of the periodic oscillations in Earth's polar motion since 1900.⁵ 

The same research documented that the lengthening of the day has been accelerating at a faster pace since 2000 than at any point in the preceding century.

The Coming Century

The implications extend well beyond timekeeping. If high-emissions trajectories continue, Soja's team projects that the climate-driven influence on Earth's rotation could surpass the Moon's gravitational effect before the end of the 21st century.⁶ 

That would mark a profound inversion: for billions of years, the Moon set the pace. Human industry would have overtaken it.

Research published in 2024 found that melting ice had already shifted Earth's rotational axis by roughly 10 metres since 1900, a phenomenon called polar motion.⁵ 

That shift in turn generates small perturbations in Earth's interior, feeding back into the dynamics of the molten core in ways scientists are only beginning to understand.

For satellite systems, the changes are not trivial. GPS and space navigation rely on precise models of Earth's rotation to calculate the position of objects on the ground and in orbit. Small but persistent errors in those models, compounded over time, can translate into navigational inaccuracies. As the rate of rotational change itself changes, those models must be continuously revised.⁵

Caveats and Open Questions

The researchers are transparent about the limitations of their methodology. Deriving day-length changes from foraminifera fossils requires a chain of inferences: from isotope ratios to sea levels, from sea levels to ice volumes, and from ice volumes to rotation rates. Each step carries uncertainty, and the deep-learning model, however sophisticated, is only as good as the data it processes.¹

Christian Bizouard, an astrogeophysicist at the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service in France, noted that Earth's core activity remains nearly impossible to predict. Any projection about future rotational change depends on assumptions about core dynamics that current science cannot fully resolve.⁷

Other unresolved questions include the long-term effect of groundwater depletion on rotational dynamics, the potential role of deep-ocean circulation changes, and whether atmospheric mass redistribution caused by shifting weather patterns contributes meaningfully at multi-decadal scales. 

Future research using higher-resolution sediment cores and improved geodynamic models may refine these findings, or challenge some of their assumptions.

Beyond Temperature: Rethinking What Climate Change Does

Public understanding of climate change tends to focus on temperature records, sea-level projections and extreme weather events. This research points to a broader and more unsettling truth: human activity is now altering the physics of the planet itself.

Geophysicist Duncan Agnew put it plainly in comments following his 2024 Nature paper. Humanity, he said, had "done something that affects, measurably, the rotation rate of the entire Earth."⁸ 

That statement is not hyperbole. It is a finding published in peer-reviewed journals, supported by satellite geodesy, fossil chemistry and deep-learning modelling applied to 3.6 million years of data.

The interconnections are striking. Carbon emissions warm the atmosphere. A warmer atmosphere melts ice. Meltwater redistributes mass across the globe. That redistribution slows a planet four and a half billion years old. Each step in that chain is measurable. Together, they describe an influence that no previous civilisation has exerted.

Conclusion: Time, Physics and the Human Footprint

There is a particular quality to the claim that humans have altered Earth's rotation. It moves the climate crisis out of the domain of weather and economics and into the domain of planetary mechanics. The day itself, which for 3.6 million years changed only when natural forces of ice ages and orbital cycles compelled it, is now changing because of us.

That change remains invisible without instruments. Judah Levine, a physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, has noted that everyday life is not sensitive at the millisecond level.⁵ 

The person catching the 7 am train will not notice. But the GPS receiver calculating where that train sits on the track will, eventually, need to account for a slightly longer day than the one its model assumed.

The deeper significance is not logistical. It is conceptual. When the Quaternary's great ice ages waxed and waned in response to orbital shifts, they did so over tens of thousands of years. The current rate of rotational change, driven over decades by the burning of fossil fuels, has already exceeded what those vast natural cycles produced. If emissions remain high, scientists project that rate will double by 2100.¹

What remains unknown is whether there are thresholds, points at which the cascading feedbacks between ice loss, sea level, polar motion and Earth's interior dynamics produce changes that outpace current projections. The foraminifera in their ocean-floor sediment recorded every ice age for millions of years. They are now recording something that has no precedent in their long archive. 

What that record will show to researchers a century from now depends, in no small part, on choices being made today.

References

1. University of Vienna: Climate change slows Earth's spin, day lengthening unprecedented in 3.6 million years (2026)

2. Phys.org: Climate change is slowing Earth's spin at unprecedented rate compared to past 3.6 million years (2026)

3. Smithsonian Magazine: Melting polar ice sheets are slowing Earth's rotation (2024)

4. Newsweek: Earth's rotation is changing at a speed not seen in 3.6 million years (2026)

5. NBC News: Melting ice is slowing Earth's spin, shifting its axis and influencing its inner core (2024)

6. Euronews: Unprecedented in the past 3.6 million years, how human-made climate change is making days longer (2026)

7. NBC News: Melting polar ice is slowing the Earth's rotation, with possible consequences for timekeeping (2024)

8. Nature: A global timekeeping problem postponed by global warming, Duncan Agnew (2024)

9. EurekAlert: Climate change slows Earth's spin, day lengthening unprecedented in 3.6 million years (2026)

10. Gizmodo: Earth's spin is slowing at a pace not seen in millions of years (2026)

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The Invisible Front: How War Is Burning the Climate - Lethal Heating Editor BDA

Armed conflict releases hundreds of millions of tonnes of greenhouse gases, yet militaries operate almost entirely 
outside global climate accounting

Key Points

Global military activity accounts for an estimated 5.5% of total greenhouse gas emissions, placing it fourth among the world's largest national emitters. 1 Russia's three-year war in Ukraine has generated roughly 230 million tonnes of CO₂ equivalent, more than the combined annual output of Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia. 6 The first 120 days of Israel's campaign in Gaza produced emissions exceeding the annual output of 26 nations, with reconstruction projected to add tens of millions of tonnes more. 9 Military emissions reporting was exempted under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol after US pressure; the 2015 Paris Agreement made reporting voluntary, and most countries still disclose nothing. 12 Post-war reconstruction is one of the largest hidden carbon costs of conflict: rebuilding Syria's damaged housing alone is projected to release around 22 million tonnes of CO₂. 15 Rising defence budgets compete directly with climate finance; global military spending hit a record $2.7 trillion in 2024, while the $100 billion annual climate finance pledge to developing nations remains unmet. 3

The burning began in the dark. 

In February 2022, as Russian armoured columns crossed the Ukrainian border and artillery shells tore open industrial facilities along the Donbas, a different kind of damage was accumulating, invisible but measurable: the carbon footprint of a major land war in the 21st century. 

Within weeks, researchers at a small Dutch-based non-profit, the Initiative on GHG Accounting of War, began logging what no international climate body was required to track. 

Within seven months, they had documented at least 100 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent released into the atmosphere. The equivalent, they noted, of the Netherlands' entire annual output.

That calculation was only the beginning. By the third anniversary of Russia's full-scale invasion in February 2025, total war-related emissions had reached 230 million tonnes of CO₂ equivalent, comparable to the combined yearly output of four Central European nations. ⁶ 

The figure encompasses battlefield fuel use, the burning of forests and agricultural land along the front lines, the destruction of energy infrastructure, and the airspace rerouting that has forced civilian aircraft onto longer, more fuel-intensive paths across a continent. It does not yet include the enormous carbon cost of rebuilding what was destroyed.

Ukraine has become the most closely studied climate casualty of modern warfare. But the dynamics playing out across its scorched plains and shattered cities are not unique. From Gaza to the Sahel, from Myanmar's contested borderlands to the oil fields of Libya, armed conflict is quietly generating greenhouse gas emissions on a scale that existing international frameworks are simply not designed to count. War, it turns out, has a carbon footprint, and it is enormous.

The Scale of the Problem

Researchers at the Conflict and Environment Observatory and Scientists for Global Responsibility published a landmark estimate in 2022: the world's militaries, taken together, account for roughly 5.5% of total global greenhouse gas emissions. ¹ 

If armies and defence industries were a single country, they would rank as the world's fourth-largest emitter, behind only China, the United States, and India, but ahead of Russia. That figure, the researchers noted, covers only peacetime operations and the supply chains that sustain them. The additional emissions generated by active conflict were not included.

Quantifying those conflict emissions is far harder than it sounds. Satellite imagery can detect fires; chemical sensors can identify pollutants; proxy indicators, including fuel consumption records, weapons delivery logs, and damage assessments, can fill some gaps. But the data is fragmentary, access to conflict zones is restricted, and the methodologies for estimating wartime emissions are still being developed. A further complication is that destruction of industrial infrastructure often temporarily reduces civilian emissions, making it easy to misread a country at war as cleaner than it was before. ¹⁶ 

The actual picture, once fires, reconstruction, and military fuel use are included, points firmly in the other direction.

Wartime emissions compare unfavourably with sectors the public knows well. The global aviation industry produces approximately 2.5% of annual CO₂ emissions. The entire military sector, at 5.5%, is roughly double that. Cement production, one of industry's most notorious emitters, accounts for around 8%. Shipping contributes about 2.9%. War, in other words, belongs in the same league as heavy industry, yet it appears in almost no national climate account. ²

Not all forms of warfare generate equal emissions. Mechanised land war, with its fuel-hungry tanks, armoured personnel carriers, and artillery supply chains, is among the most carbon-intensive. Aerial bombing campaigns add enormously to that total: a single modern fighter jet burns through tonnes of fuel per sortie, and the industrial production of precision-guided munitions is itself highly energy-intensive. 

Research presented at a 2025 American Academy of Arts and Sciences roundtable explored whether lighter technologies, such as drones and cyberattacks, might reduce a conflict's carbon footprint over time. The tentative conclusion was that, while individual strikes may emit less, the combination of more frequent use and the eventual need to rebuild what such weapons destroy will likely offset any efficiency gains. ¹⁷

Two Conflicts, One Planet

In Ukraine, war has become the largest single source of the country's carbon emissions. A 2025 assessment by the Initiative on GHG Accounting of War found that 36% of all war-related greenhouse gases came directly from military activity, including fuel burned by tanks, jets, and supply vehicles, plus the steel, concrete, and explosives used to construct and maintain hundreds of kilometres of frontline fortifications. ⁷ 

Another 27% is attributable to reconstruction activity already underway. The rest is distributed across energy infrastructure destruction, civilian aviation rerouting, and the displacement of refugees across Europe.

The fires are among the most alarming findings. In 2024 alone, roughly 965,000 hectares of Ukrainian land burned, more than twice the total area burnt across the entire European Union that same year. Landscape fires along the front lines accounted for 48.7 million tonnes of CO₂, a 113% increase on the preceding two years. ⁸ 

The fires result from a lethal combination: artillery-sparked blazes during dry summer conditions, climate-driven heat extremes, and the practical impossibility of firefighting in active combat zones. Climate change and the war are amplifying each other.

In Gaza, the carbon arithmetic is compressed into a far smaller geography. Researchers from Queen Mary University of London and Lancaster University published a study in early 2024 finding that the first 120 days of fighting generated between 420,000 and 652,000 tonnes of CO₂ equivalent from direct military activity alone, more than the annual emissions of 26 individual countries. ⁹ 

When pre-war construction, such as tunnel infrastructure, and projected post-war reconstruction are factored in, the total rises to more than 61 million tonnes. That number exceeds the combined annual emissions of Sweden and Portugal.

The reconstruction estimate is significant. By January 2024, between 36% and 45% of buildings in Gaza had been destroyed or damaged. Rebuilding 100,000 damaged structures using conventional techniques would generate at least 30 million tonnes of greenhouse gases, equivalent to New Zealand's annual output. ¹⁰ 

Cement and steel, the fundamental materials of urban reconstruction, are two of the most carbon-intensive industries on earth. Every bombed city carries within it a future emission debt.

Beyond Ukraine and Gaza, emissions from conflicts in Myanmar, the Sahel, Yemen, and the Democratic Republic of Congo receive far less scientific attention, not because they are small but because monitoring them is even harder. The DRC, for instance, has lost vast tracts of tropical forest to the pressures of prolonged conflict and displacement, releasing stored carbon on a scale that is only partially captured by satellite systems. 

Researchers who gathered at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2025 warned explicitly that smaller but persistent conflicts were being systematically overlooked in global emissions accounting. ¹⁷

Black Rain and Poisoned Ground

When a fuel depot is struck by a missile, the immediate result is a fireball visible from kilometres away. The longer-term result is more insidious. Large-scale hydrocarbon fires, and the war in Ukraine has produced hundreds of them, generate enormous plumes of black carbon, a mix of soot and chemical particulates that absorbs solar radiation and accelerates atmospheric warming. 

These plumes can travel thousands of kilometres. Research on the 1991 Gulf War oil fires, which consumed roughly 700 Kuwaiti wells over nine months, found that the resulting soot contributed to the accelerated melting of Tibetan glaciers, thousands of kilometres from Kuwait. ¹⁶ 

The fires contributed more than 2% of global fossil fuel CO₂ emissions in that single year.

Urban bombardment creates analogous contamination on a smaller but more geographically concentrated scale. When buildings collapse, they release decades of stored materials: asbestos, heavy metals, PCBs, and fuel residues. In Gaza, a preliminary assessment by the United Nations Environment Programme in June 2024 found that approximately 37 million tonnes of debris had accumulated, contaminating soil and groundwater with toxic substances. ¹¹ 

These contaminants disrupt soil chemistry in ways that reduce long-term land productivity, effectively converting farmland into dead zones for years or decades.

Explosions themselves alter soil structure. The detonation of high explosives compacts soil, fragments its chemistry, and introduces heavy metals, including lead, copper, and zinc from shell casings, into the ground at concentrations that inhibit plant growth and leach into groundwater. 

In Ukraine, ammunition containing heavy metals has contaminated agricultural land across some of the country's most productive farming regions. Ukraine's agriculture sector accounts for around 60% of the country's exports; the long-term damage to that soil represents an economic and ecological loss that extends far beyond the current war. ⁸

Water systems are particularly vulnerable. In Gaza, the destruction of eight wastewater treatment plants, of which six had been damaged or destroyed by May 2024, resulted in an estimated 130,000 cubic metres of raw sewage being discharged daily into the Mediterranean Sea. ¹⁰ 

The groundwater beneath Gaza, already stressed by decades of over-extraction, has been further contaminated by munitions residues and the collapse of sanitation infrastructure. The Mediterranean plume from such discharge carries biological and chemical pollutants into shared regional waters, crossing borders regardless of political agreements.

The Carbon Cost of Destruction

The destruction of cities is a form of carbon release that operates on a vast but largely uncounted scale. Buildings, bridges, pipelines, and power stations represent embodied carbon, the cumulative emissions produced when they were first manufactured and constructed. When they are bombed, that embodied carbon does not disappear; it joins the ongoing atmospheric ledger as debris management and reconstruction demand yet more energy. 

Clearing the rubble from Aleppo and Homs alone, according to estimates by the Conflict and Environment Observatory, would require more than a million truck journeys. ¹⁶ 

Each of those journeys burns diesel. Each load likely contains hazardous materials.

Modern cities, precisely because they concentrate so much energy infrastructure, are acutely vulnerable to this form of cascading damage. The bombing of electricity grids, transformer stations, gas pipelines, and district heating systems does not merely deprive civilians of warmth and light. It forces the substitution of dirtier, less efficient energy sources, including diesel generators, wood burning, and coal-fired backup systems, often for years after the fighting has stopped. 

In eastern Ukraine, chemical factories, oil refineries, and coal processing facilities have been among the most heavily targeted sites. The resulting toxic releases have contaminated the Dnipro river basin and the Black Sea. ²⁰

Damage to dam and water management infrastructure creates the longest-lasting environmental cascades. The destruction of the Kakhovka dam in Ukraine in June 2023 released a torrent of contaminated water across a vast agricultural floodplain, destroyed riparian ecosystems, and deposited an unknown volume of munitions residues and industrial pollutants into the lower Dnipro and the Black Sea. The ecological recovery from an event of that magnitude is measured in decades, not years.

The Long Carbon Tail of Reconstruction

Post-war reconstruction is, in many respects, the most underappreciated chapter of war's climate impact. The Iraq War between 2003 and 2008 was responsible for an estimated 141 million tonnes of CO₂ equivalent, according to a study by Oil Change International. In that same period, only 21 EU member states individually produced more emissions than the war itself generated. ¹⁸ 

Much of that total came not from the fighting but from the logistics, fuel supply chains, and the early phases of reconstruction.

Syria's civil war, which has left roughly 60% of urban infrastructure damaged or destroyed, carries an estimated reconstruction emission debt of 22 million tonnes of CO₂ for housing alone, not counting roads, power stations, schools, or hospitals. ¹⁵ 

In practice, reconstruction in conflict-affected countries has rarely incorporated climate considerations. Iraq and Syria both relied heavily on oil revenues and conventional construction, locking in carbon-intensive infrastructure for another generation. Gas flaring, in which excess petroleum gas is simply burned off rather than captured, intensified in Libya, Syria, and Yemen during and after their respective conflicts, a trend that has continued long after the fighting receded.

Ukraine presents what may be the most consequential reconstruction opportunity yet seen. President Zelensky has spoken of needing at least $5 billion per month for rebuilding. The international community has been debating whether that rebuilding could be structured around clean energy, energy efficiency, and decentralised renewable systems rather than the gas-dependent grid Ukraine relied on before the war. 

Proponents argue the war presents a rare chance to leapfrog fossil fuel infrastructure entirely. ⁷ Sceptics note that the immediate pressure to restore heat, light, and industrial capacity tends to overwhelm long-term planning, and that international reconstruction funds have historically moved far more slowly than the carbon-intensive imperative to rebuild fast.

The Reporting Gap

In 1997, as diplomats in Kyoto negotiated what would become the world's first binding climate treaty, the Pentagon lobbied hard for an exemption. Military emissions, US officials argued, could not be disclosed without jeopardising national security, revealing the locations and readiness of forces to potential adversaries. 

The lobbying worked. The Kyoto Protocol excluded international military operations from national emissions totals and allowed countries to group domestic military emissions with civilian categories, obscuring the true military share. ¹²

The 2015 Paris Agreement technically ended the formal exemption. In practice, it replaced mandatory exclusion with voluntary disclosure, which amounts to much the same thing. Under the Paris framework, countries may report their military emissions but are not required to do so. According to the Military Emissions Gap organisation, which tracks reported data submitted to the UNFCCC, only four countries provide detailed disaggregated military fuel data. ¹³ 

A 2025 report by Scientists for Global Responsibility found that almost all official military emissions figures, even for countries with comparatively strong reporting practices, cover less than 10% of their actual military carbon footprint.

The practical result is that a sector producing an estimated 5.5% of global emissions operates in almost complete statistical darkness. Researchers working on the IPCC's Sixth Assessment Report have noted that the scenarios used to model future climate trajectories do not include a quantitative assessment of military spending's impact on CO₂ emissions. 

A 2025 peer-reviewed study in a leading environmental journal found that events such as the US-led War on Terror and Russia's invasion of Ukraine led to measurable increases in global CO₂ emission intensity, estimating that military spending growth accounted for 27% of the total change in emission intensity between 1995 and 2023. ⁴ 

That finding has not yet been incorporated into mainstream climate modelling.

Several credible proposals exist to address the gap. The Conflict and Environment Observatory has published a framework for mandatory military emissions reporting. Academics from Oxford, Lancaster, Columbia, and Harvard have co-signed calls for the UNFCCC to require explicit military reporting in national inventories. The European Parliament has called for transparent reporting by member states. ¹⁴ 

None of these proposals has so far produced binding change.

Energy Markets and the War Premium

Russia's invasion of Ukraine reshaped European energy policy faster than any Green New Deal had managed. As Russian gas supplies were severed or sanctioned, European governments scrambled for alternatives, reopening coal plants, racing to build liquefied natural gas import terminals, and accelerating renewable deployments at a pace that would have seemed impossible in 2021. 

The short-term reaction was unambiguously dirty: coal consumption rose sharply in Germany and across Eastern Europe in 2022 and 2023. The medium-term trajectory, however, pointed toward a faster clean energy transition, driven by the hard lesson that energy dependence on an aggressor is a strategic liability.

Whether that acceleration will persist is an open question. Geopolitical instability has a well-documented tendency to push governments toward energy security at the expense of climate commitments. Oil Change International estimated that Russian fossil fuel exports earned approximately €58 billion in just the first two months after the invasion, with the EU accounting for €39 billion of that total. ¹⁹ 

The revenue funded the continuation of the war. European dependence on Russian gas was not merely an environmental failure; it was a strategic one, and the two failures turned out to be inseparable.

Military supply chains are themselves highly carbon-intensive. Producing a modern tank requires enormous quantities of steel. Artillery shells consume both steel and explosives. Explosives production is energy-intensive and relies on chemical processes that generate significant nitrous oxide emissions. 

The US military is the world's largest institutional consumer of fossil fuels, and its supply chain emissions, covering the weapons and equipment it procures, roughly double its direct operational footprint. ⁵ 

As NATO members race to rearm, those supply chain emissions are multiplying across the alliance.

The Economic Displacement

Every dollar spent on a missile is a dollar not spent on a solar panel. The relationship is not quite that simple, but it is not entirely metaphorical either. Global military spending hit a record $2.7 trillion in 2024. In the same year, the long-standing pledge by wealthy nations to provide $100 billion annually in climate finance to developing countries remained unfulfilled, despite having been due since 2020. ³ 

The contrast is stark: the same governments that have consistently failed to meet their climate finance commitments spend 50 times as much on their militaries every year.

Rising defence budgets are not merely displacing climate spending at the national level. They are generating additional emissions through the investments themselves. Research by macroeconomist Balázs Markó at Bocconi University found that for every percentage point increase in military spending, total emissions rise by between 0.9% and 2%. ² 

NATO's 2025 commitment to a target of 5% of GDP for each member nation, if met, would double the alliance's combined military expenditure between 2025 and 2030, generating an estimated additional 840 million tonnes of emissions compared with a scenario where spending remained at 2% of GDP.

Climate change itself is increasingly identified as a driver of future conflict, creating the feedback loop that many researchers now consider the most dangerous long-term dynamic in the field. Water scarcity, crop failure, extreme heat, and displacement are already documented contributors to instability in the Sahel, in the Horn of Africa, and across parts of the Middle East. 

If warming continues to generate the conditions that make conflict more likely, and conflict generates the emissions that accelerate warming, the system becomes self-reinforcing in the most dangerous possible way.

Recovery, Accountability, and What Comes Next

How long do ecosystems take to recover from the damage of war? The honest answer is: it depends on the damage, and sometimes the answer is never. Vietnam's forests took decades to partially recover from the aerial spraying of Agent Orange, a herbicide that destroyed an estimated 4.5 million acres of forest and farmland and left soil contamination that persists today. 

Ukraine's nature reserves, more than 12,000 square kilometres of which have become active combat zones, will require at least 15 years to recover from the direct physical damage alone, according to preliminary Ukrainian government estimates. ²⁰ 

The chemical contamination and unexploded ordnance that now covers roughly 30% of the country's territory complicate that timeline substantially.

There are examples where environmental restoration has been incorporated into post-conflict recovery. El Salvador, after its civil war, invested in watershed management and reforestation as part of a broader rural recovery programme. Rwanda made systematic forest restoration central to its post-genocide agricultural strategy. Bosnia invested in mine clearance partly because the contaminated land was economically unusable. These are partial models, not templates. ¹⁶ 

None of them operated at the scale and complexity that Ukraine, Syria, or Gaza now present.

International legal frameworks for environmental accountability in war remain weak. The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court recognises widespread, long-term, and severe damage to the natural environment as a potential war crime, but prosecutions on those grounds are extremely rare. 

A group of researchers at Goldsmiths and the Palestinian Environmental NGOs Network has called for Israel to be investigated under Rome Statute provisions for systematic agricultural destruction in Gaza. Ukrainian officials are building a reparations case against Russia partly on climate damage grounds, estimating total climate liability at more than $42 billion using a social cost of carbon of $185 per tonne. ⁶ 

Both cases face the same obstacle: no binding international mechanism exists to adjudicate climate damages caused by war.

Environmental monitoring during conflict is emerging as a potential new area for cooperation. Satellite systems operated by the European Union, including the Sentinel-5P instrument used to track atmospheric pollutants, have already produced detailed data on air quality changes over Gaza and Ukraine. 

Researchers using those tools have tracked spikes in carbon monoxide, sulphur dioxide, and methane as infrastructure burns and waste management collapses. The science is ahead of the policy: the data exists, the methodologies are improving, but no international body is yet required to act on what the satellites see.

Conclusion: The Unanswered Question

There is a particular kind of cognitive dissonance at work in contemporary climate politics. Governments negotiate emissions cuts, publish net-zero targets, and announce clean energy subsidies while simultaneously increasing military budgets, fighting wars, and exempting their armed forces from the reporting requirements they impose on every other sector. The gap between what is measured and what matters has rarely been wider.

The research being produced now, from the meticulous carbon accounting of Ukraine's war to the satellite studies of Gaza's air quality, represents a genuine scientific advance. For the first time, it is becoming possible to measure, in near real time, what armed conflict costs the atmosphere. That knowledge is valuable. Whether it will translate into accountability, into changed behaviour at the negotiating table or on the battlefield, is a different question entirely.

The atmosphere does not distinguish between a tonne of CO₂ from a coal plant and a tonne from a burning oil depot struck by a cruise missile. Both warm the planet. Both narrow the window for the action the IPCC says is still possible. If the world is serious about climate, it will eventually have to reckon with the emissions it has been most reluctant to count. 

The question is whether that reckoning comes in time to matter, or only after the damage has been done.

References

1. Parkinson, S. & Cottrell, L. (2022). Estimating the Military's Global Greenhouse Gas Emissions. Scientists for Global Responsibility and Conflict and Environment Observatory.
2. Climate Change Performance Index. (2024). CCPI x Military Emissions Gap: How Military Emissions Impact Global Warming.
3. Transnational Institute. (2025). Climate Collateral. Updated November 2025.
4. PMC/Nature. (2025). Rising military spending jeopardises climate targets. Environmental research journal.
5. Crawford, N. C. (2019). Pentagon Fuel Use, Climate Change, and the Costs of War. Watson Institute, Brown University.
6. Initiative on GHG Accounting of War / Planetary Security Initiative. (2025). Climate Damage Caused by Russia's War in Ukraine: Three Years.
7. de Klerk, L. et al. (2024). Climate Damage Caused by Russia's War in Ukraine: 24 February 2022 to 23 February 2024. Initiative on GHG Accounting of War.
8. European Commission Joint Research Centre. (2025). War Worsens Climate and Environmental Challenges in Ukraine.
9. Queen Mary University of London. (2024). New Study Reveals Substantial Carbon Emissions from the Ongoing Israel-Gaza Conflict.
10. Wikipedia / UNEP. (2024). Environmental Impact of the Gaza War. Based on UNEP preliminary assessment, June 2024.
11. Shaheen, A. et al. (2024). The War on the Gaza Strip and Its Consequences on Global Warming. Frontiers in Human Dynamics.
12. National Security Archive. (2022). National Security and Climate Change: Behind the US Pursuit of Military Exemptions to the Kyoto Protocol. George Washington University.
13. Military Emissions Gap. (2025). Problem: The Military Emissions Gap. Conflict and Environment Observatory.
14. Scientists for Global Responsibility. (2025). Most Militaries Report Less Than 10 Percent of Their Carbon Footprint.
15. Conflict and Environment Observatory. (2021). How Does War Contribute to Climate Change?
16. CEOBS. (2021). How Does War Contribute to Climate Change? Conflict and Environment Observatory.
17. American Academy of Arts and Sciences. (2025). Carbon Footprint of Military: The Environmental Impacts of Modern Wars. Roundtable Report, July 2025.
18. IPS Journal. (2022). War Is a Climate Killer.
19. IPS Journal. (2022). War Is a Climate Killer: Russian fossil fuel exports and European dependency.
20. Wikipedia. (2025). Environmental Impact of the Russian Invasion of Ukraine.

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Fire, Then Flood, Then Fire Again: Australia's Climate Whiplash Is Getting Worse - Lethal Heating Editor BDA

A new report finds record fossil fuel pollution is overpowering natural cooling cycles, plunging communities from one disaster to the next with barely a breath between.

Key Points

Australia's 2025-26 summer delivered record heat, catastrophic fires and severe flooding in rapid succession, a pattern scientists call “climate whiplash.” 1 Fossil fuel pollution is now overriding natural climate drivers like La Niña, pushing Australia's temperature baseline permanently higher. 2 South Australia's Marree recorded a new state high of 49.8°C in January, then received ten times its normal monthly rainfall within a week. 3 Melbourne has logged as many extreme heat days since 2000 as it did in the entire twentieth century. 4 Insurance payouts for extreme weather averaged $4.5 billion a year between 2019 and 2024, more than double the prior 30-year average. 5 Mid Coast Council in NSW has applied for disaster recovery funding 16 times since 2019, illustrating the mounting fiscal strain on local government. 6

In the space of ten days last January, communities along Victoria's Great Ocean Road lived through catastrophic fire weather warnings, watched cars wash out to sea in flash floods, and then braced again for returning extreme heat. 

It was not a fluke. It was the new rhythm of the Australian summer.

A report released this week by the Climate Council documents the arc of that season in troubling detail. Titled Breakneck Speed: Summer of Climate Whiplash, the report charts the back-to-back disasters that struck between December 2025 and February 2026, and sets out the science that links them to rising greenhouse gas concentrations from burning coal, oil and gas.¹

The picture it draws is one of a country whose disaster management systems, insurance markets and local government budgets are absorbing punishments that once came once a generation but now arrive in clusters, sometimes within days of each other.

A Season Unlike Any Other

The 2025-26 summer did not arrive with the signature of a dangerous El Niño, the Pacific Ocean warming pattern associated with drier, hotter conditions across much of Australia. Conditions were actually the reverse. Australia moved through the summer in a La Niña pattern, which typically brings cooler temperatures and wetter weather to large parts of the continent.

Yet the summer still delivered the fourth-hottest year on record for Australia and the globe's third-hottest year on record.² For climate scientists, that apparent contradiction carries a pointed message.

“Climate change is now firmly behind the steering wheel of Australia's temperatures,” said Adjunct Professor Andrew Watkins, a Climate Councillor and meteorologist. “In fact 2025 started and ended in La Niña, which usually cools large parts of Australia, yet this was our fourth hottest year on record. That tells us the baseline has shifted.”

The mechanism is straightforward, though its consequences are not. Rising concentrations of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases trap more heat in the atmosphere and oceans. That underlying warmth is now powerful enough to overwhelm natural cooling cycles that once reliably moderated Australian summers. What a La Niña could subtract, decades of fossil fuel pollution have more than added back.²

Records That Should Not Have Fallen

The summer's temperature records were not marginal. They were historic.

On 27 January 2026, Walpeup and Hopetoun in Victoria recorded a new state high of 48.9°C, surpassing the previous record set at Hopetoun on Black Saturday in 2009. Almost one third of Victoria recorded its highest January temperature ever on that single day.³

In South Australia, the small outback town of Marree, near Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre, endured five consecutive days above 48°C. On one of those days, the thermometer reached 49.8°C. On the outskirts of Port Augusta, the mercury touched 50°C on 30 January, making it the most southerly place on Earth ever to reach that threshold.

Melbourne reached 42.9°C during the season. The city has now recorded eleven days at or above 42.9°C since the year 2000. It recorded the same number across the entire century from 1900 to 1999.⁴ In Mildura, 45°C was reached only six times between 1946 and 1999. Since 2000, the town has exceeded that mark a further 27 times in just 26 years.

In the Northern Territory, Alice Springs recorded more than 30 summer days above 40°C, almost twice its historical average of 17, before intense rainfall triggered dangerous flash flooding on 12 February.

The Physics of Whiplash

The whiplash pattern, where extreme heat is followed rapidly by extreme rainfall and flooding, is not coincidental. It follows directly from the physics of a warmer atmosphere.

“Our hotter oceans and atmosphere also mean more water evaporates into the sky than ever before,” Professor Watkins explained. “With more moisture in the atmosphere, storms produce more rain.”

Some towns in western Queensland recorded their average annual rainfall within the first five weeks of 2026. A tropical low in February then triggered flood watches across nearly half the continent.¹ Communities that had been cut off by smoke and heat in January found their roads submerged under floodwaters a month later.

Dr Linden Ashcroft, a Climate Council research fellow and senior lecturer at the University of Melbourne, points to shifts in atmospheric circulation as a further driver. Global warming is altering the temperature difference between the tropics and the poles, destabilising the jet streams and pressure systems that once kept Australian seasons more predictable.

“We've got more energy in our earth system than at any other time in human history,” Dr Ashcroft said, “and that means these events are packing more punch.”

The heatwaves this summer also broke from historical patterns in a second respect. Record temperatures in the south-east were not driven by hot northerly winds blowing off the desert interior, as has historically been the case. They arose from atmospheric conditions that were, in the assessment of climate scientists, reshaping themselves in real time.

Two Case Studies in Rapid Disaster

The Great Ocean Road communities in Victoria lived through perhaps the most compressed version of the whiplash cycle. Fire warnings one week, flood waters the next, then heat again. The speed of the transition left little room for recovery, for insurance assessors to complete their work, for damaged roads to be cleared, or for residents to weigh whether to rebuild.

The second case is both more remote and more economically critical. The Eyre Highway stretches across the Nullarbor Plain and is the sole land link between Perth and Australia's eastern states. During the 2025-26 summer, the highway closed because of fires burning in 45°C heat. Two days later, floodwaters cut it again.¹

The economic consequence of losing that route, even briefly, ripples through freight costs, fuel prices and the supply of goods to and from Western Australia. It is a pointed illustration of how climate whiplash reaches beyond the communities directly struck by fire or flood. It enters supply chains, business continuity plans and infrastructure stress assessments.

In South Australia, Marree's ordeal extended over weeks. After five days above 48°C, a two-day rainfall event dumped ten times the town's normal February monthly rainfall. A fortnight later, eight consecutive days of rain cut all roads into the town. For a community that depends on those roads for food, medical supplies and commerce, the compound isolation was more than meteorological discomfort. It was a test of basic resilience.³

The Fire Season Rewritten

Greg Mullins, a former NSW Fire Commissioner and Climate Councillor, has spent his career measuring the boundaries of what fire services can manage. His assessment is unambiguous.

“We used to think of catastrophic fire conditions as once-in-a-generation events,” Mr Mullins said. “Now they're arriving every decade. The climate baseline has shifted, and that means bigger, more dangerous, destructive fires flaring up more quickly, more often.”

This summer, Victorian firefighters battled 200 fires in a single day, a volume of simultaneous demand that strains command structures, equipment and the endurance of personnel. The season ultimately resulted in the loss of 451 homes and more than 1,000 other buildings in Victoria alone.

In Tasmania, strong winds on 4 December fanned nearly 30 bushfires, destroying 19 homes on the east coast. Hobart recorded its windiest summer day at 98 kilometres per hour. Three weeks later, between 23 and 26 December, the state experienced daily snowfall. The range of extremes within a single month in a single state captures the disorienting character of modern Australian summers.

Mr Mullins noted that destructive fires are now occurring even on cooler days, driven by wind rather than heat alone. This expands the window of fire danger beyond the hottest days of summer, and confounds the traditional seasonal preparation models used by fire agencies and communities.

Mounting Costs, Stressed Budgets

The financial toll accumulates in ways that are visible in insurance premium notices, council balance sheets and government disaster recovery allocations.

Between 2019 and 2024, insurance companies paid out an average of $4.5 billion per year for extreme weather events. That figure is more than double the annual average across the prior 30 years.⁵ Those costs do not remain contained within the industry. They flow through to household premiums, through to properties that become uninsurable, and through to communities where rising premiums effectively price out lower-income residents.

At the local government level, the Mid Coast Council in New South Wales has applied for state and federal disaster recovery funding sixteen times since 2019. That frequency of application is not a sign of poor management. It is a measure of how regularly disasters now strike a single coastal council area and how thoroughly they exhaust local fiscal capacity.⁶

Summer extremes are also leaving lasting damage to ecosystems and agricultural land, with dead livestock, degraded pastures and compromised water catchments adding costs that do not always appear in insurance statistics but weigh heavily on regional economies.

What Comes Next

Dr Ashcroft noted that the Pacific Ocean typically resets between March and April, at which point climate scientists gain clearer sight of whether El Niño or La Niña conditions will dominate from May onwards. The prospect of an El Niño summer following the baseline already established by fossil fuel-driven warming is one that concerns scientists who observed what La Niña failed to prevent in 2025-26.

The Climate Council's report calls directly on governments to cease approving new coal and gas projects, and to accelerate the transition to clean energy. Mr Mullins framed the connection between energy policy and disaster cost as direct and immediate: “Disasters are costing Australians dearly.”

The report also identifies a specific mechanism by which continued fossil fuel investment worsens future fire risk. Every additional tonne of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere raises the heat baseline. A higher baseline means more days above the thresholds that drive catastrophic fire conditions, more moisture cycling through the atmosphere to produce extreme rainfall events, and less recovery time between disasters.

A Nation at a Crossroads

Australia occupies a peculiar position in the global climate conversation. It is among the world's most exposed countries to climate impacts, and among the most significant exporters of the fossil fuels that drive those impacts. The summer of 2025-26 did not resolve that tension. It sharpened it.

Communities along the Great Ocean Road, in the outback of South Australia, in the freight corridors of the Nullarbor, and in the suburban fringes of Melbourne and Mildura are absorbing costs, physical and financial, that compound with each season. Their fire services, council budgets and household insurance policies carry a burden that is growing faster than the systems designed to absorb it.

The Climate Council's report lands at a moment when Australia faces a federal election and questions about the pace of its energy transition remain sharply contested. The summer's record heat, its fires and its floods do not determine how those political questions will be resolved. But they do define the conditions under which future Australians will ask the same questions, if the present trajectory continues.

Whether Australia's political settlement will keep pace with its physical reality is a question the 2025-26 summer raised with unmistakable urgency, and one that neither the heat nor the floodwaters have yet answered.

References

1. Climate Council: New report: Aussies flung from summer fires to floods in breakneck climate whiplash (2026)

2. Climate Council: Bronze Medal Nobody Wants: 2025 Earth's Third-Hottest Year (2026)

3. Climate Council: Breakneck Speed: Summer of Climate Whiplash – full report (March 2026)

4. Bureau of Meteorology: Melbourne climate data, December 2025

5. Insurance Council of Australia: Catastrophe statistics

6. Canberra CityNews: Summer climate ‘whiplash’ hitting harder and faster (March 2026)

7. Climate Council: Breakneck Speed – report landing page (2026)

8. IPCC Sixth Assessment Report: The Physical Science Basis (2021)

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Australia’s Fossil Fuel Subsidy Paradox: Billions flow to coal, oil and gas as governments promise a clean energy future - Lethal Heating Editor BDA

Key Points

Australian governments provide billions annually in fossil fuel subsidies [1] The diesel fuel tax credit scheme is the largest subsidy [2] Subsidies now exceed $16 billion a year across governments [3] Critics say subsidies undermine climate policy goals [4] Supporters argue subsidies protect regional industries and jobs [5] Debate intensifies as Australia faces a rapid global energy transition [6]

On a dusty coal haul road in Queensland’s Bowen Basin, trucks the size of houses move slowly through the red earth.

Each burns thousands of litres of diesel a day, fuel partly underwritten by Australian taxpayers.

Across federal and state budgets, billions of dollars flow quietly each year to support fossil fuel production and use.

At the same time, governments promise voters a future powered by clean energy.

The contradiction sits at the centre of Australia’s climate debate.

A Quiet Stream of Public Money

Australian federal and state governments together provide an estimated $16.3 billion a year in subsidies and tax concessions to fossil fuel industries.^[1]

The figure includes direct spending, tax breaks and concessions for fuel used in mining, transport and heavy industry.

Researchers estimate this support equals roughly $31,000 every minute of the year.^[1]

Most Australians never see the payments, because they appear in budget papers as tax arrangements rather than direct grants.

Yet their scale rivals some of the country’s largest social programs.

The Diesel Rebate at the Centre

The largest subsidy is the federal Fuel Tax Credit Scheme, which refunds fuel excise to industries that use diesel away from public roads.^[2]

The program is expected to cost about $10.8 billion in a single financial year.^[2]

Mining companies, agricultural producers and construction firms are among the biggest recipients.

The scheme dates back decades and was designed to ensure industries did not pay road taxes for fuel used off road.

Critics now argue it has evolved into a large subsidy for fossil fuel consumption.

Climate Policy Meets Budget Reality

The subsidies exist alongside ambitious national climate targets.

Australia has committed to cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 43 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030.

Yet economists and climate analysts say fossil fuel subsidies can slow the transition to cleaner energy.^[4]

Lower fuel costs encourage continued reliance on diesel and other carbon intensive energy sources.

That dynamic complicates efforts to reduce emissions in sectors such as mining, transport and agriculture.

Regional Economies and Political Pressure

Supporters of the subsidies say the policies protect regional industries that underpin Australia’s economy.^[5]

Mining and agriculture rely heavily on diesel powered machinery that currently has few affordable alternatives.

Industry groups warn that removing fuel credits could increase production costs and weaken export competitiveness.

In resource regions, these arguments carry political weight.

Communities built around coal mines or gas fields often view the subsidies as essential economic support.

A Growing National Debate

The issue has drawn increasing scrutiny from economists, climate experts and sections of the business community.

Several policy groups argue the subsidies distort markets by favouring fossil fuels over emerging clean technologies.

Some companies in the resources sector have also begun calling for reform as they invest in renewable energy and green hydrogen.

International agreements have added pressure.

Many countries, including Australia, have pledged to phase out what they describe as “inefficient” fossil fuel subsidies.^[3]

The Energy Transition Question

The debate arrives as global energy markets begin to shift.

Government modelling suggests the value of Australia’s coal and gas exports could fall sharply in coming decades as countries move toward net zero emissions.^[6]

At the same time, demand for minerals used in renewable technologies is rising rapidly.

Some analysts argue redirecting subsidies toward clean energy infrastructure could accelerate that transition.

Others warn that rapid policy shifts could disrupt industries that still employ tens of thousands of Australians.

Conclusion

Australia’s fossil fuel subsidies reveal a deeper tension in national climate policy.

Governments promise a rapid transition to renewable energy while maintaining financial support for industries that produce coal, oil and gas.

Part of the reason lies in economic reality.

Fossil fuels remain a major source of export income, government revenue and regional employment.

Another reason lies in political caution.

Energy transitions reshape economies slowly, and governments often prefer gradual change over abrupt disruption.

Yet the scale of the subsidies raises difficult questions.

Every dollar spent supporting fossil fuels is a dollar not invested in renewable energy, energy efficiency or climate resilience.

For some economists the issue is not only environmental but fiscal.

They argue that removing subsidies could free billions for public services or climate adaptation.

For industry groups the concern is different.

They warn that rapid changes could damage sectors that still anchor Australia’s export economy.

The tension is unlikely to disappear soon.

As climate targets tighten and global markets shift, Australia will face a fundamental policy choice.

Whether governments continue subsidising fossil fuels, or begin redirecting those funds toward the industries of a low carbon future, remains an open question for the decade ahead.

References

1. Australian fossil fuel subsidies growing faster than NDIS, hitting $16.3 billion in 2025–26
2. Australian governments subsidising fossil fuel use by more than $30,000 a minute
3. Fossil Fuel Subsidies in Australia 2025
4. Fossil fuel subsidies hit $14.5 billion in 2023–24
5. Fuel tax credits scheme faces scrutiny
6. Treasury modelling on Australia’s fossil fuel export outlook

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The Tipping Point Problem: Why the World Is Running Out of Room to Manage Climate Change - Lethal Heating Editor BDA

Key Points

The global mean temperature for 2024 reached 1.55°C above pre-industrial levels, surpassing the Paris Agreement's 1.5°C aspirational threshold for the first time in a calendar year.1 Climate scientists warn that tipping points, once crossed, trigger self-reinforcing feedbacks that can accelerate warming beyond human capacity to manage or reverse.2 The Great Barrier Reef suffered its most spatially extensive mass coral bleaching on record in 2024, with coral cover declining by up to 30 per cent across entire regions in a single year.3 Australian governments collectively subsidised fossil fuel producers and major users to the value of $14.9 billion in 2024-25, a figure rising year on year despite mounting climate costs.4 The Global Catastrophic Risks 2026 report identifies a deep governance failure, warning that humanity is managing a non-linear planet with institutions designed only for linear, incremental change.5 Preventing catastrophic climate change will require not only rapid emissions reductions but a fundamental restructuring of global governance to confront vested interests and align economic priorities with planetary boundaries.6

For decades, climate scientists have warned that warming the planet is not a simple, smooth process. 

Push the Earth's systems hard enough, and they push back, accelerating change in ways that no international agreement was designed to handle. 

A landmark report now puts that warning in blunt, institutional terms: humanity is governing a non-linear planet with instruments built for a more predictable world.

The Global Catastrophic Risks 2026 report, produced by the Global Challenges Foundation and authored by experts including University of Oslo governance researcher Manjana Milkoreit and climate scientist Eva Mineur, identifies catastrophic climate change as the foremost of five civilisation-level threats facing humanity today. 

The report does not merely rehearse familiar emissions data. It argues that the architecture of global climate governance, from the Paris Agreement to successive UN Climate Conferences, is structurally incapable of managing the cascading, non-linear disruptions that accelerating warming is already setting in motion.⁵

A Threshold Already Crossed

The numbers at the start of 2026 leave little room for measured optimism. Every year between 2015 and 2024 ranked among the ten warmest in recorded history. 

The global mean temperature for 2024 reached 1.55°C above the 1850-1900 pre-industrial average, according to the World Meteorological Organisation, breaching the 1.5°C threshold that the Paris Agreement had set as its most ambitious target.¹

One year above that threshold does not constitute permanent overshoot. The science is clear on this point. But it illustrates how rapidly the margins have narrowed. The report's authors write that each additional fraction of a degree "narrows the space for stability" in ways that are not always visible until a system fails. The risk is not just continued warming; it is cascading disruption.²

That disruption is already arriving. At 1.5°C of sustained warming, climate models project dramatically more frequent and severe extreme weather events. At 3°C, entire regions could shift to climate conditions unseen for millions of years, with sea-level rise, crop failures and lethal heat rendering large parts of the planet effectively uninhabitable. Mass displacement on that scale would overwhelm political systems, international institutions and the concept of managed adaptation altogether.

The Mechanics of a Tipping Cascade

What distinguishes catastrophic climate risk from ordinary environmental degradation is the concept of tipping points: thresholds beyond which self-reinforcing feedbacks take over, driving further change independent of human emissions. Melting Arctic ice reduces the surface reflectivity of the planet, absorbing more heat. Thawing permafrost releases stored methane. Dying rainforests shift from carbon sinks to carbon sources. Each of these processes, once triggered, makes the next tipping point more likely.

The Global Catastrophic Risks 2026 report draws directly on the Global Tipping Points Report of 2025, which found that coral reefs have already passed their tipping point and could functionally collapse within a decade without coordinated global action to bring temperatures back below 1.0°C in the longer term.² 

The critical word in that sentence is "functionally." A world without functioning coral reef ecosystems is not a world with one fewer natural wonder. It is a world in which hundreds of millions of people lose access to fisheries, coastal protection and the marine biodiversity on which those services depend.

Milkoreit, in a conversation accompanying the report's release, observed that climate governance was never designed for this kind of non-linear disruption. The institutions managing climate risk were built to handle gradual, predictable change. Tipping points are neither gradual nor predictable. They produce sudden, irreversible shifts, and the governance systems meant to prevent them have no binding ecological red lines, no global institution specifically tasked with safeguarding Earth system resilience.⁵

Australia's Reef: A Live Experiment in Tipping-Point Science

No place in the world illustrates the tipping-point problem more vividly than the Great Barrier Reef, which stretches for more than 2,300 kilometres along Australia's Queensland coast and supports an estimated 1,500 species of fish and 400 types of coral.

In early 2024, the reef suffered the most spatially extensive mass coral bleaching event in recorded history. The Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS), which has monitored the reef since 1986, reported that the bleaching affected all three regions of the system simultaneously, with high to extreme bleaching prevalence across the majority of surveyed reefs. The primary driver, AIMS scientists concluded, was climate change-induced heat stress from record ocean temperatures.³

The consequences were severe and rapid. Coral cover declined by between 14 and 30 per cent across entire regions in a single year, with some individual reefs losing more than 70 per cent of their coral cover compared to 2024 survey levels. Northern GBR cover fell from 39.8 per cent to 30 per cent, recording the largest single-year decline since monitoring began. 

In early 2025, a sixth consecutive mass bleaching event occurred, focused on the Northern GBR and parts of western Australia, where a marine heatwave produced water temperatures 3°C to 4°C above normal along the Kimberley coast.³

The Climate Change Authority has noted that globally, coral reefs are projected to decline by 70 to 90 per cent if warming remains at 1.5°C for an extended period. At 2°C, up to 99 per cent of corals could be lost or fundamentally altered. The GBR's recovery windows are visibly shrinking with each successive bleaching season.³

For the roughly 60,000 people employed in the Great Barrier Reef's tourism and fishing industries, the ecological deterioration is already an economic one. For coastal communities in the Torres Strait and Cape York Peninsula, it is more fundamental still: the reef provides food, cultural identity and physical protection against storm surge. Its decline is not an abstract environmental statistic.

The Governance Gap: Fragmented Policies, Cascading Risks

The Global Catastrophic Risks 2026 report reserves some of its most pointed analysis for the structural inadequacies of the current governance framework. The Paris Agreement, it argues, remains the indispensable foundation of global climate diplomacy. But successive UN Climate Conferences have produced incremental commitments that collectively fall well short of what the science demands.⁶

The report identifies four distinct dimensions of governance failure. Climate policy remains fragmented from related domains, including biodiversity, energy, food and finance, despite deep interconnections between them. Unequal access to finance and technology limits the capacity of lower-income countries to transition away from fossil fuels or adapt to impacts they did not cause. 

A leadership gap persists, with political courage to confront vested interests in chronic short supply. And there are no binding ecological red lines: no global institution is charged specifically with protecting Earth system stability as a whole.

"We are governing a non-linear planet with institutions designed for linear change," the report's authors write. "That is the major reason for governance failure."⁵

The consequences of that failure are not evenly distributed. The harshest climate impacts fall on those least responsible for cumulative emissions: low-income communities, small island nations, Indigenous populations in vulnerable coastal and arid regions. The moral and political tension embedded in that asymmetry, the report argues, will itself destabilise governance unless addressed through equitable finance and shared accountability mechanisms.

Australia's Subsidy Paradox

Australia's climate position illustrates the governance gap in precise and measurable terms. The country has committed, under its updated Nationally Determined Contribution submitted in September 2025, to reducing emissions by 62 to 70 per cent below 2005 levels by 2035, with a long-term net zero target of 2050.

Yet at the same time, Australian governments collectively provided $14.9 billion in subsidies to fossil fuel producers and major users in 2024-25, a 3 per cent increase on the previous year, according to The Australia Institute's annual subsidy audit. 

The federal government's Fuel Tax Credits Scheme alone cost $10.2 billion, returning fuel tax to major diesel users including multinational mining companies.⁴ In 2025-26, that figure rose again to $16.3 billion, growing faster than the National Disability Insurance Scheme.

That sum equates to roughly $548 for every person in Australia, or $28,381 for every minute of every day. By contrast, the nation's Disaster Ready Fund, the primary mechanism for responding to climate-induced floods, fires and cyclones, held $4.75 billion in reserves. Australia's governments were committing approximately 14 times as much to the activities that cause those disasters as to the funds designed to manage their consequences.⁴

The Climate Change Performance Index rated Australia poorly in its 2025 assessment, noting that while the country's updated NDC represented progress, "the 70% upper end is for creating the perception of greater ambition than what is actually planned." Australia continues to approve new fossil fuel infrastructure, has no policy to cap fossil fuel exports, and has not joined the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance.

The contradiction is stark. Australia simultaneously positions itself as a climate leader in Pacific diplomacy and one of the world's largest per capita producers and exporters of coal and liquefied natural gas. The two positions are not obviously reconcilable within the timeframes that climate science demands.

What the Science Demands

The Global Catastrophic Risks 2026 report does not take the position that catastrophic climate change is inevitable. Its core argument is more conditional and, in some respects, more challenging: the physical science of tipping points, cascading feedbacks and Earth system resilience is now sufficiently understood to define what avoiding catastrophe requires. The gap is not scientific. It is political, economic and institutional.

Preventing catastrophic outcomes requires, at minimum, rapidly peaking and then steeply reducing global emissions, financing the transition for lower-income countries, and restructuring governance to treat climate as what it is: a systemic stability issue with binding ecological limits. The report calls for stronger accountability mechanisms, binding red lines, integration of climate with biodiversity and food governance, and the political courage to confront vested interests who profit from the current trajectory.⁶

Carbon pricing, green financing and removal of fossil fuel subsidies are identified as immediate economic levers. But the report's authors are clear that these are necessary rather than sufficient. The deeper requirement is a form of governance that can anticipate non-linear futures rather than react to linear trends, and that can mobilise collective action at the speed those futures demand.

The Question That Remains Open

Australia enters this reckoning from an unusual position: a wealthy, high-emitting country with extraordinary exposure to climate impacts, an economy still structurally tied to fossil fuel exports, and a political culture that has historically struggled to sustain consistent climate policy across election cycles. 

The reef bleaching, the subsidies, the updated NDC, the Fuel Tax Credits Scheme, all of these sit within a single national story about priorities, vested interests and the distance between stated commitments and enacted policy.

The Global Catastrophic Risks 2026 report's most unsettling observation is not about emissions curves or temperature thresholds. It is about the relationship between governance and time. Climate tipping points operate on timescales that political systems typically cannot see or plan for. The reef does not wait for an election cycle. Permafrost does not respond to a ministerial announcement. The carbon already in the atmosphere will continue warming the planet for decades regardless of what parliaments resolve this year.

What remains genuinely open is whether the political imagination necessary to bridge that gap exists within democratic institutions, or whether it will need to be built, through new forms of accountability, new international frameworks and a willingness to treat the stability of the Earth's systems as something more than a line item in a budget. 

The answer to that question, the report's authors suggest, will be written not in scientific papers but in the decisions made in the next few years by governments, industries and electorates that still retain the power to choose.

References

1. World Meteorological Organisation, State of the Global Climate 2024 
2. Global Challenges Foundation, Global Catastrophic Risks 2026: Catastrophic Climate Change Overview 
3. Australian Institute of Marine Science, Annual Summary Report of Coral Reef Condition 2024/25 
4. The Australia Institute, Fossil Fuel Subsidies in Australia 2025 
5. Global Dispatches, How to Prevent Catastrophic Climate Change (interview with Manjana Milkoreit and Eva Mineur) 
6. Global Challenges Foundation, Global Catastrophic Risks 2026 (full report) 
7. Climate Change Authority, Understanding Climate Threats to the Great Barrier Reef 
8. Climate Change Performance Index, Australia Climate Performance Ranking 2025 
9. The Australia Institute, Australian Fossil Fuel Subsidies Growing Faster Than NDIS, Hitting $16.3 Billion in 2025-26 10. Global Tipping Points Report 2025 

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