The timing was exquisite, if unintentional. On the day the United Nations’ retiring leader urged a distracted world to focus on combatting climate change, Australia’s formal Opposition withdrew its support for its country’s “ideology-driven” 2050 goal of net zero carbon emissions.
In a week full of news, Opposition energy spokesman Dan Tehan’s energy policy statement didn’t get much attention. He should be pleased, given the awkward questions raised by his promise to “take a chainsaw” to climate laws.
The Coalition avoided mention of the whole reason for the energy debate – the destabilising impact of fossil energy on climate. It persistently treats our impact on climate and the biosphere as a matter of ideology, something you can choose to take seriously, or not. It chooses not.
This is where the Trump administration in the US and a reciprocal cultural cringe in Australia have landed us. “Reality” is being determined by the word of a favoured leader who says climate change is a hoax, which makes it okay for willing acolytes to ignore or trivialise the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
China is going in the opposite direction. A Carbon Brief analysis shows nearly three-quarters of its current five-year plans include climate and energy policies or targets, while its total installed renewable wind and solar capacity is now over 1970 GW. The US figure, by comparison, is 450 GW.
“The greatest power is not the power to dominate. It is the power to build a future that works for everyone.” So said the retiring UN secretary-general, Antonio Guterres, opening the annual leaders’ gathering at the General Assembly last week. That seems a forlorn hope as domination continues to grab the headlines.
Unlike the Coalition and the Trump administration, Guterres listens to what science says about the climate. To leaders in New York he repeated the warning of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that the world was “almost certain” to breach the Paris Agreement “safe” threshold of 1.5C.
But even this understates the danger, both directly from heating and indirectly from complacency.
The IPCC smooths out spikes in temperature records using a running 20-year average – a decade before and a decade after a given year. The yearly record says that the 1.5C heat threshold was crossed during an El Niño phase in 2024, but the IPCC won’t lock in the breach until the 2030s.
Veteran climatologist James Hansen and other scientists oppose this protocol, which virtually guarantees a delayed response to weather and climate threats. Interests which want to understate the danger can point to the official figure and say that the world has time in hand to fix things.
But it doesn’t. The year after that first crossing of the 1.5C boundary in 2024, our burning of petrol, diesel, marine and aviation fuel, natural gas and coal added over 38 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. And who could have guessed? – 2025 was the second-warmest year on record despite a “cool” La Niña.
That’s what’s driving the long-term trend as another heating phase in the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) cycle cranks up. This El Niño is shaping as one for the ages. It will likely push this year above the 2024 heat record, and then make 2027 yet another record-breaker.
Over 90 per cent of greenhouse warming’s excess heat energy is stored in the ocean. In August the average global sea surface temperature surpassed 21C – another record. August is normally a cool month for sea surface temperatures.
But what does normal mean any more? Surface temperatures in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific, where El Niños form, are at record highs, while some lower depth layers are a monstrous 6C warmer than average. As most of the global ocean is in our hemisphere, the southern summer is when most ocean heating happens. So we have that ahead of us.
Past El Niño patterns indicate that Australia generally and south-east Australia especially will be hotter and drier than average this summer, with a greater than usual risk of wildfire and a high chance of severe coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef. But we have no reliable guide as to how bad this will be, because we’ve never been here before.
The 2026 COP, the 31st, begins in Antalya, Türkiye in the second week of November. Australia is presiding over COP negotiations, from which Donald Trump’s US is formally absent. Next week in Fiji and Tuvalu we will co-host, with Pacific leaders, special pre-COP ministerial and leaders’ events.
Expect nothing from any of this. Then, if nations can find the wherewithal to push through any sort of substantive and lasting emergency measure, you’ll get a pleasant surprise.