Essay by Eric Worrall
If we don’t act quickly, the tropical city of Belém in the Amazon Jungle might become uninhabitable!
COMMENT 25 February 2026
We need a global assessment of avoidable climate-change risks
To understand the urgency of emissions reductions, policymakers and citizens need a full analysis of what is at stake.
By Peter A. Stott, Y. T. Eunice Lo, John H. Marsham, David Obura, Tom H. Oliver, Matthew D. Palmer, Nicola Ranger, Simon Sharpe & Rowan Sutton
Climate change presents many threats to life on our planet: a worsening global food crisis, extreme heat that could lead to millions of deaths, intense droughts, floods and the collapse of crucial ecosystems. Some island countries and cities might disappear beneath rising seas. Conflict, state failure and mass migration could escalate.
Policymakers and citizens are aware of some of these risks, but not necessarily how severe they will be, how rapidly they might emerge or which risks are avoidable. Government leaders need to know the severity and urgency of such risks to help them to make well-informed decisions and set priorities. So far, they have only a partial view.
For example, policymakers might realize that sea-level rise requires spending more money on flood defences, yet neglect the possibility that parts of large cities such as London, New York City or Mumbai might have to be abandoned (see ‘London flooded by rising seas’). They might be aware that more people will die in heatwaves in a hotter climate, yet be unprepared for mass casualties if tens of thousands in one region were to die in conditions exceeding the limits of human tolerance.
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Reflecting wide perspectives. The broad nature of risk assessments means that they are hard to produce. First, they are interdisciplinary. For example, the expertise necessary to identify an impact threshold relevant to a society (such as mass casualties in a city from extreme heat; see ‘Intolerable heat stress’ and ‘Boiling in Belém’), which requires socio-economic and health data, differs from that needed to assess the likelihood of crossing that threshold, which requires climate-modelling information. Experts and practitioners from different fields must thus work together.
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Read more: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00544-6
It’s kind of sad seeing scientists in this situation.
Before I read the Climategate emails, I thought they were all frauds, but after reading Climategate I came to realise many, possibly all of them actually believe the nonsense they are peddling. Climategate is full of activist scientists acting to suppress contrary evidence, not as part of a conspiracy to deceive, but because they believe their mission to save the world is so important, nothing can be allowed into the public domain which might create doubt.
Now the world has moved on, and climate action is no longer a priority, climate scientists are still trying to fight a battle which has been lost, a cause which other people increasingly find irrelevant and implausible. If it wasn’t for all the damage their nonsense climate warnings did to the world economy, all the lives blighted or cut short by soaring energy prices, I would feel a little sorry for them.
