The Mediterranean beachside haven of Antalya in Turkey is more used to hosting well-fed tourists than stressed climate negotiators. But for two weeks starting on 9 November, the city will become the climate change capital of the world, welcoming tens of thousands of delegates to the UN COP31 summit.

COP31 is the latest instalment of the annual climate summits where countries come together with the aim of tackling climate change. The meetings were responsible for ushering in the Paris Agreement in 2015, the climate treaty under which nations have promised to hold warming to “well below” 2°C and as close to 1.5°C as possible.

But in recent years, the summits have had a less impressive track record. Critics argue the meetings are no longer fit for purpose, undermined by the need for unanimous consensus in all decisions and struggling to find direction now that the work of agreeing a legal climate treaty is completed.

Delegates left last year’s COP30 summit in Belém, Brazil, having agreed the bare minimum – that they remain united behind the Paris Agreement. But after a fortnight of tortuous negotiations, they were unable to agree on fresh commitments to move away from fossil fuel use or end deforestation.

And although the world is now on course for lower levels of warming than looked likely before the Paris Agreement was struck, global emissions are still not falling and the world is on track for 2.8°C of warming by the end of the century – nowhere near the goals laid out under Paris.

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So can this upcoming summit, COP31, change the game?

This year’s brutal weather should provide plenty of motivation. From devastating glacier collapses to severe heatwaves and raging wildfires, there has been no shortage of reminders that planet Earth is teetering on the brink of crisis. And that all came ahead of a super-sized El Niño now under way in the Pacific, a timely demonstration of what warming beyond 1.5°C will feel like in the real world – hot and dangerous, in short.

But don’t expect fireworks from this COP. So far, the mood music from the hosts – a joint gig between Turkey and Australia – is setting the tone for a business-as-usual summit.

Hangovers from Belém

As with recent summits, there’s no big declaration or new treaty pegged for Antalya. Instead, the main task negotiators face will be to grapple with a series of hangover decisions from Belém.

At COP30, countries agreed to create a “just transition mechanism”, which has alternatively been described as a “platform”, a “hub” and a “work programme”. The idea is to provide a support structure for those affected by the shift to a cleaner economy. For example, countries need to work out how best to support and retrain workers in the fossil fuel economy as energy grids transition to cleaner fuels. But the process of identifying how this just transition mechanism will work in practice has barely begun.

Nations also agreed to triple adaptation finance for lower-income countries – in short, helping them cope with the impacts of climate change – by 2035. But the commitment was vague, with no baseline year and no agreement on who should contribute or what types of finance would count. Delegates in Antalya will continue to hammer out the details.

“These are all big, kind of chunky areas where you know there will be strong expectation from developing countries and civil society that there is progress made,” says at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, a UK climate and energy think tank.

Road map to nowhere?

One of the biggest disappointments from COP30 was that countries failed to commit to developing “road maps” away from fossil fuels. This would involve drawing up plans for moving their economies away from oil, gas and coal use. Although the idea had backing from more than 80 nations in Brazil, the final text from the summit failed to mention fossil fuels at all.

Countries that still backed the idea gathered in Santa Marta, Colombia, in April this year and jointly promised to draw up transition plans. However, to date, only France has produced anything like a fully fledged road map away from fossil fuels. Some countries are expected to announce their road maps on the sidelines of COP31, but it is unclear whether any major fossil fuel economies will come forward.

And despite a global oil crisis triggered by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz that makes the case for clean energy ever more obvious, it is unlikely the road map idea will make it into the formal COP agenda this year.

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Instead, the summit’s hosts are pushing electrification as a route away from fossil fuels. The more you can electrify cars, home heating and the like, the faster the clean transition, the thinking goes. Turkey has launched a new “electrification target” that would see countries commit to electrifying 35 per cent of their annual energy consumption by 2035, up from the current rate of about 23 per cent.

We don’t yet know whether this would be a voluntary pledge countries would sign up to, or something that the hosts will push to be universally agreed under the main negotiations. Questions also remain over whether the target will include any directive for countries to decarbonise their power grids. Turkey and Australia “are talking about electrification in isolation, [and] rarely talking about electrification linked to ramping up renewables and decarbonising”, says Redmond-King.

Geopolitical headaches

Meanwhile, there are some serious headwinds facing the summit. In the face of rising fuel prices triggered by the Russia-Ukraine war and the US-Iran conflict, wealthy nations are tightening their belts. International aid has been cut significantly from many national budgets, including in the UK, where spending is set to fall by £6.5 billion to a historical low in 2027/2028. That leaves less money for funding climate action in lower-income countries, who in turn say they can’t take action to cut emissions without more cash. Arguments over funding risk souring the atmosphere of the summit.

Then there’s the awkward issue of the hosts. Both Turkey and Australia wanted to host COP31 and neither would back down, so the UN awarded them joint hosting responsibilities. Turkey is responsible for the location and logistics, as well as the so-called Action Agenda, which includes the pledges, commitments and announcements outside of the negotiations. Australia, meanwhile, will run the formal talks. But running a successful COP is a major challenge even for one country. With two countries in charge, there’s a real risk of things drifting into confusion and infighting. Questions over their commitment to the cause linger over both countries, who have each been slow to embrace the energy transition and still rely heavily on fossil fuels.

But there are a few spots of hope too. In Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won a historic fourth term as president last month, defying expectations to beat right-wing populist candidate Flávio Bolsonaro. Lula’s victory means Brazil’s delegation will be in Turkey pushing for more progress on deforestation and fossil fuel transition road maps.

Meanwhile, Democrats may take control of the US Congress in midterm elections on 3 November, just before COP31 kicks off. A win for the Democrats in both houses could lead to renewed incentives for clean energy development and electric vehicles.

The US withdrew from both the Paris Agreement and the UN climate convention after Donald Trump took office in 2025, a move that has substantially worsened warming projections for 2100. Any sense that the US is returning to climate action will bolster morale among delegates.

What’s the headline?

In the formal negotiations track, there will be further talks on how the different “implementation” programmes on cutting emissions and ensuring a fair transition will work in practice. But these are unlikely to produce any big headlines.

“What we are going to see… in Antalya are many very important discussions, but they are less grand, big decisions,” , executive director of COP30, told journalists on a briefing call on 22 October.

A cover decision, which can summarise key decisions or include new pledges, could offer the opportunity for nations to present a new headline-grabbing commitment. Australia and Turkey have said ahead of the summit that they will work on developing a cover text, which could acknowledge the inevitability that the world will overshoot 1.5°C of warming and call on countries to go faster on cutting emissions.

Negotiations over the wording of the cover decisions often provide the dramatic finale for a COP summit. But it can become a trap for ministers running the event, says , a highly experienced climate negotiator who has led both the French and European Union delegations at COPs.

Ministerial teams come into a COP thinking, “how do I get a result that doesn’t look dreadful?” says Watkinson. “Particularly the ministers in charge; they want to get a boost to their career, and the country wants to say it’s done something important for the world.” It means COPs often end up “focused on yet another decision where we change the adverb”, he says.

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Watkinson wants to see COP summits focus much less on headlines generated by cover texts, and more on the backroom work to get countries to collaborate and communicate with each other. “If we seek the big decision each year, we’re using a huge amount of energy to get it, and we’re not focusing on the real challenge, which is how do we overcome the barriers that are holding us back,” he says.

That might mean changing the process to focus less on a consensus outcome with all parties, with action instead delivered by smaller groups of willing participants who work together to concentrate on delivering emissions cuts, he says.

It looks likely that the Antalya summit, despite its postcard-worthy setting, will be an unglamourous mix of long nights and bitter quarrels, reluctant compromises and underwhelming outcomes.

But for meeting insiders, the hope is that change will come in time for COP33 in two years’ time, when countries are due to conclude a global assessment of their progress to decarbonisation. The pressure will be even greater on that COP to deliver a meaningful response to the stocktake’s findings. The question is, can these summits reinvent themselves in time? As Watkinson puts it: “Practically everybody I speak to says, of course, we need to change it. We can’t carry on as we do.”

As seasonal storms take many of us by surprise, it’s time to head for the certainty of indoors, and a decent book (or two). We have some really intriguing titles this month, including a profoundly odd-sounding book by a forest that shares author rights with humans, and some terrifying night terrors that may teach us a lot about our brains. Oh, and if you want to stop trying to control everything around you, try surrendering to a higher power – of your choice, naturally.

by Anna Lembke

In a complex world, the pressure to control your life is immense: from removing annoying noises around you to slavishly avoiding missing out on living your best life, to keeping your relationship, children and health on track in every way imaginable. It’s overwhelming. Surely we can’t keep it up? According to Anna Lembke’s new book, Radical Surrender: Letting go in a world addicted to change, there is a way out. The word ”addicted” in the subtitle offers a clue here: this is the author of the bestselling book Dopamine Nation, in which she looked at pleasure and pain – and the critical task of finding a delicate balance between them, especially in an age of unprecedented high-reward, high-dopamine stimuli, mostly delivered digitally.

In this new book, we are promised tools to help us let go of our desire for control, but we have to follow Lembke’s advice and acknowledge a “power greater than ourselves, however we define it, and give our will over to that power: less mastery and more a return to mystery”. As an addiction medicine psychiatrist and head of Stanford University’s Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic in California, this “radical surrender” should be scientifically argued. Watch out for our review on 5 November.

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by Steven Strogatz and Alex Townsend

Let’s face it: our every move, from our next Google search to our latest Netflix selection, is utterly dependent on numbers, and AI is now an everyday reality. We have no choice but to face up to the overwhelming presence of mathematics, small, medium – or big. In Big Math: The hidden codes that run our world, Steven Strogatz and Alex Townsend (both leading mathematicians at Cornell University, New York) set out to show how relatively familiar concepts such as matrices, vectors, Markov chains, linear algebra and the like lie at the heart of computer science and quantum computing – essential for us all to know, say its publishers, if we’re to “comprehend the changes sweeping the world”.

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by Amy Crawford

For some while now, we’ve known that the story of invasive species is complex, but just how complex is the stuff of Amy Crawford’s Undesirable: Invasive species, humans, and where we all belong. Blundering all over the world, we have accidentally (as well as deliberately) carried species with us on our adventures – and often created great incidental damage to the recipient environments, ranging from destroyed habitats to changes in the climate. Then there is the accidental introduction of blow-in species over relatively short stretches of water, or those dropped by migrating birds. After hundreds of years, it’s still not entirely clear where the gains or losses to local biodiversity really land.

“Whether it’s garlic mustard spreading through American forests or brushtail possums allegedly decimating the flightless birds of New Zealand,” Undesirable is a “multi-faceted story”, say its publishers. On top of that, exactly how to hold ourselves to account remains an open question. And apparently, the young field of “invasion biology” has been “wracked by controversy and haunted by ethical quandaries as it has sought to destroy some species for the benefit of others”. Crawford, a freelance writer and long-time contributor to Smithsonian magazine, looks set to give us plenty to chew on here.

by Robert Macfarlane, Cosmo Sheldrake, Giuliana Furci, César Rodríguez-Garavito, Los Cedros Cloud Forest. Illustrated by Paula Terán Ospina

Look closely at the list of creators on the cover of this book, aimed at a 5+ age group, about a cloud forest within the Intac valley in northwestern Ecuador, and along with nature writer Robert Macfarlane and other experts, you’ll spot a more unusual contributor: Los Cedros Cloud Forest itself. As the publishers (probably correctly) point out, this is the first time a forest has been included in the creation of a book. To celebrate that fact – and the anniversary of a court decision recognising Los Cedros’s right to exist and flourish in the future – this is apparently “more than a book”, in that by making it, “we are recognising the forest’s moral rights as the co-creator of a literary work”. When you open Song of the Cedars, the flora, fauna and fungi of Los Cedros Cloud Forest jump off the page in a panoramic scene, which can be read or displayed as you wish. All the royalties from sales of the book, the publishers say, will be used to support the protection of Los Cedros. Fighting talk!

by Angèle Christin

What’s it like to make your money as a content creator? Angèle Christin, a digital studies scholar at Stanford University, California, takes us inside that world in her new book. The things these influencers post on social media range “from dance routines to political commentary, makeup tutorials to carpentry DIY”. She looks far and wide to explore what she calls their “golden dreams of passion, autonomy, and monetary returns”. No spoiler alert needed: the outcome for these creators and their followers shows how this digital work tends to fuel precarity, inequality – and much more. Christin’s bottom line: it’s more than time to rethink the economic structure of social media.

by Ashley Ward

Ocean water is nearly four times saltier than human blood, yet it has been central to our evolution – the  “amniotic fluid of life itself”, as the publishers of Saltwater: A natural history of the sea describe it. In this book, author Ashley Ward, a marine biologist, will bring readers face to face with the deep secrets of marine life. There will be jousting rival humpback whales, and claustrophobic journeys in a submersible to 600 metres deep to see an aurora of bioluminescence. We will also apparently encounter the complex seabird cities that develop along coasts, where auk fathers train their chicks to become skilful divers. And there’s mention of the ethereal song of a pod of belugas carrying across a fjord in the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard. Ward could hardly be better placed to deliver all this and more, given his background as a biologist at the University of Sydney, Australia, and as head of its Animal Behaviour Lab.

by Baland Jalal

A sneak peek at the introduction of Baland Jalal’s The Phantom Mind: Insights from the borderlands of sleep shows what we can expect from a researcher often billed as the leading expert in sleep paralysis. “One morning in my teenage years, I awoke gripped by terror… In horror, I realized a demon was on my bed. It grabbed my legs and began tossing them up and down in the air, while crushing my chest and squeezing my neck. While being strangled to death, I could somehow telepathically read the mind of the monster. It had one – and only one agenda: to destroy me.”

This terrifying no man’s land between REM sleep and wakefulness became the territory of his research for the next decade or so. There are plenty more great stories in this highly accessible book, including one featuring Jalal’s mentor, the eminent neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran, who appears as a sleep-paralysis ghost to Jalal – and leads him off on a new train of thought about exactly how the ghostly figures people see in sleep paralysis are formed. The borderlands of sleep turn out to be a rich seam to mine for those hoping to discover more about the waking mind. And watch out for our interview with Jalal, in our 14 November issue.

by Erica McAlister, illustrated by Natalie McIntyre

This is the latest in the Chicago University Press’s Day series. Earlier in the year, we enjoyed marine biologist Helen Scales’s Shell Day and behavioural ecologist Marty Crump’s Snake Day. Insect Day: A story of 24 hours and 24 hexapod lives follows the same pattern, acting as an hourly guide, this time following insects as they hunt for food, mates or just plain safety from predators. Author Erica McAlister is a curator at London’s Natural History Museum who studies flies. She starts at midnight in Africa with a female mosquito, Anopheles gambiae, which is out for the blood of any unwitting sleeper and may unintentionally transfer malaria. Who knew, by the way, that the males have no taste for blood?

By 7am, we’ve moved on to the Arctic circle, where a queen of Bombus polaris, the Arctic bumblebee, is basking within the flowers of the Arctic poppy. She can also keep warm simply by vibrating. Throughout the day, we meet the yellow-legged saddle casemaker (Agapetus ochripes), the blue-winged helicopter (Megaloprepus caerulatus), the Peruvian shield mantis (Choeradodis rhombicollis), the ferocious water bug (Abedus herberti) and Grote’s bertholdia (Bertholdia trigona). In its closing pages, Insect Day delivers a final punch: we’ve just toured insects, but there may be as many as 30 million more yet to describe.

by Richard Dawkins

A new Richard Dawkins book is always a bit of a treat, and 42 Tales from Life: A modern bestiary looks set to be no exception. This is a collection of animal tales, explaining how they evolved into the extraordinary, intriguing and often beautiful forms they have, with a colourful backdrop of illustrations by 19^th-century naturalist, morphologist and artist Ernst Haeckel. According to the publisher, Dawkins reveals “the fundamental truths behind even the most unfathomable animal behaviours”, such as the galloping of fish, the shape of the rhinoceros’ horn, the surprising similarities between horses and lizards, and why hummingbirds glow so brilliantly. The book starts with “The Cephalopod’s Tale” and “The Hummingbird’s Tale”, ending with “The Bat’s Tale” and “The Frog’s Tale”. They are accompanied by Haeckel’s art, whose depictions of plants, sea creatures and other animals turn out to have fascinated Dawkins all his life.

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Steven D. Allison
Harvard University Press Out 3 November (US) and 27 November (UK)

It’s 2030. Heatwaves are scorching parts of the globe, while elsewhere, hailstorms or tsunamis ravage homes, cities and farmlands. Wildfires rage across continents, Arctic ice sheets dwindle, volcanoes spew left and right, and Earth cracks open along multiple fault lines. Death tolls – human, animal and plant – soar.

Amid this doom and gloom, a superhero arises from scientific labs, ready to fight our – human-made – enemy, climate change. The tiny figure can trap excess carbon from the atmosphere, or bury it underground or at the bottom of the sea, for near-eternity. It can fuel jet engines with clean energy, replace chemical fertilisers, save coral reefs from bleaching and disease, and re-engineer trees, food crops and other plants to survive, even thrive, in droughts.

This scenario is at the heart of Steven Allison’s book, . Allison, professor of ecology at the University of California, Irvine, maintains a balance between realism and optimism as he introduces his as yet unsung hero, the microbe.

These resilient, highly adaptable and primarily single-celled organisms could, he insists, play a far larger role in controlling or maybe even reversing climate change than we imagine. Many of these bacteria, archaea, fungi and viruses are currently dismissed as insignificant or even targeted as pathogens to be wiped out. But the microbes he and others envision using against climate change are non-toxic and non-pathogenic.

The tiny superhero can trap excess carbon from the atmosphere or bury it underground for near-eternity

They are also, unlike other proposals – installing solar mirrors in space or sucking carbon dioxide out of the air – cheap, abundant, easy to produce and totally organic. For Allison, they “offer a rare glimmer of hope”.

His book explores how microbes live and interact with each other, and with “newcomers” such as humans. He focuses especially on how scientists are uncovering the mysteries of microbes and glimpsing the extraordinary properties they could offer if we only understood enough to stop fighting them.

Allison is a captivating storyteller, taking us on colourful journeys to different regions and times. Along the way, we meet fascinating characters, like Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, who ran his own draper’s shop in the Dutch city of Delft during the 17th century, and discovered bacteria by looking at his dental plaque using microscopes and lenses he had custom-built.

Microbes also appear as characters in their own right. We encounter bacteria-eating viruses engaged in an “insidious lifestyle” known as lysogeny inside their hosts, and zooplankton, which, like cattle, graze – and “poop a lot”.

He ensures we stay focused as we navigate complex concepts and vocabulary, like “phycoerythrins”, light-harvesting and naturally fluorescent proteins in certain cyanobacteria. We also get better acquainted with biofilms – layers of slime made of carbohydrates, proteins and other sticky biomolecules. Unlike the ones we know and hate – dental plaque and toilet bowl rings – these biofilms stop important microbes from being swept away in moving water by holding on to water like a sponge. Those microbes are also protected from desiccation, while predators, such as animals or viruses in soil, find it hard to get at prey inside a biofilm. Inside, microbes can gain the carbon and nutrients they need to grow.

In passing, Allison provides us with what can seem like cool facts to use at dinner parties. But they are offered in service of the big picture. Did you know that Sequoia trees can live a thousand years or that their bark is fire-resistant? That the annual per capita energy usage in the US is 76,300 kilowatt-hours, equivalent to the energy in 2300 gallons of petrol? Or that there are nearly 3 billion billion billion oxygen-producing Prochlorococcus cyanobacteria floating around the ocean, thousands more than the stars in the known universe?

One way or another, the core message of The Age of Microbes is delivered: we can get microbes right or we can get them wrong. They are incredibly good at taking carbon in – and at letting it out again. The trick is to get them to swallow carbon and harbour it for thousands of years. That is exactly what they already do when their remains are preserved in the ground or at the bottom of the ocean as “microbial mummies”, forming clumps called necromass.

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Enter the other superheroes in Allison’s book: the researchers and bioengineers studying microbes. There is a refreshing amount of overdue credit given to women scientists. What we now call the greenhouse effect was discovered by Eunice Newton Foote, who published a paper on it in 1856. A century or so later, biologist Mary Mandels pioneered cellulosic ethanol using fungal enzymes. If we ever fly on jets powered by carbon-neutral fuel, Allison says, “you’ll have microbes and Mary Mandels to thank”. He also pays due debt to the Earth wisdom of Indigenous peoples, including the Pacific Northwest Karuk, who understand the importance of mushroom networks.

Today’s labs are investigating the genes behind necromass, hoping to selectively breed for them or to produce “designer microbes”. Others study how to help plants resist climate change. Still others are slogging through complex risk-benefit analyses of commercial products touting microbial benefits. And there is key work on improving soil, depleted or destroyed by millennia of agriculture, using microbial “inoculants”.

We also have some “long-shot” solutions for climate adaptation, especially when it comes to protecting coral reefs, Allison tells me later in an email. There are scary forecasts about losing most of the world’s coral reefs by the end of this century, so “probiotic” microbes that boost heat tolerance and reduce bleaching could save reefs that millions depend on.

Overall, The Age of Microbes is a must-read as climate change bites deeper. Let’s hope that microbes do indeed prove to be an excellent addition to our armoury.

Three more great reads about biology’s frontiers

by Rob Dunn

Rob Dunn explores the biology of homes, from moths in cupboards to thousands of species of insects, bacteria, fungi and plants under our noses. Kill them in the name of “cleanliness” at our peril.

by Michael Grunwald

We might be making things worse by following bad science (and politics) in the fight to feed (maybe) 10 billion people by 2050. Michael Grunwald offers an intriguing narrative.

by Karen G. Lloyd

For more great storytelling, check out microbial biogeochemist Karen Lloyd’s journey to Earth’s deep biosphere. Its “alien” life forms could make us rethink how life is supposed to work.

Christa Lesté-Lasserre is a science journalist specialising in animal health and behaviour

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The three main greenhouse gases reached unprecedented concentrations globally in 2025, continuing an upward trend that will lead to more global warming, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) warns.

The WMO Global Atmosphere Watch programme has published its on the amount of greenhouse gases that have accumulated in the atmosphere, ahead of the UN’s COP31 climate conference, which will be held in Turkey in November.

It reports that the global average surface concentration of carbon dioxide reached a record 426.8 parts per million (ppm) in 2025, which is 53 per cent higher than pre-industrial levels.

The increase from 2024 to 2025 was slightly higher than the average annual growth rate over the past decade, but the increase wasn’t as steep as the previous year.

The levels of methane and nitrous oxide also reached record highs of 1948 parts per billion (ppb) and 339.1 ppb respectively in 2025, an increase of 167 per cent and 26 per cent on pre-industrial levels.

“Greenhouse gases are trapping an unprecedented amount of heat in the atmosphere, providing energy for more extreme weather and associated risks to our economies and societies,” WMO Deputy Secretary-General Ko Barrett said in a statement.

This follows the UN recently confirming that the global target to limit warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels is due to be exceeded in the next few years, with emissions on track to cause 2.8°C of warming by the end of the century.

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The WMO report also warns that more attention should be given to the steadily rising levels of two other gases in the atmosphere, molecular hydrogen and sulphur hexafluoride, as more countries decarbonise their energy systems.

Although hydrogen isn’t a greenhouse gas, it has a strong indirect effect on global warming and is being used for energy storage. Its concentration increased by 5.3 per cent between 2010 and 2024.

Sulphur hexafluoride, used primarily as a spark suppressant in electricity distribution, has the highest 100-year global warming potential overall – approximately 24,000 times that of CO2. According to the WMO, levels have been increasing steadily over the past three decades in proportion to growing global electrification.

After months of vacillation, the UK government has finally announced that drilling will go ahead at the Jackdaw gas field in the North Sea. Prime Minister Andy Burnham has described the move as “a pragmatic approach”, saying “we’ll still require oil and gas as part of our energy needs for decades to come”.

The thing is, the climate of our rapidly heating planet doesn’t recognise pragmatism. The only thing it acknowledges and responds to is how much carbon dioxide is added to the atmosphere, and it doesn’t care where it comes from.

reveals that the rate of global heating doubled over the period 2011 to 2025, compared with 1971 to 2025, so that the planet’s temperature is now rising at a rate of 0.4°C a decade. The corollary of this is that the 1.5°C limit is set to be permanently breached as soon as 2028 – a full decade sooner than previous projections. Furthermore, the speed of heating means that even the projected rise of 2.8°C by 2100 is now unrealistic, and points towards a much hotter world arriving far more quickly.

Nonetheless, a report published today by the UN Environmental Programme claims that, while the 1.5°C threshold is now dead in the water, it may still be possible to limit the global average temperature rise to just a few tenths of a degree above this.

, to have a “good” chance of staying this side of 1.7°C to 1.8°C, greenhouse gas emissions would need to fall 18 per cent by the end of this decade, 45 per cent by 2035 and a whisker under 70 per cent by 2040. That “good” is doing some seriously heavy lifting, but what’s more, the idea that emissions, in the real world, will drop by more than two-thirds in less than 15 years is pure fantasy. Especially at a time when fossil fuel corporations are planning for expansion, aided and abetted by the governments of the UK, the US and others.

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Instead, as pointed out by director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, the implementation of current national commitments would mean global emissions reaching close to 50 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (a measure of the global warming potential of all greenhouse gases) by 2035. And that’s assuming that such commitments are adhered to, which is by no means certain as governments, including that of the UK, row back on green measures.

Today’s decision to go ahead with Jackdaw, and to allow drilling in adjacent areas, is entirely the wrong one. A separate decision about the far more carbon-intensive Rosebank oil field is expected by the end of the year. Going ahead with either project guarantees that the UK is now complicit in pushing up global greenhouse gas emissions, and reducing the chances of limiting the global average temperature rise to something more manageable.

At the same time, the decision marks a conscious commitment to retain fossil fuel infrastructure and lock in hydrocarbons to the country’s energy mix for decades to come. Not only will this endanger national carbon reduction goals, but it will hand other nations an excuse to green-light their own new fossil fuel projects.

Every tonne of CO2 we don’t emit makes our future that little bit less grim, and every tonne we pump out takes fully 400,000 years to remove from the atmosphere completely.

There is nothing pragmatic, then, about opening the North Sea to more drilling. The decision will do little to create jobs and make energy cheaper, but the resulting higher temperatures will ensure that the country is rewarded in the form of more drought, floods and wildfires.

Bill McGuire is professor emeritus of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London.