"The way that science is communicated is still really, really poor. Corporations and governments are continuing to increase fossil fuel emissions every year. There's climate behind so many things and the media is disgraceful in not pointing out these connections. Heat that goes into the oceans is equal to about 1 million Hiroshima atomic bombs every day; yet it's only the tiniest amount of the cumulative heat that is completely changing our environment. What needs to happen here is scientists and everybody get involved in some serious PR, get the information, the science out to the public." READ & WATCH "2026: Where the Climate Emergency Stands Now" transcript below:Climate Emergency Forum Jan 19, 2026: An alarming new study by Pan & Cheng shows that 2025 set yet another record for global ocean heat content, with the upper 2000 meters of the ocean storing more energy than ever observed. In this episode, our guests unpack what “record‑breaking ocean heat” really means for the climate system, extreme weather, and long‑term sea level rise. Ddecision‑makers can respond to this latest warning from the world’s oceans.
TRANSCRIPT: 2026: Where the Climate Emergency Stands Now
Peter: So it's obvious what's gonna happen. We are gonna get more and more and more disastrous, catastrophic, what we call extreme weather events. But as the insurance company terms them, these are actually catastrophes. The extreme heat, which is also on an accelerating trend, particularly in the United States, particularly in North America. The extreme heat is really, really ramping up very, very fast indeed. Forest fires will continue to increase, and we will continue to lose our future. And that's really what, you know, that's the honest, you know, hard truth.
Herb: Hello, and welcome to another edition. I think it's our 271st and counting of the Climate Emergency Forum. I'm Herb Simmens, author of A Climate Vocabulary of the Future, and I'll be your host and moderator today. And as always, our regular panelists, Dr. Peter Carter and Paul Beckwith are joining us. Welcome, Peter and Paul.
Peter, as you know, is a retired medical doctor from British Columbia who created and manages the Climate Emergency Institute. He's also served as an expert reviewer for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Paul is a climate system scientist from Ottawa, Canada. He's taught at universities in the Ottawa area and hosts a popular and prolific YouTube channel covering every aspect of the climate crisis. His videos have been viewed by more than 11 million viewers over the years.
Today is our second program of 2026. Our first program that we hope you will watch because we think it's extra special, originated in part from the coast of Antarctica last week, where a group of people are investigating the possibility of putting a seabed curtain around the Thwaites Glacier, the so-called Doomsday Glacier. So we hope you'll take a look at that.
Today, we thought we would stay closer to home, not go to Antarctica or anywhere else, but really the three of us, Peter and Paul and myself, what do we think about where we are with the climate emergency? We've all been thinking about it, talking about it for years. It's a new year, usually at the new year, people have anticipations and resolutions and expectations. So we haven't organized this, we haven't rehearsed this. We just sort of wanna have a free-flowing discussion, which I'm absolutely delighted to help host and take care of in some respects with two of the most knowledgeable people on the planet on the climate emergency. So with that, I hope that you will like this program, that you will subscribe to our channel, that you will go to our website, climateemergencyforum.org. We could use your donations at the beginning of the year so we can continue to produce similar quality programs. We hope you'll add your comments, your ideas for programs for this year, and that you will send this program off to your friends and colleagues so they can also get the wonderful experience, we hope, of listening and watching as Peter and Paul chat about 2026.
So with that as an introduction, I wanna turn it over to you, Peter. You just returned a couple of weeks ago from New Orleans, where you attended the AGU, the American Geophysical Union, this major convocation of scientists from all over the world talking about our planet. I understand you made a presentation there. Let's start with that. What did you say? Why did you go there? What were your impressions? And what do you want our viewers to know about that?
Peter: New Orleans, of course, seemed a long way for us to go. We've done AGUs before, they've been in San Francisco, and we've done a few EGUs, Europe, which are in Vienna, which are always very nice. I've done a few of these, and to begin with, there weren't a lot of attendances, but I have seen going to these conferences periodically, the increase, the slow increase in interest in climate change. To begin with, the big interest seemed to be investigating Mars, right? But now they've included the Earth more and more and more, so that's gratifying. So why I went there was I put in an application to do a town hall presentation. They accepted it, so I reluctantly told my good supportive wife, Julie, that looks like we're going to New Orleans, Julie. We weren't sure that New Orleans had a great reputation, but we got there anyway. We did the town hall, and it actually went down very well. We had a really good attendance and some good questions, so that was very nice. What I did was I did one of my long, long PowerPoints. At the end of doing the PowerPoint, I realized, I think what needs to happen here is the scientists and everybody gets involved in some serious PR.
[KE: Absolutely, the fossil fuel industry spends Millions on PR to spread disinformation, and those false facts are the main reason people in the USA still think climate change is a hoax, that scientists live in Ivory Towers; in fact, I feel that way sometimes too. You guys need to explain things in simple words. If I were 30 years younger, I would be pitching all the climate scientists to let me handle a major PR campaign to get out the truth about what is happening to our planet, inform past the massive obstruction of the climate hoax prevaricators.]
So I decided to make that the theme, and that really went down. I mean, nobody really thought of that. Everybody agreed with it, thought it was a good idea, and we had some very good input about how to do it. I mean, we've been beaten down and beaten back for decades by the fossil fuels using the big professional PR agencies, right? It occurred to me, my God, we should be doing the same. And I thought even the scientists’ organizations could get together, they could fundraise, and they could do it. So that was sort of why I went. That was the appeal to go there.
My final point is that we were pleasantly surprised that we really liked New Orleans. The visit was really good. We liked that city. So we went to an American city and we enjoyed it.
Herb: Oh, as an American, I'm not sure how to react because it sounds like you were so surprised that you enjoyed an American city, but it's certainly one of my favorite cities. You, know, just thinking back-
We had a program several weeks ago where we looked back on 2025. It wasn't a good year for the climate, particularly in the United States with the announcement, just a couple of days ago, that coal use in the United States went up by several percent last year, presumably a direct result of the policies of the current occupant of the White House.
Peter: I read a long report on that yesterday from the Rhodium Energy Group, and they concluded that the big drive actually wasn't Trump because the Trump horrors, they said hadn't really kicked in yet. But it was very interesting because the big drives were data centers, a huge, huge increase in data centers, also Bitcoin mining. So I thought that was very interesting and alarming.
Herb: We should probably do a program in data centers because the implications are for climate, for the environment, for most everything, and possibly the future of humanity. Pretty amazing. Yeah, I was sort of about to say that when I prepared for our program at the end of December that you weren't able to make, Peter, I sort of characterized 2025 as what I called the big shrug that here we had the continuation of temperatures at or around 1.5 degrees C. We had countries pulling back. We had a COP in Belem that achieved, I think almost everyone agreed, next to nothing. And yet at the same time, and we have tipping points, the announcement that coral reefs is sort of, if not officially, but certainly groups like the folks at Exeter University have said that coral reefs are basically the first major tipping point that's likely been activated, which is an immense unfathomable tragedy.
And so I called it the big shrug that basically, yeah, leaders of the world, even many of the, certainly not all of the normal climate allies, whether it's fatigue after all these decades or depression or disappointment or despair or just helplessness. Basically, rather than a more aggressive approach, it seems to be this, again, this oversimplified kind of big shrug. Paul, what do you think? Do you share that kind of perspective
Paul: One thing for sure is there's no lack of new reports and so on how big the problem is. Peter mentioned one report and I'm just reading, I'll probably do my next video on this very report, but Copernicus, the European year-end summary, they summarize what exactly happened in 2025. And what I love about their report and their website is their graphics are just incredible. And there's a detailed PDF, which is also, they have all kinds of graphic artists to try to depict the data in a way that people can easily understand. Peter was talking about AGU. I did attend one of the AGU conferences in New Orleans a few years back. It was interesting, it was very expensive accommodation right downtown near the AGU center. So I stayed in a motel about half hour away, which I would walk late at night through darkened streets in New Orleans. Luckily didn't have any problem, but interestingly at the motel where I was on the telephone poles, you could see a very, very dark line which was the water level after Hurricane Katrina. You know, the water completely submersed the one story buildings and was up near the top of the telephone pole in the region where I was staying for the AGU conference.
I wanna talk a little bit about climate organization. How do you get people off their duff and, you know, taking action on climate or attending large protests or effecting change? And I wanna use the UK national climate emergency briefing which occurred on November 27th as sort of a, you know, example of what can be accomplished in order to change people and get the information, the science out to the public.
So in this event, it was organized by, mostly by two brothers, Nick Oldridge and Simon Oldridge, who had background with something called Nature Save, a green insurance company and other businesses. They did a lot of interesting work. I mean, basically the event on November 27th involved, you know, a dozen or so leading UK experts. So the different categories, they had a different speaker on the national, why it's an emergency, on nature, on climate, on energy transitions to renewables, another person on weather extremes, food security, health, tipping points, economics and national security. All these different topics were covered by an expert. And the audience was something like 1200 people, many, many politicians from all parties, leaders from business culture, faith groups, sport and media. So it was a big deal, it was a big event.
The purpose was to report the latest evidence on climate change to make clear what was at stake. And this was for UK, how was British life being affected in this multi-pronged emergency and outline a specific solutions or at least ideas to try to mitigate it. So it was an incredible logistical planning event. And I think there's gonna be a documentary on it. In the description, there'll be links to videos from these different people. There's a group called Climate Science Breakthrough that's involved, which is interesting
because they have put out a series of videos called Climate Science Translated, Comedians versus Professors. So they'd have professors talking about some of the science of climate change and specific things that were happening and they'd have comedians debating with them. And the comedians, of course, they would, you know, it adds an interesting view because, you know, how do you engage an audience? How do you get people to listen? You know, if you throw a little bit of humor in, people can tend to remember more and so on. So, you know, there's lots of issues. Like, you know, there's lots of questions, I guess, that result.
How could we organize such an event, say in Canada or in the US, for example, and what sort of effect can we have? Like, can we actually get politicians to take notice and so on? So these are some of the issues that I've been thinking about based on what's happened. And Nick Breeze did a wonderful video interviewing one of the key organizers for this event. So it's, you know, it's sort of a question of how to engage the public and get more information to them on our crises that are occurring. Herb: Well, first of all, we hope to have Nick Oldridge come on one of our programs to speak about his efforts and the follow-up as you've articulated, Paul. But let me gently push back on what you've said.
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AI Overview: Prevaricators are people who habitually lie, avoid telling the truth, or use evasive, ambiguous language to mislead others. Synonyms include liars, equivocators, quibblers, and fabricators. Derived from Latin, it originally meant an unfaithful advocate or someone who "walks crookedly" to avoid the truth. [KE: They need to be countered]
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I'm sure we're all familiar with the idea that providing more information to people is known in the academic literature as the information deficit model. That basically the assumption is people don't know, they have a deficit in information about climate, which everyone has until they first learn about it. And if we can fill that deficit so that it doesn't exist, then action will follow. There are many climate communicators and academics who have pushed back against that, saying that the research shows that giving people more information does not by and large lead to action. In fact, in some cases it leads to less action. And obviously the literature is, you know, is very large and contested and so forth.
but that was and would be one of the questions I would ask Nick Oldridge is, what's your theory of change? Because there's no shortage of information. You know, is there something unique about this? You know, I think you could argue that it was and that the intent was to reach the decision makers. I mean, they didn't invite the general public to this. They invited the members of parliament and, you know, the elites in the UK society who could make differences in their companies and their organizations and so forth.
Paul: Yeah, I mean, that's absolutely right. Trying to change the masses so that politicians listen is what we thought would be the way to go. But it turns out that if you get one person running the country, then information doesn't really matter. You know, if you get lobbyists and fossil fuel people and industry pushing in and you get one providing funding, huge, massive amounts of money, and you get one person in charge of the US, then you can see what happens.
15.15
[IMAGE] So imagine if somebody like James Hansen was president of the US.
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Imagine if somebody like James Hansen was president of the US. [KE: Sigh] *** See bottom of post
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[BACK TO BECKWITH]
Like, imagine what policies he could do, right? What policies he could push through. You don't need people understanding anything, right? The general public, you have one person who knows what's going on on climate and could change the world, right? I mean, this is, so we're rolling, it's not rolling the dice. I mean, how would Hansen ever get elected to such a position, even if he wanted to, right? He doesn't have the backing of the huge corporations, the money, which is obviously in fossil fuel companies. So it's just the way our society is working. So if that doesn't work, what are our other options? What can we do? I guess that's the question, right? Just throw up our hands and go on holiday or, you know? No, I mean, we still, we have some moral fiber. We understand what's happening. And so we're gonna keep trying to make change and not having any expectation of any results, I guess.
Herb: We have a kind of small N of three kind of natural experiments going on right now. Again, it's certainly imperfect. Here in North America, where we have the leader of Canada, who is a recognized climate finance expert, who's been immersed in the climate world for decades as literally not just a national leader, but a world leader. And just below the United States, the literal president of Mexico is a climate scientist. And in the middle, we don't even need to characterize the person in the middle. But in other words, so here we have this situation and in a couple of years, can we look to see what progress Canada and Mexico have made as compared to the United States? Because that clearly is an example of leaders coming from very different perspectives, but very unique perspectives in terms of, in one case, diehard, burn baby burn and burn down every windmill and solar panel within a million miles. Anyway, it's just interesting. Peter, you wanna comment on this?
[KE: Guys, you've got to address the false information, disinformation;for example PBS Terra "Weathered" with its headlines that sound like the report is going to be climate science; and then you watch the clip and it's this hyperactive attractive woman giving science tips that you learned in geography class in third grade ignoring climate change that is happening right now. They are devious in their ways of getting disinformation out and even if you keep repeating truth over and over again, it won't do any good unless you attack back at the information warfare against climate science that is going on. Guys, this is war. Some very powerful people are convincing half the population that it's no big deal that the planet is heating, whatever their motive is. Until you stop that, until scientists attack back against the information warfare, we are not going to move forward in stopping this destruction of human habitation on Earth. Think about it. Who profits from allowing the planet to keep heating? This President is even making it heat faster with his policies to increase fossil fuel burning. Why?]
Transcript continued
Peter: In response to Paul's point, which is very interesting, what I can remember is going way, way back, the leading scientists have said that the one thing we must not do on communicating climate change would give any scary stories, things that might scare people because they said that the psychologists and social scientists have said that that's the worst thing to do. People would just sort of go into paralytic despair. I tried to challenge that, but I didn't have much success. I mean, I've been a family and an emergency doctor all my life. So I know that that's absolute nonsense. When people are faced with overwhelming traumatic issues, they do not fold, they rise to the occasion. That's what human beings are like.
I'm, of course, very interested in climate change communication. That's sort of what I try to do. It's still very poor. The way that the science is communicated is still really, really poor. And I can give the example of today. We had the WMO, the World Meteorological Organization, give the official 2025 global temperature increase, which, of course, we all wait for with bated breath. And they said that it was 1.44 degrees C. They also mentioned that there were two centers that had higher, and I'm sure, as Paul mentioned, Copernicus, I'm sure they were-
Paul: 1.47 for Copernicus.
Peter: Okay, there you go. So it's a little bit confusing, of course, for the public that we have this range of global temperature increases. And I guess WMO is trying to address that, but that's all they do. They give the global average temperature increase. That's not the metric that the public would possibly understand. And what they could understand, which the scientists have never given, is what is the temperature in the summertime, right? When we get all the heat waves and the fires and the droughts, that's what we need to know. And of course, we have that data. We have the maximum temperatures on a monthly, weekly, and daily basis in the summertime. So if only the scientific community would start communicating that, the public would get the situation for sure.
Now, there are some really good climate change science communicators, but there's really only a handful. I mean, there's James Hansen, right? He's still putting out his excellent newsletters. I mean, he's just a great hero. I should mention that the WMO confirmed, again, that James Hansen is right, that we are into a short-term acceleration of global temperature increase. Global warming, as James Hansen said some time ago, a few years ago, is actually accelerating. And the WMO confirmed that despite that last year was a little bit lower than the year before, that that trend is continuing. So that was important to us for sure.
So James Hansen, of course, Tim Lenton, who was the, I would guess he was the key speaker at the UK, very successful event. Yeah, he's been great for many years. Stefan Rahmstorf is another one who started putting himself out there. The scientists don't use social media. Stefan has started to use social media, so I really, really appreciate that. Yeah, things are getting rapidly worse, of course. The main reason, of course, as the WMO says, is that every year our emissions go up. Our emissions have been put up, increased year by year by year. And on top of that, we have the problem with a loss of cooling. We have a reduction in aerosols because of air pollution. Paul talked about that extremely well. And also we have this thing on less reflective clouds as well. But primarily what's going on is that the corporations and the governments are continuing to increase fossil fuel emissions.
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But primarily what's going on is that the corporations and the governments are continuing to increase fossil fuel emission
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Herb: You know, there's a lot of controversy, not surprisingly, in the climate communication field, a lot of different viewpoints. But in my own research and chatting with some climate communicators, it seems that there seems to be fairly high consensus on a three-part sort of set of guidelines that most subscribe to. And this doesn't apply just to climate communication, but to most communication. And these sort of messages or these approaches are not consistent with how, shall I say, the left progressive people tend to think and act. And let me tell you what they are. Number one is a very, very simple message. Okay, not complicated, not dealing with nuances and maybes and possibilities. This is how the right wing communicates very successfully. Number two, repeat, repeat, repeat, and repeat some more. Now, people on the progressive side and on the left side, however terms you wanna use, generally, I'll speak for myself, we get bored with repeating the same thing. You know, we want variety, we want nuance. We don't want the same six words to say a million times. It gets boring. Yet the research shows that's what you need to have messages sink in. So it needs to be simple. It needs to be repetitive over and over and over again.
[KE: You may feel like it's been said a hundred times, but the people you're trying to reach have still not heard it, so you have to repeat and repeat and repeat, public relations 101
And perhaps, I don't know if it's more important than the other two, but it's at least as important. It needs to be delivered by people you trust and institutions you trust. So some random scientist on Twitter or somewhere else, no matter what their credentials are, to the average person, they have no reason to necessarily trust them except to the degree to which they trust the scientific community, which we know has declined significantly over the years for unfortunate reasons.
So it's sort of your neighborhood high school football coach or your pastor or someone like that, or your doctor, as you would probably know, Peter. I'm sure your patients trusted you overwhelmingly or they wouldn't go back. And so what you said basically had an enormous influence on what they thought and what they did. And so those are the three sort of ingredients, generic ingredients that I think are useful to evaluate any climate message or any climate campaign. That, let me turn it back to you, Paul.
Paul: Peter mentioned some great climate communicators. I would also mention Katharine Hayhoe is a person. And our friend from COPs, Nick Breeze has a very good channel and talks about lots of different issues on climate. And I guess I wonder, I mean, Greta Thunberg, of course, came onto the scene and she's pretty much left the scene on climate, she's doing lots of other activism, of course, but I think she'll come back to climate hopefully at some point.
Peter mentioned the WMO report and I mentioned the Copernicus report and they're using professional graphics artists to try to depict data in a very interactive sort of intuitive way for people to understand. I'd like to mention also beginning of the year, there's often lots of updates on what happened the previous year. Last year about this time, a global methane review paper, 86 odd pages came out about the global methane budget and so I expect to see one of those fairly soon.
So in terms of ocean heating, that paper just came out, multiple authors talking about the record increases in global ocean temperatures in the last few years and how because of the La Niña and the Pacific, it dropped off a little bit in 2025, but it's still in the top three. And of course, the ocean temperature, not just on the surface, but through the water column is very important because it takes tremendous amounts of energy to heat the ocean and it doesn't experience the same fluctuations that the atmospheric temperatures would have with the air having much lower heat capacity. So it's very important what's going on in the oceans and some ridiculous amount of heating, 23 zeta joules or something, the zeta joule is 10 to the 21st joules. The global electricity production is about a 10th of a zeta joule. So when the oceans heat 23, you can get an idea of how massive that is.
There's also an excellent review on methane seeps from around the world, how methane is seeping up from the continental shelves and the ocean floors, not just from biological breakdown of organic material that settled into the ocean sediments, but also geological coming up through fissures and cracks. And a reminder that some of these deep sea ocean vents are probably where life originated on the planet. And there's a lot of creatures down there that rely on something called chemosynthesis, where they get their energy for life from chemical reactions and methane breakdown as opposed from photosynthesis, which of course is what everybody knows at the surface of our planet.
So there's lots of reports, lots of stuff coming out. I've noticed in the last little while that there's a lot more reports by Chinese scholars, Chinese scientists, and they're kind of filling some of the void that US scientists that have lost their jobs and are struggling right now, not able to do as much research. Some are continuing privately, but we're talking about an awful lot of climate scientists from different organizations that are suddenly without jobs and income in the US. So how do they publish papers? Well, the journals are still there, so they're accepting far more papers from non-US countries to try to carry the ball forward. And in fact, some groups are trying to keep data sets in the US going by providing private or independent funding for this research, because there's a lot of data sets that are very important, but they're over time, right? We need to collect data every year and update and compare. And if we have gaps where years where nothing is collected, then this is very problematic. So there's a lot of things going on. I really liked the initiatives of involving comedians and scientists, and there's other initiatives as well, but we have to keep up the fight anyway, one way or the other.
Herb: I wanna turn to, since we're again at the beginning of the year, whether either of you have any thoughts on what our viewers should be looking for as the year progresses in terms of policy, in terms of actual climate events, in terms of what temperatures will be, in terms of decisions made by countries like China and so forth.
Give us some sense of what to look out for so that when we have our 2026 review at the end of December of this year, we can look back and we're not gonna hold you to this. This is a very informal conversation, but does anything come to mind, either of you?
Peter: Well, the WMO and actually the UK Met Office have predicted short-term forecast of what 2027 is gonna be. And it's gonna be pretty well about the same as this year. And that's really, really bad. That's terrible because the other day, the WMO also confirms that we're in this short-term acceleration. Now, this acceleration is not gonna stop. It's going to continue, unless there's some really, really powerful intervention. And the reason for that is that all of the drivers of global warming, which are just as important as global warming, are record high and they're increasing as fast as ever, some of them faster than ever. So I mentioned emissions, atmospheric CO2 is accelerating. It's continually accelerating. Its annual increase last year was the highest ever. And methane is continuing to increase. Paul mentioned methane, and there's increased, definitely increased awareness that methane is very, very, very important. It's just as important that we stop emitting methane as we stop emitting CO2 in order to control global heating. Now, the Global Carbon Project last year, they did what they call, they do their carbon budget, which is CO2, which tells us that CO2 emissions have increased again at record high. Methane is following, aligning is what they said, with the worst case scenario. Methane emissions and methane atmospheric concentrations are aligning with the worst case scenario. And with regards to emissions, the same thing applies to nitrous oxide, right? So it's obvious what's gonna happen. We are gonna get more and more and more disastrous, catastrophic, what we call extreme weather events. But as the insurance company terms them, these are actually catastrophes. They term these catastrophes, not just disasters. The extreme heat, which is also on an accelerating trend, particularly in the United States, particularly in North America. The extreme heat is really, really ramping up very, very fast indeed. Forest fires will continue to increase, and we will continue to lose our future. And that's really what, you know, that's the honest, you know, hard truth. As this is allowed to continue, our future is declining, let's put it like that. Our emissions and concentrations and ocean heat, as Paul mentioned, as that continues to accelerate, most heat is definitely accelerating, we will have a declining future, is what we're gonna have. Ocean heat, yeah, as Paul said, is totally, totally important. And it's a much better indicator than global warming, which is frankly a lousy indicator. Ocean heat goes up on an accelerating trend year by year by year, there's no ups and downs like with the global warming, which tends to certainly be confusing. 2025 was another record year for ocean heat. It increased a little bit less than the years two years before, but that was because of the cooling La Niña. And WMO also mentioned that they're 1.44 degrees C, that accounts for the effect of the cooling La Niña from right at the beginning of 2025 to the end of 2025. So we're gonna have more horror stories. The, Cheng paper, and you know, like Paul mentioned, all that they've got, all that all trying to send us back, the title is 2025, another record for ocean. He mentioned the past couple of years, it's not increased quite as much. Paul, your thoughts on what to look forward to this, if looking forward is even the right way to put it this year.
Paul: Well, 2024, of course, was the record hottest year by far. You know, there were some months that went to 1.67, 1.7 degrees even. And then 2023 was second place, 2025 just slightly behind 2023. Some groups show that it's on par with 2023. So what's happening is, you know, the background is continuing to rise rapidly. Look at Hansen's numbers, it was 0.18 degree Celsius global average temperature rise per decade. Now it's 0.36, 0.38, 0.4, according to Hansen's work. The ENSO is a big factor, but it's on top of the background warming. So the ENSO, you know, we've had a La Niña, so we've had the Pacific Ocean is cooler. When we set those records in 2024, and in previous years when there were spikes, it was the El Niño, powerful El Niño on top of the background warming from all the greenhouse gases and feedbacks and so on. So it's projected with more and more certainty that this La Niña's ending, we're in El nothing, if you like, or El neutral, but we'll get a La Niña or an El Niño coming in soon. You know, if it develops and is strong over the next year or two, then we're going to blow away previous record temperatures. Also, one of the things people have pointed out this year is that the hurricane season in terms of the US Gulf was very subdued this year. They dodged a bullet, but when the El Niño comes back, there's no more bullets that they will dodge. Instead of getting bullets, they're going to get cannons and bazookas in the US. Maybe that will wake up people when there's more Katrina type catastrophes, you know, super storms hitting the US. You know, when you keep setting records, eventually you can't keep setting more and more records. There is variability. So you set a record and then it backs off for a year or two and then surges forward, setting more records.
I mean, let's look at wildfires in Canada, for example, and the combustion of all this, all the trees and forests and so on, and all the greenhouse gases put up from those events. You know, look at the wildfires in LA, urban wildfires within cities and, you know, droughts in other different places. I mean, Iran's in the news as being a huge threat. Well, they're basically out of water in Tehran at the moment they may have to move the capital to different regions.
[KE: Yeah why is no one is mentioning that Tehran was going to be evacuated soon due to there being no water; did that play into Trump's reason to attack them? Is Iran going to turn into a forever uninhabitable battlefield? But I digress.]
So these sort of things are sort of ongoing. And when we talk about inflation, well, of course there's inflation. There's climate behind so many things and the media is disgraceful in not pointing out these connections. You know, there's inflation on certain foods and coffee and things. And of course there's inflation, there's scarcity because of climate change destroying crops around the world in different areas. You look at the data centers for coal consumption in the US. Well, of course, I mean, AI is demanding more and more. Servers, huge, huge blocks, not just buildings, but huge blocks, neighborhoods of these massive warehouses containing all of the Nvidia chips connected by fiber optics to be the hardware behind AI. Huge pushes and huge money going into that sort of thing. And interesting, you know, that's driving up electricity prices for everyday Americans who have to pay their monthly bill to get electricity to their houses. Their prices are going up huge amounts over the last few years. But I hope those people realize that the AI data centers are paying much, much lower rates for electricity per kilowatt hour than the American consumer is paying. So the American consumer rates are going up, everything is going up, inflation, but the data centers are getting electricity dirt cheap from the power companies. So look at this sort of thing. I mean, it's time that people wake up in America, right? And see what is happening, how much extra they're paying for the tariffs, how much extra they're paying. And also ICE, for example, you know, the group ICE, their budget is something like 60 or $70 billion. That's how much money they're getting from the US government. The US military budget is about 900 billion and the present occupant of the White House is trying to push that to be increased to $1.6 trillion. So right now it's 900 billion or 0.9 trillion. And that's being pushed to go up to 1.6 trillion over the next few years.
Just calculate what an increase that is.
That's like an increase of 60, 70% to the US military budget because the threats out there are too large, right? The polar bears in Greenland are gonna come after us, right? So we're seeing complete chaos. We're starting to see global chaos. And if the US moves into Greenland, then we have global chaos. It's really hard to have a crystal ball in these things other than chaos is coming, uncertainty is coming. And is there an end point to this sort of madness? I don't know what else to call it. So anyway, it's hard to make predictions, but if we're just basing them on climate, it's heading one direction, and that's the wrong direction, sticking to climate.
Peter: Can I just add that Paul's introduction on those staggering figures on military expenditures, I think is very, very relevant to climate change because the war economies, all of the big countries, they're all on war economies, right? They're all competitive, right? So they're all working to put out more and more and more manufactured stuff and more and more armaments. So I believe quite strongly that that is a big driver of increasing greenhouse gas emissions, the situation with war, and the expenditure that they're all doing. You know what I mean? United States is double anybody else. So I think that's highly, highly relevant. I could just finish by mentioning the ocean heat. We've confirmed that 2025 was a record for ocean heat content and a staggering number of million trillion joules, but that represents that Paul mentioned and understands a lot better than I do, but it is absolutely staggering.
On that paper, by the way, on ocean heat, they mentioned more specifically explaining the processes whereby ocean heat is actually exacerbating the extreme weather events that we're getting on land. So this huge buildup of ocean heat is actually now a factor in increasing the catastrophic disasters, extreme weather events that we're getting on land. Paul: The albedo is often mentioned, right? The albedo or reflectance is less. The Earth is getting darker. There's fewer clouds. These low-level clouds are very highly reflective. There's fewer of these clouds. The energy, the solar energy at the top of the atmosphere fluctuates slightly with solar cycles, et cetera, sunspots, but only like a very small percent or less, right? But the problem is, is that's the top of the atmosphere solar energy, the shortwave radiation.
On the surface of the Earth, the shortwave radiation is greatly increasing, causing increased warming because there's fewer clouds, fewer aerosols over the ocean from shipping fuels, fewer aerosols over places like China and India who've cleaned up their air because these small PM2.5 particles are a huge health problem. So with fewer of those, there's fewer cloud condensation nuclei, fewer low-level clouds, a higher absorption of shortwave solar radiation on the surface.
So of course, when that heats the surface, you get the longwave solar radiation, the infrared radiation, which is entrapped by the greenhouse gases. So we're heading, you know, that's an important point too. The albedo is having a huge effect. And Hansen's talked about that quite a bit. I just want to say, you know, don't miss one of James Hansen's posts. I mean, he's got his blog at Columbia. There are certain people that have vital information on our climate system. And I've got the Gilligan hat in honor of James Hansen, right?
Herb: All right, well, let me wrap this up. Thanks to Peter and Paul. Lots of interesting, provocative, and honestly depressing news about anticipating more of the same, except it will not be the same because it's likely to be worse because of the nature of the climate dynamic. That as greenhouse gases build up, as impacts increase, they reinforce each other. They don't counterbalance each other. As we're beginning 2026, I think it's important to look back at 2025 and look at some numbers and some trends that I think will help guide us as we do our programs and we think about how we can be most effective in climate this coming year.
What I'd like to do today in terms of the sort of the headlines is focus on the work that a wonderful climate scientist, Zeke Hausfather has done on what he called the state of the climate 2025 and what his conclusions were. And so here we are, number one, regarding the ocean heat content. It was the warmest year on record for ocean heat content. And one of the largest year over year increases in ocean heat. And listen to this, the oceans added 39 times more heat than all of the annual human energy use in 2025. Just imagine that. The ocean surface temperatures, the year 2025 effectively tied with 2023 is the second warmest year on record there for global, rather global surface temperatures there. The consensus seemed to be that the temperature was just under 1.5 degree increase from pre-industrial times, 1.44, which is pretty much the same as that. The second warmest temperatures over land, because most of us, in fact, all of us live on land and not in the sea and yet on land, and many people don't know this, that global temperature averages were right around or over two degrees C above pre-industrial levels, just below the record in 2024. So people talk about we don't wanna go over two degrees, well on land we're already there. Over the oceans, the surface temperatures were one degree C over pre-industrial eras. And the heating in the atmosphere was the second warmest year in the lower troposphere, the lowest part of the atmosphere. Sea level rise reached record highs, continuing a notable acceleration over the last three decades. Along with that, and not surprisingly shrinking glaciers and ice sheets, cumulative ice loss from the world's glaciers and from the Greenland ice sheet reached a new record high contributing to sea level rise. Greenhouse gases, and of course it's the amount of greenhouse gas that's in the atmosphere that's kind of the control knob for what happens to us here on the planet. Concentrations of CO2, of methane and of nitrous oxide, the three most important greenhouse gases, all reached, not only did they increase, but they reached record levels in 2025.
So basically what we're talking about is a catastrophe.And if we look ahead to this year that we're a couple of weeks into now, this particular report predicts that global average surface temperatures are likely to be between the second and fourth warmest on the record, similar to 2023 and 2025 at around 1.4 degrees above pre-industrial level. They're just numbers, but if you try to translate them into things we can sort of try to understand, the amount of heat that hits the earth, 90% of which goes into the oceans, is equal to about, listen to this, 1 million Hiroshima atomic bombs every day, or about 12 bombs every second that I speak, or that you listen. That's the amount of heat we are adding to the earth. So if we think about what we can do individually, it's important, but it's only the tiniest, tiniest amount of the cumulative amount that is completely changing our environment, our ecosystems and our ability to function as a human species. That sort of gives you a kind of retrospective look back at 2025.
We all need to be much more aggressive in much more important ways, politically, environmentally, and otherwise, so the 2026 doesn't turn out to be quite as bad as the predictions say.
So with that, as always, I'm gonna thank you, thank our guests today, thank our viewers, our over 20,000 subscribers. Please like this program, subscribe to our channel, leave us your comments and your questions, go to our website, climateemergencyforum.org. We could use your donations. If you see that donate button, this helps produce the programs that we do, of which we're well over 270 programs so far. We have a very exciting network of programs we hope to present to you this year, and we look forward to your continued loyalty and participation. And with that, as always, we look forward to seeing you next week. Thanks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJIDvwwPb1Q&t=12s
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Peter: I should mention that the WMO confirmed, again, that James Hansen is right, that we are into a short-term acceleration of global temperature increase
***IMAGINE
BECKWITH: So imagine if somebody like James Hansen was president of the US.
BONUS John Lennon - Imagine Comic Strip
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At Climate Emergency Forum we look beyond short‑term sea‑surface temperature fluctuations to focus on the deep, accumulating heat that drives the climate crisis for centuries to come. This video was recorded on January 14th, 2026, and published on January 19th, 2026, and represents the opinions of the discussion participants. Our panel explains how scientists measure ocean heat content, why the 2025 increase—on the order of tens of zettajoules—is well outside natural variability, and how this energy is already amplifying marine heatwaves, coral bleaching, and coastal impacts. We also clarify recent misconceptions suggesting that “ocean heat is coming down,” showing how the latest peer‑reviewed work instead finds continued, “unabated” warming of the global ocean. If you’ve seen headlines about cooling patches, El Niño/La Niña shifts, or “natural cycles,” this discussion connects those pieces back to the underlying, relentless rise in stored ocean heat. Finally, we explore what record‑high ocean heat means for policy, risk, and justice in the critical years ahead..
[KE: Everything scientists predicted about global warming/ climate change since the 1970s is coming true, only faster] [If activists want to do an online meeting that anyone can watch and participate in, say on youtube, You Can Count Me In to help promote it. If you do organize a meeting, don't make it like COP where everybody has to fly and drive in, because that just negates the whole purpose. my two cents]
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