PARIS: From carbon pollution to sea-level rise to global heating, the pace and level of key climate change indicators are all in uncharted territory, more than 60 top scientists warned Thursday.
Greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels and deforestation hit a new high in 2024 and averaged, over the last decade, a record 53.6 billion tons per year — that is 100,000 tons per minute — of CO2 or its equivalent in other gases, they reported in a peer-reviewed update.
Earth’s surface temperature last year breached 1.5 degrees Celsius for the first time, and the additional CO2 humanity can emit with a two-thirds chance of staying under that threshold long-term — our 1.5C “carbon budget” — will be exhausted in a couple of years, they calculated.
Investment in clean energy outpaced investment in oil, gas and coal last year two-to-one, but fossil fuels account for more than 80 percent of global energy consumption, and growth in renewables still lags behind new demand.
Included in the 2015 Paris climate treaty as an aspirational goal, the 1.5C limit has since been validated by science as necessary for avoiding a catastrophically climate-addled world.
The hard cap on warming to which nearly 200 nations agreed was “well below” two degrees, commonly interpreted to mean 1.7C to 1.8C.
“We are already in crunch time for these higher levels of warming,” co-author Joeri Rogelj, a professor of climate science and policy at Imperial College London, told journalists in a briefing.
“The next three or four decades is pretty much the timeline over which we expect a peak in warming to happen.”
No less alarming than record heat and carbon emissions is the gathering pace at which these and other climate indicators are shifting, according to the study, published in Earth System Science Data.
Human-induced warming increased over the last decade at a rate “unprecedented in the instrumental record,” and well above the 2010-2019 average registered in the UN’s most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, in 2021.
The new findings — led by the same scientists using essentially the same methods — are intended as an authoritative albeit unofficial update of the benchmark IPCC reports underpinning global climate diplomacy.
They should be taken as a reality check by policymakers, the authors suggested.
“I tend to be an optimistic person,” said lead author Piers Forster, head of the University of Leed’s Priestley Center for Climate Futures.
“But if you look at this year’s update, things are all moving in the wrong direction.”
The rate at which sea levels have shot up in recent years is also alarming, the scientists said.
After creeping up, on average, well under two millimeters per year from 1901 to 2018, global oceans have risen 4.3 mm annually since 2019.
An increase in the ocean watermark of 23 centimeters — the width of a letter-sized sheet of paper — over the last 125 years has been enough to imperil many small island states and hugely amplify the destructive power of storm surges worldwide.
An additional 20 centimeters of sea level rise by 2050 would cause one trillion dollars in flood damage annually in the world’s 136 largest coastal cities, earlier research has shown.
Another indicator underlying all the changes in the climate system is Earth’s so-called energy imbalance, the difference between the amount of solar energy entering the atmosphere and the smaller amount leaving it.
So far, 91 percent of human-caused warming has been absorbed by oceans, sparing life on land.
But the planet’s energy imbalance has nearly doubled in the last 20 years, and scientists do not know how long oceans will continue to massively soak up this excess heat.
Dire future climate impacts worse than what the world has already experienced are already baked in over the next decade or two.
But beyond that, the future is in our hands, the scientists made clear.
“We will rapidly reach a level of global warming of 1.5C, but what happens next depends on the choices which will be made,” said co-author and former IPCC co-chair Valerie Masson-Delmotte.
The Paris Agreement’s 1.5C target allows for the possibility of ratcheting down global temperatures below that threshold before century’s end.
Ahead of a critical year-end climate summit in Brazil, international cooperation has been weakened by the US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement.
President Donald Trump’s dismantling of domestic climate policies means the United States is likely to fall short on its emissions reduction targets, and could sap the resolve of other countries to deepen their own pledges, experts say.
Warning signs on climate flashing bright red: top scientists
https://arab.news/9msc7
Warning signs on climate flashing bright red: top scientists

- “The next three or four decades is pretty much the timeline over which we expect a peak in warming to happen”
UN chief calls Cyprus peace talks ‘constructive’

- Cyprus has been divided since 1974, when a Turkish invasion followed a coup in Nicosia backed by Greece’s then-military junta
UNITED NATIONS: UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said Thursday that meetings between Cyprus’s rival leaders at the organization’s New York headquarters were “constructive,” even as questions remained about crossing points on the divided island.
Cypriot President Nikos Christodoulides and Turkish Cypriot leader Ersin Tatar have been holding talks and had reached a breakthrough on forming a committee on youth and three other topics, Guterres said.
The opening of four crossing points, and the exploitation of solar energy in the buffer zone between the two sides of the island remained unresolved, he said.
“It is critical to implement these initiatives, all of them, as soon as possible, and for the benefit of all Cypriots,” Guterres said.
The meeting follows one in Geneva in March, which marked the first meaningful progress in years.
At that gathering, both sides agreed on a set of confidence-building measures, including opening more crossing points across the divide, cooperating on solar energy, and removing land mines.
Guterres said there were specific technical issues still to be resolved on the issues of crossing points, but did not give details.
Cyprus has been divided since 1974, when a Turkish invasion followed a coup in Nicosia backed by Greece’s then-military junta. The Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, declared in 1983, is recognized only by Ankara.
The internationally recognized Republic of Cyprus, a member of the European Union, controls the island’s majority Greek Cypriot south.
The last major round of peace talks collapsed in Crans-Montana, Switzerland, in July 2017.
“I think we are building, step-by-step, confidence and creating conditions to do concrete things to benefit the Cypriot people,” Guterres said in remarks to reporters.
US designates group that claimed Kashmir attack as terrorists

- Gunmen in April shot dead 26 people, almost all Hindus, in Pahalgam, a tourist hub in the Indian-administered side of divided Kashmir
WASHINGTON: The United States on Thursday designated as terrorists a shadowy group that claimed an April attack in Kashmir, which triggered Indian strikes on Pakistani territory.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio described The Resistance Front as a “front and proxy” of Lashkar-e-Taiba, a UN-designated terrorist group based in Pakistan.
The terrorist designation “demonstrates the Trump administration’s commitment to protecting our national security interests, countering terrorism, and enforcing President (Donald) Trump’s call for justice for the Pahalgam attack,” Rubio said in a statement.
Gunmen in April shot dead 26 people, almost all Hindus, in Pahalgam, a tourist hub in the Indian-administered side of divided Kashmir.
Little had been previously known about The Resistance Front, which claimed responsibility for the attack.
India designates TRF as a terrorist organization and the India-based Observer Research Foundation calls it “a smokescreen and an offshoot of LeT.”
Pakistan has denied responsibility for the attack.
US House passes landmark crypto bills in win for Trump

- It will now head to the Senate, where Republicans hold a thin majority
WASHINGTON: The US House passed landmark cryptocurrency bills on Thursday, delivering on the Trump administration’s embrace of the once-controversial industry.
US lawmakers easily passed the CLARITY Act, which establishes a clearer regulatory framework for cryptocurrencies and other digital assets.
The bill is intended to clarify rules governing the industry and divides regulatory authority between the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission .
It will now head to the Senate, where Republicans hold a thin majority.
House legislators also easily passed the GENIUS Act, which codifies the use of stablecoins — cryptocurrencies pegged to safe assets like the dollar. That bill was due to immediately go to Trump for his signature to become law.
The GENIUS Act was passed by the Senate last month and sets rules such as requiring issuers to have reserves of assets equal in value to that of their outstanding cryptocurrency.
The raft of legislation comes after years of suspicion against the crypto industry amid the belief that the sector, born out of the success of bitcoin, should be kept on a tight leash and away from mainstream investors.
But after crypto investors poured millions of dollars into his presidential campaign last year, Trump reversed his own doubts about the industry, even launching a Trump meme coin and other ventures as he prepared for his return to the White House.
Trump has, among other moves, appointed crypto advocate Paul Atkins to head the Securities and Exchange Commission .
He has also established a federal “Strategic Bitcoin Reserve” aimed at auditing the government’s bitcoin holdings, which were mainly accumulated by law enforcement from judicial seizures.
The Republican-led House is also considering a bill it calls the Anti-CBDC Surveillance State Act that aims to block the issuance of a central bank digital currency — a digital dollar issued by the US Federal Reserve.
Republicans argue that a CBDC could enable the federal government to monitor, track, and potentially control the financial transactions of private citizens, undermining privacy and civil liberties.
It would require a not-easily-won passage in the Senate before going to Trump for his signature.
An aborted effort to set the anti-CBDC bill aside caused a furor among a small group of Republicans and delayed the passage of the two other bills before a solution was found.
‘A trap’ — Asylum seekers arrested after attending US courts

NEW YORK: In gloomy corridors outside a Manhattan courtroom, masked agents target and arrest migrants attending mandatory hearings — part of US President Donald Trump’s escalating immigration crackdown.
Trump, who campaigned on a pledge to deport many migrants, has encouraged authorities to be more aggressive as he seeks to hit his widely-reported target of one million deportations annually.
Since Trump’s return to the White House, Homeland Security agents have adopted the tactic of waiting outside immigration courts nationwide and arresting migrants as they leave at the end of asylum hearings.
Missing an immigration court hearing is a crime in some cases and can itself make migrants liable to be deported, leaving many with little choice but to attend and face arrest.
Armed agents with shields from different federal agencies loitered outside the court hearings in a tower block in central New York, holding paperwork with photographs of migrants to be targeted, an AFP correspondent saw this week.
The agents arrested almost a dozen migrants from different countries in just a few hours on the 12th floor of the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building.
Brad Lander, a city official who was briefly detained last month by ICE agents as he attempted to accompany a migrant targeted for removal, called the hearings “a trap.”
“It has the trappings of a judicial hearing, but it’s just a trap to have made them come in the first place,” he said Wednesday outside the building.
Lander recounted several asylum seekers being arrested by immigration officers including Carlos, a Paraguayan man who Lander said had an application pending for asylum under the Convention Against Torture — as well as a future court date.
“The judge carefully instructed him on how to prepare to bring his case to provide additional information about his interactions with the Paraguayan police and make his case under the global convention against torture for why he is entitled to asylum,” Lander said.
After his hearing, agents “without any identifying information or badges or warrants grabbed Carlos, and then quickly moved him toward the back stairwell,” he said.
Lander, a Democrat, claimed the agents were threatening and that they pushed to the ground Carlos’s sister who had accompanied him to the hearing.
The White House said recently that “the brave men and women of ICE are under siege by deranged Democrats — but undeterred in their mission.”
“Every day, these heroes put their own lives on the line to get the worst of the worst... off our streets and out of our neighborhoods.”
Back at the building in lower Manhattan, Lander said that “anyone who comes down here to observe could see... the rule of law is being eroded.”
US prosecutor in Epstein, Maxwell cases abruptly fired

WASHINGTON: A US federal prosecutor who handled the case of notorious sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and is the daughter of a prominent critic of President Donald Trump has been abruptly fired, US media reported.
Maurene Comey, the daughter of former FBI director James Comey, was dismissed on Wednesday from her position as an assistant US attorney in Manhattan, several major US outlets reported.
The Justice Department declined to confirm Comey’s firing to AFP, saying it would have “no comment on personnel.”
Politico published a message Comey, who spent 10 years in the US attorney’s office, sent to her former colleagues in which she said she had been “summarily fired” by the Justice Department with no reason given.
She also encouraged them not to fall prey to “fear.”
“If a career prosecutor can be fired without reason, fear may seep into the decisions of those who remain,” Comey said. “Do not let that happen. Fear is the tool of a tyrant.”
Comey’s dismissal comes a week after the Justice Department confirmed it had opened an unspecified criminal investigation into her father, a long-time Trump adversary.
It also comes amid mounting pressure on Trump to release material from the probe into Epstein, who committed suicide in a New York prison in 2019 after being charged with sex trafficking.
Comey was among the prosecutors who handled the case involving the wealthy financier, which never went to trial because of his death.
She also prosecuted Ghislaine Maxwell, the only former Epstein associate who has been criminally charged in connection with his activities.
Trump is facing the most serious split in his loyal right-wing base since he returned to power over claims his administration is covering up lurid details of Epstein’s crimes to protect rich and powerful figures.
The Trump-supporting far-right has long latched on to the scandal, claiming the existence of a still-secret list of Epstein’s powerful clients and that the late financier was in fact murdered in his cell as part of a cover-up.
The Justice Department and FBI said this month that there was no evidence that Epstein kept a “client list” or was blackmailing powerful figures.
Comey’s father, the former FBI chief, has had a contentious history with Trump dating back to his first term in the White House.
Trump fired Comey in 2017 as the then-FBI chief was leading an investigation into whether any members of the Trump campaign had colluded with Moscow to sway the 2016 presidential vote, in which the Republican beat Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.
Since taking office in January, Trump has taken a number of punitive measures against his perceived enemies, stripping former officials of their security clearances and protective details, targeting law firms involved in past cases against him and pulling federal funding from universities.