Since the blistering hothouse of the early Eocene, some 50 million years ago, the temperature of our world has followed a broadly cooling trend that saw the transition from greenhouse to ice house (defined by the growth of ice at one or both poles). This culminated, around 2.5 million years ago, in the development of Ice Age conditions, involving the advance of the great continental ice sheets across northern hemisphere high- and mid-latitudes.

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Last week, new UK Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, visited the site of the Stourbridge wildfire, which destroyed 19 homes and badly damaged many others. For the first time, since he came to power last month, he actually mentioned climate change, and acknowledged its role in driving the wildfire activity that has exploded across the nation this summer.

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Barely a month goes by these days without the Yellowstone supervolcano hitting the headlines somewhere or other, and this one is no exception. It might be a swarm of Earth tremors or a minor steam-driven explosion that sets the hearts of news editors and disaster preppers racing. Or, on occasions like this, a new piece of research that sheds light on prospects for the next big bang. Sometimes it can seem as if the entire world is waiting for Yellowstone to blow – in a sense, almost willing it. So, what do the latest findings tell us – and do they bring good news or bad? Let’s dig a bit deeper.

In January 2025, researchers from the United States Geological Survey (USGS) published a new analysis in the journal Nature that reveals exactly what’s going on underneath Yellowstone. By measuring and mapping the electrical conductivity of the rocks, they were able to paint a three-dimensional picture of how much magma there is, and where it’s located. This is because molten rock can be up to a thousand times more conductive than its solid equivalent, so is pretty easy to pick out.

The bad news is that there is one hell of a lot of magma down there. The good news is that it’s not all in one place, nor is it filling some great subterranean void. Most of the magma, in fact, is contained in pockets, each making up 2–30 per cent (by volume) of the hot, solid, rock within which they are contained. Furthermore, the areas of magma-hosting rock are not all joined up, so even if the volcano did blow, it couldn’t all come out in one go. The most interesting revelation, however, lies in what the study tells us about where the next volcanic action might be centred.

It turns out that the magma is not evenly distributed. Most of it is concentrated under the north-east of the Yellowstone Caldera – the huge crater left by the last super-eruption 630,000 years ago. Somewhere between 400 and 500 cubic kilometres (95–120 cubic miles) of sticky, silica-rich rhyolite magma is squatting here. That’s significantly more than the volume of magma that erupted in Yellowstone’s huge Mesa Falls blast around 1.3 million years ago. Furthermore, hot basalt magma rising from the mantle below is pumping more and more heat into this part of the volcano, keeping the rhyolite magma hot and, over time, ramping up the total volume of molten rock.

This may sound disconcerting, to say the least, but remember that the magma is spread around. All these pockets of molten rock would need to connect up and pool together before there is sufficient volume to come out in one hefty eruption. Nevertheless, the authors of the Nature paper have hypothesised that this part of the volcano will be the most likely place for the next big outburst. The big question is – when?

There is a great deal of talk about the next Yellowstone super-eruption being due, but this – as the latest research also bears out – simply isn’t the case. Alongside the aforementioned Mesa Falls eruption, there have been two other much bigger blasts, the Huckleberry Ridge eruption a little over two million years ago, and the 630,000-year-old Lava Creek outburst. The average return period of the three eruptions is 735,000 years, so notwithstanding the lack of any statistical rigour, given such a small sample size, there’s no reason to think that another super-eruption is in any way imminent.

It’s also worth observing that the Mesa Falls eruption, while massive, wasn’t deserving enough to be awarded the epithet ‘super’, as the volume of its deposits fell below the 1,000 cubic kilometres threshold required. Consequently, the return period between the two really big ones is nearer one and a half million years. The reality, then, is that the next Yellowstone super-eruption could be a very long time coming – but it will come. And, when it does, its impact on the United States and the entire planet will be immense.

To get some idea of what a future Yellowstone super-eruption might look like, we need to look back in time at those earlier explosions, which have many features in common. All involved a detonation so great that the erupted magma was torn apart, creating colossal quantities of ash. In addition, each eruption was followed by the collapse of the crust above the emptied magma reservoir, leading to the formation of a giant caldera.

The current 60-kilometre-wide (35-mile) Yellowstone Caldera was formed during the most recent Lava Creek eruption. While each super-eruption marked the climax of an eruption cycle that was terminated by collapse, this was both preceded and followed by volcanic activity on a smaller scale. This highlights an important point that doesn’t get much airing in discussions about the Yellowstone threat, and that is that there have been plenty of smaller eruptions between the three biggest, and many of these have not been explosive. In fact, the last eruption at Yellowstone involved the relatively quiet extrusion of lava around 70,000 years ago.

But let’s zero in on the big ones which, let’s face it, is what everyone wants to know about. What would we experience as Yellowstone girded itself for volcanic cataclysm, and during the eruption itself? One thing we don’t know too much about is how long the build-up to a big one takes, and what the warning signs would be. Even today, there are hot springs, bubbling mud pools and swarms of Earth tremors. Meanwhile, the land surface continually rises and falls as if a giant slumbers below, which, in a sense, it does.

It might seem logical to expect a super-eruption to be preceded by more of the same warning signs we see in smaller eruptions – just on a larger scale, possibly with growing unrest over decades or longer. However, research on past eruptions at another supervolcano, Mount Toba in Indonesia, suggests otherwise. The findings indicate that warning signs could be minimal, offering little to suggest that a world-changing eruption was on its way. This is very bad news for anyone living within 100km (60 miles) or so of the Yellowstone volcano, because once all hell breaks loose, there will be little chance of escape.

This isn’t to say that a Yellowstone super-eruption will explode onto the scene unannounced. Recent fieldwork by geologists has revealed that the 630,000-year-old Lava Creek event was preceded by two smaller-scale explosive eruptions, probably separated by years, maybe even decades. When the volcano reawakens, we may well see the same thing again – smaller ‘starter’ events heralding the main course.

From a mitigation point of view, in such a case, the big problem lies in trying to predict which eruption, if any, will be ‘super’, something that will not actually become apparent until after the event, when the amount of disgorged material can be quantified. However, whether Yellowstone vomits out 500, 750, or 1,000 cubic kilometres of ash and debris is pretty immaterial – all would be cataclysmic and devastating for the country. Whenever it comes, the next Yellowstone super-eruption will be impossible to miss and – whether you live close by or on the other side of the planet – its consequences will be unavoidable.

The eruption is likely to be focused, initially at least, at a single vent – breaking through where the swelling crust above the magma reservoir is weakest. As viscous rhyolite magma – packed with gas, and under enormous pressure – breaks the surface, it tears itself apart, the initial detonation deafening anyone unfortunate enough to be in the vicinity.

Blasting upwards faster than the speed of sound, a plume of ash and pumice (the low-density rock we use to abrade hard skin) reaches the edge of space within minutes, spreading laterally to plunge everywhere below into pitch darkness. A torrent of hot ash and pumice falling across Yellowstone and the surrounding region starts fires, heats the air and makes it almost impossible to breathe. But there is worse to come – much worse.

As part of the eruption column collapses under its own weight, it triggers fast-moving surges of hot ash, incandescent gas, and near-molten pumice fragments – known as pyroclastic flows – that hurtle outwards in all directions. Travelling at speeds of more than 300km an hour (180mph), overtopping hills and filling valleys, these pyroclastic flows destroy and bury everything within about 100km (60 miles) of the vent, turning every living thing – from lodgepole pine to chipmunk, from moose to human – into charcoal.

Meanwhile, the upper part of the column of ash and pumice expands rapidly, even pushing against prevailing winds, forming an ever-widening, giant ‘umbrella’ that brings darkness and a deluge of ash and pumice as it goes. Within 24 hours, ash would be falling across much of the United States and parts of Canada, bringing down power lines, shorting out electronics, causing transport chaos, flattening crops in the fields, and contaminating water supplies. Normal life would be at a standstill.

Modelling of the ash cloud generated by a future Yellowstone super-eruption, conducted by USGS scientist Larry Mastin and colleagues, reveals that for most scenarios, ash more than a centimetre deep would cover a land area of anything between a few and several million kilometres. Places like Miami and New York would get away with just a few millimetres of falling ash, while up to 3cm would fall as far afield as Chicago and San Francisco, and Winnipeg in Canada. Anywhere closer than 1,500km (930 miles) – like Denver and Salt Lake City – would experience extremely disruptive ash fall, the depth increasing to many metres as Yellowstone is approached.

As ash particles act as nuclei for water in the atmosphere, heavy rains would be triggered to add to the mayhem, turning much of the country into a sea of mud, clogging rivers and bringing widespread flooding. The ash would also carry with it huge quantities of toxic metals, such as arsenic, cadmium, lead and mercury, bringing the potential for long-term contamination of water, crops and animal feed.

It’s likely that all of this ash won’t be dumped in one go, and that the eruption will happen in stages, perhaps as new vents open up, extending its disruptive impact. The worst could well come during the climactic phase, when magma is erupted in the form of giant curtains along great arcing fractures. These would open as the central block of crust above the magma reservoir sinks into the evacuated space beneath to form a new caldera. In total, the whole thing could last for weeks, perhaps as long as a month. But this is just the beginning.

While the effects of the heavy and extensive ash-fall would devastate agriculture across much of North America, and bring the US economy to its knees, this isn’t the worst of it. Any remaining ash in the atmosphere will settle out pretty quickly, but this isn’t the case for the vast quantities of sulphur dioxide gas blasted high into the stratosphere during the eruption, which will spread across the planet within weeks.

When combined with atmospheric water vapour, the gas forms an aerosol of tiny particles that build a global ‘veil’. This shields the planet from incoming sunlight and lowers surface temperatures. The 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines brought about a sudden drop in global temperature of around 0.5°C (about 1°F) for a couple of years. Although this was the second biggest volcanic blast of the 20th century, it was around one hundred times smaller than Yellowstone’s Lava Creek super-eruption.

Travelling back a couple of centuries, the great 1815 eruption of Indonesia’s Tambora volcano – three to four times bigger than Pinatubo – had a major impact on global weather, leading to the so-called ‘Year Without a Summer’ in Europe. Widespread harvest failures across the continent and in the eastern United States brought civil unrest, bread riots, and the last major subsistence crisis in the developed world. What then would be the result of a future Yellowstone explosion that was 25 times bigger?

It would be reasonable to think that scaling up would result in a much bigger climate impact, and computer modelling suggests this is the case. The global temperature after a Yellowstone super-eruption-sized event is predicted to fall by up to 4°C (7°F) on average, by up to 7°C (13°F) across land, and by more than 10°C (18°F) across central North America. Temperatures begin to climb again within a few years, but it takes a couple of decades at least for them to return to previous levels. Not surprisingly, the sea ice cover at the poles increases significantly, and there are major changes in global weather patterns.

Needless to say, such severe cooling – which nearly matches a return to Ice Age temperatures – would be catastrophic for global agriculture, leading to widespread harvest failure, and famine on an unimaginable scale, across both the majority world and in developed nations. All things considered, it would be a surprise if global society and economy survived in any form that we might recognise. But there is a glimmer of light through the gloom.

A recent NASA study has broken with the consensus to speculate that the temperature fall following Yellowstone’s next super-eruption might end up not being much greater than that following Pinatubo or Tambora, although the researchers admit there are big uncertainties. So, good news? Maybe.

Ultimately, we won’t know just how severe the resulting cooling will be until Yellowstone erupts again. However cold it gets, the direct impact of the eruption on the United States will likely have enormous repercussions across the world, and – in its own right – will severely test the resilience of global society and economy.

Perhaps the only saving grace is that – as the latest research tells us – it doesn’t look like happening anytime soon.

A version of this article was published in BBC Science Focus magazine on June 26th, 2026

As Europe bakes in what could be its hottest and driest summer on record, the rapid transformation of our climate is harder than ever to ignore. But how much hotter will it get, and what will that mean for life on Earth?

To get a picture of our future, we can either use computer models or look to episodes of rapid climate change in the geological record. While models are invaluable in terms of tracking where our world may be heading, peering back into deep time provides unrivalled information about cause and effect; about how the climate has changed in the past and what the consequences were. There is no guesswork involved, as the evidence is all laid out for us in the sediments and rocks, in the ice sheets and in the remains of ancient life.

Looking back in time also helps us to put human-caused global heating in context by making comparisons with past episodes of rapid temperature increase, and when we do this, the news isn’t good. It isn’t so much the degree of heat that is the issue – our world has been much hotter than it is today for much of its 4.6-billion-year history – but the speed of change.

Perhaps barring the immediate aftermath of the dinosaur-obliterating asteroid impact 66 million years ago, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have never risen as quickly as they have in the last couple of centuries. Even worse, nowhere in the geological record is there evidence for the average temperature of our world climbing as quickly as it is now. This means 10 times faster than during the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, which marked extreme hothouse conditions 56 million years ago, and at least 20 times faster than at the end of the last glacial period.

Judicious analysis of past climates also permits us to recognise potential analogues for where our world is heading in the decades and centuries to come. Over the last 50 million years or so, the planet’s climate has followed a broadly cooling trend, which we are now rapidly rewinding – a process, if you like, of prehistorification. Deciding how far back we will end up is still within our gift, but it is a given that our grandchildren will grow up in a climate different to any experienced during the tenure of human civilisation.

Modelling studies suggest that if – and it’s still a big if – emissions peak by 2040 and then fall quickly, we will rewind the climate clock 3 million years and bequeath to our descendants a Late Pliocene climate. Then, atmospheric CO₂ levels were much lower than today, at 330 to 400 parts per million (ppm), but the temperature was between 2.5ºC and 4ºC above the pre-industrial average, and sea level 15 to 25 metres higher. Pliocene conditions could start to appear in the continental heartlands as soon as the 2030s and spread out from there.

If we fail to rein in emissions fast enough, or if natural feedback effects drive more heating than expected, then a further rewinding of the climate clock back to the Miocene becomes more likely; to a time 15 million to 17 million years ago, when CO₂ concentrations, at 400 to 600 ppm, were a bit lower to moderately higher than they are today. At 6ºC to 8ºC above pre-industrial, however, the temperature was far higher than expected for such CO₂ levels, suggesting the involvement of other heating factors that we don’t yet fully understand. Sea level was maybe 50 metres higher than it is today.

But this may not be the end of it. The current high rate of heating documented by satellite observations and borne out by Earth’s rapidly escalating energy imbalance implies that rewinding the climate clock back fully 50 million years remains within the bounds of possibility, eventually reprising the blistering heat of the early Eocene hothouse. Such conditions would make most of our world uninhabitable for humans, and severely test the capacity of our species to prevail.

As the Persian poet and mathematician Omar Khayyam observed almost 1000 years ago: “When I want to understand what is happening today, or try to decide what will happen tomorrow, I look back.” They are words that serve us well as we contemplate our future climate, and that we ignore at our peril.

A version of this article appeared in New Scientist on July 24th 2026

Today I, and other UK climate scientists, sent an open letter to the Energy Secretary, Miatta. Fahnbulleh, asking her to take serious note of the science when making a decision about the Jackdaw and Rosebank oil fields. The letter and list of signatories follows.

Dear Secretary of State,

As climate scientists, we write to you at this crucial moment to urge you not to forget the scientific evidence when you make your decisions about the Jackdaw and Rosebank fields.

We do not have the vast sums of money the fossil fuel industry uses to orchestrate both effective lobbying and the media narratives that have delayed climate mitigation for decades. The contest for politicians’ and public attention is heavily stacked in the favour of the fossil fuel industry.

But atmospheric physics doesn’t care about what pleases the industry or is perceived as politically palatable. It cares about the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. We have already burned far too much, and this has made extreme heat, fires, floods and failed harvests more frequent and more deadly. We know that burning more fossil fuels will accelerate already-severe and escalating threats to life. There is nothing pragmatic about enabling this to continue into the decades ahead.

Climate scientists - echoed by the United Nations, International Energy Agency and many others - have repeatedly cautioned that new fossil fuels are not compatible with limiting global heating and thus protecting the lives of billions of people and countless other species. Meanwhile our colleagues in the energy sector have demonstrated affordable and achievable pathways to evolve beyond fossil fuels.

Amidst a summer of devastating wildfires, we welcomed the Foreign Secretary’s recent statement affirming the government’s stated commitment to leading a green transition. But pledges must be matched with genuinely transformative action, and new oil and gas development is not compatible with this. What we do here in one of the world’s wealthiest countries - one which takes pride in our science and our global influence - really matters.

The climate crisis is evolving at a rapid and accelerating pace, yet scientists’ warnings are increasingly drowned out. Against a backdrop of lost lives, shattered livelihoods and ecosystems disappearing in smoke - a stark reminder of the consequences of climate change - we sincerely hope that our plea will be heard.

Yours sincerely,

Bill McGuire, Professor Emeritus of Geophysical & Climate Hazards, University College London

​​Ken Carslaw FRS, Professor of Atmospheric Science, University of Leeds

Friederike Otto, Professor of Climate Science, Imperial College London

Joanna Haigh, Professor Emerita of Atmospheric Physics, Imperial College London

Gail Whiteman, Hoffmann Impact Professor for Accelerating Action on Nature & Climate, University of Exeter

Benjamin Sovacool, Professor of Earth and Environment, Boston University; Professor of Energy Policy, University of Sussex

Pete Smith FRS, FRSE, Professor of Soils and Global Change, University of Aberdeen

Peter Cox CBE, Professor of Climate System Dynamics, University of Exeter

Richard Pancost, Professor of Biogeochemistry, University of Bristol

Hayley Fowler FRS, Professor of Climate Change Impacts and Director of the Centre of Climate and Environmental Resilience, Newcastle University

Prof Ralf Toumi, Director, Grantham Institute, Imperial College London

Richard Allan, Professor of Climate Science, University of Reading

Keith Shine FRS, Emeritus Regius Professor of Meteorology and Climate Science, University of Reading

Stephan Harrison, Professor of Climate and Environmental Change, Exeter University

Neil Arnold, Professor of Glaciology, University of Cambridge

Pier Luigi Vidale, Professor of Climate System Science, University of Reading, UK

Raymond Pierrehumbert FRS, Professor of Planetary Physics, University of Oxford

Neil Adger, Professor of Geography, University of Exeter

Hannah Cloke, Regius Professor of Meteorology and Climate Science, University of Reading

Ian Willis, Professor of Glaciology, University of Cambridge

Roland Gehrels, Professor of Physical Geography, University of York

Paul Valdes, Professor, School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol

Lorraine Whitmarsh, Professor of Environmental Psychology, University of Bath

Dave Reay, Emeritus Professor of Carbon Management & Education, University of Edinburgh

Roger Few, Professorial Research Fellow in Environment, Risk and Development, University of East Anglia

Chris Thomas FRS, Professor of Biology, University of York

Lisa Emberson, Professor in Environmental Science, University of York

Rosemary Green, Professor of Environment, Food and Health, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine

Declan Conway, Professorial Research Fellow, Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, London School of Economics and Political Science

David Thomas, Professor of Geography, University of Oxford

Christopher Merchant, Professor of Ocean and Earth Observation, University of Reading

James Dyke, Associate Professor of Earth System Science, Global Systems Institute, University of Exeter

Rachel James, Associate Professor in Climate Science, University of Bristol

Rebecca Dell, Assistant Professor in Polar Studies, University of Cambridge

Mark New, Visiting Professor, University of Bristol

You probably missed it – certainly most of the media did – but in the middle of last month a senior government politician admitted for the first time that it might be a good idea if people started taking ‘small but important steps’ in preparation for potential national emergencies.

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Such is the astonishing scale of the wildfires burning at the gates of Bordeaux and Madrid, that if they had happened 20 – even 10 – years back, they may well have shocked the world into taking action on the climate crisis. But like the proverbial frog in a pot of slowly heating water, we have become inured; not only to the ever more devastating impacts of climate breakdown, but increasingly to the actions needed to bring global heating to heel.

Even as more than 35,000 wildfires rage across the surface of our world, and as we continue to rewind our planet’s climate so it resembles hotter episodes from its distant past, governments and trading blocs are very deliberately turning away from climate action.

The latest evidence that we are not only doing too little but actually doing less as time goes by is provided by the climate action media platform, We Don’t Have Time. It reported last week that the 12 months to July this year saw the reversal across the world of 45 climate policies. The retreat on climate action is global, but Europe – previously seen as a leader in emissions reductions – is in the vanguard, weakening measures across the board, including in the areas of carbon pricing, methane emissions and the phasing out of petrol and diesel vehicles.

This isn’t yet an apocalyptic reversal of the majority of climate commitments, as the continuity of countless other climate policies testifies. We are, however, at an especially critical period: if we don’t want backsliding on climate action to continue, we have to act now.

We Don’t Have Time lays the blame squarely at the foot of lobbying by the fossil fuel sector, and other industries antagonistic to climate action, making the point that as long as the usual suspects continue to make the most noise in the meetings where decisions are made, they will get what they want. What we have to do, then, is to make even more noise – on the streets, via the ballot box and in the media – putting pressure on politicians and governments so that they don’t cave in to vested business interests.

We must force those in power to join the dots between the fires raging across Europe and the El Nino building in the Pacific, and the activities of the fossil fuel corporations and others who choose not to do so.

But we need our own lobbyists too – those qualified and in positions to speak truth to power about the dire straits we are already in, who can add credence to the noisy debate. Cue the world’s climate scientists. At this critical moment, the science has a duty to out-shout and out-shine corporate weasel words and government irresponsibility. The problem is that even now, at a time when the rate of global heating has doubled, this is just not happening.

Sure, there are climate scientists out there telling it like it is, making a lot of noise and often putting their livelihoods and career prospects on the line, but they remain the exception rather than the rule. Far too many individuals, for one reason or another, still keep silent, heads below the parapet, fears and frets internalised.

In 2021, I wrote an open letter to all climate scientists, reminding them that they had a duty to speak out, to come down off the fence and to force those who need to know to listen to the truth. Sadly, five years on, little has changed. For far too many, fears about funding, academic advancement, prestige, and the contempt or ridicule of colleagues, still trump speaking out.

As the heat continues to ratchet up, this cannot go on. If we want to have any possibility of drowning out the bogus claptrap of those determined to prevent serious climate action, then climate scientists – all scientists for that matter – need to wake up now and make themselves heard.

Climate science is a vast tent that incorporates aspects of geology, chemistry, physics, oceanography, meteorology, economics, social science and many other fields, so that one source putting the number of climate scientists at 18,000 worldwide is almost certainly an underestimate. When it comes to scientists of every ilk, the global figure comes out at not far short of 10 million. Just imagine how much racket the scientific community could make if it spoke with the same voice – demanding the reinstatement of climate-friendly policies, arguing for more rapid emissions cuts, and at the same time overwhelming the perfidious calls for inertia from those lobbying for business as usual.

This may well be our last chance to turn things around; to help politicians grow the backbones they need to stand up to vested interests. At this crucial time every scientist needs to examine their conscience, take on board the reality that there will be no research grants on a dead planet – and act accordingly.

A version of this article was published in The Guardian on July 29th 2026

Hardly surprisingly, given the recent apocalyptic scenes in France and Spain, thoughts have turned more than usual, recently, to humanity’s future prospects. Substantially higher temperatures locked in for millennia, alongside rising sea levels that will ultimately submerge every coastal community, ensure that we are heading for grim times. But is our species actually facing the prospect of extinction? Wiping out eight billion plus individuals is not easy, and even during times when there were far fewer humans on the planet, we still managed to muddle through shocks that threatened the existence of the species.

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As we look around us at the prodigious wildfires driving mass evacuations in France and Spain, at the brown, scorched, croplands of the UK, and towards the mammoth El Niño building in the tropical Pacific, it beggars belief that some climate deniers insist upon telling us that a new ice age is on the way. But such is the case.

The idea that a return of the ice is imminent has history. Back in the early 1970s, there was a flurry of concern – at least amongst elements of the popular media – that a new ice age was on the way. This was amplified, at the time, by Nigel Calder, the British popular science writer and broadcaster, who warned that ‘the threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind’.

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We hear a great deal about how much our world has heated up since pre-industrial times, and how we are on the cusp of crashing through the 1.5°C dangerous climate change guardrail, and rightly so. Rarely, however, do we read about what a rise of this magnitude means for different parts of the planet. Because this is a global average temperature increase, and unless everywhere is heating up at exactly the same rate, then some places must be heating up more slowly and others at a higher rate – the winners and losers if you like, at least for now. So, what does the planetwide heating map look like.

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The average temperature of our world, across the last three years, has been more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial – the aspirational limit defined by the 2015 Paris Climate Accord, and widely regarded as marking the dangerous climate change guardrail beyond which things will get very nasty indeed. Due to the manner in which it is calculated, the permanent crossing of the 1.5°C threshold won’t be confirmed until a decade after it actually happens. Bearing in mind the unprecedented El Niño that is rapidly developing in the tropical Pacific, however, it is almost certain that the only way we will see the 1.5°C mark again, is by looking in our rear-view mirror.

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The media made little of it, and it might have passed you by too, but a few weeks back the UN published its 3^rd World Ocean Assessment. As you might expect, it contained plenty of shocking news about pollution, acidification, overfishing, marine heatwaves and more. It also confirmed a single statistic that is scary in its own right – the rate of sea-level rise has doubled in just the last 10 years.

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“Taken together, the bleaching reefs and ever more monstrous wildfires, the increasingly acid oceans and the collapsing ice sheets, the blistering heatwaves and biblical floods, can be interpreted together as a planet-wide SOS. Crucially, and terrifyingly, studies of ancient climate change tell us not that we have been here before, but that we have never been here before”.

The Fate of the World is now out in hardback, e-book and audiobook formats, with the paperback version due out next year. The hardback will be out in the US in January 2027. FYI, chapter headings and a taster extract from the Introduction are below. Please do feel free to spread the word.

Chapter 1. Everything Under the Sun

Chapter 2. Carbon Planet

Chapter 3. Into the Freezer – and Out Again

Chapter 4. A Memory of Oceans

Chapter 5. Shocks, Switches and See-Saws

Chapter 6. Restless Earth

Chapter 7. Endings, Close Calls and New Beginnings

Chapter 8. Planet Human

Chapter 9. The Fate of the World

“Climate models are now extremely sophisticated and can make a reasonable fist of predicting how hot our world is set to get, and how quickly, for various emissions scenarios. Nonetheless, the parts played by feedback effects and tipping points remain hard to constrain, so we need to look elsewhere to try to better pin down their roles in our future climate. And this is where our planet’s 4.6 billion-year history comes in.

By delving into what we geologists call ‘deep time’, we can see both cause and effect: how the climate has changed before and what the outcomes were. We don’t need to make guesses, educated or otherwise, because all the evidence is laid out for us in the rocks and sediments, in the ice sheets, and in the remains of ancient life, making up the repository of information I use to build and develop the core message of this book. This is how our planet remembers the past, and how it can shed light on what is happening to our climate in the early decades of the twenty-first century and beyond. The geological record is never wrong.

Evaluating how our climate has changed in the past not only furnishes us with an unrivalled guide to where we are headed but also – through a deep-time perspective (as considered on a geological or cosmological scale) – provides the context that allows us to appraise current global heating against the bigger picture. By zeroing-in on times of dramatic climate change in the geological record that mirror where we are today – in terms, say, of temperatures or greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere – and examining what happened next, we can pick out critical information relevant to today’s climate and that of the world to come. And this is the lens through which we will peer back thousands, millions, even billions of years to tease out the lessons ancient episodes of environmental upheaval hold for us now, and in the future: from variations in the output of the sun, via the sudden heat spikes known as hyper-thermals, to the balmy episodes that punctuated the bitter cold of the Ice Age; from times when our ancestors teetered on the edge of extinction to moments when life itself almost vanished from the whole planet; from the wild swings of climate-tipping points and sea-saws to near-instantaneous hikes in sea level and volcano and earthquake storms driven by the melting of the great ice sheets.

As global temperatures approach those of the last interglacial period, known as the Eemian, we have to realise that our world is already embarked on a journey back to a prehistoric climate, so we are all deeply invested in trying to find out what is in store for us and those who come after.

This, then, is a history book about the future. It’s about where our world and its climate are headed, but how its roots are buried deeply in the past, across the immense span of time that has passed since the Earth was cobbled together from the left overs of exploding stars.

What you are about to read is an extraordinary story, set on a very special planet that happens to be our home, a home that has nurtured our species for 300 millennia and is the only one we have. The narrative takes you on a roller-coaster journey, an odyssey of discovery and wonder that will encompass everything from colliding worlds to planet-wide freezes – from magma oceans to submerged landscapes, from the explosion of life to mass culls, and from the very first single-celled creatures to humankind. And where better to begin than with our local star, without which, after all, we wouldn’t be here”.

They called it Black Sunday. The most catastrophic dust storm in US history brought mayhem to six states, from Nebraska in the north to Texas in the south. Ferocious winds picked up an estimated third of a million tonnes of dusty topsoil and transformed it into a black blizzard.

Residents of Dodge City in Kansas reported the arrival in mid-afternoon of a colossal inky cloud, some 200m high, that turned day to pitch-black night within seconds. As the sun was blotted out, the temperature plunged from 29°C into the low teens, and visibility reduced rapidly to zero.

The immense storm plagued an area of around a million square kilometres and took hours to blow itself out. In its wake, it left wasted fields of destroyed crops and the bodies of livestock, half-buried homes and barns, and the dead – either suffocated outright or succumbing to dust pneumonia (pneumoconiosis) brought on by dust-choked lungs.

The Black Sunday storm occurred over 90 years ago, on 14 April 1935, and was emblematic of the so-called ‘Dust Bowl’, which left many people destitute or homeless and brought devastation to huge tracts of the American prairie. Now, as dust storms become increasingly common in the US, some are wondering if it might happen all over again.

During the 1930s, these dust storms could be lethal due to the sheer amount of dust they moved. It accumulated in attics caused ceilings to collapse, while the build-up of high-voltage static electricity in the storms electrocuted people in their cars. Neither of these are an issue today, but dust-related health problems, like the pneumoconiosis that took lives on Black Sunday, remain. University of California researcher, Estrella Herrera, who works on the impact of dust on health, has found that hospitalisation can increase fivefold after a Texas dust storm.

“Breathing in high levels of particulate matter floating in the air can lead to inflammation of different parts of the body and exacerbate a wide range of health problems a person may already have,” said Herrera.

Young children, the elderly, and those with pre-existing conditions, like asthma and bronchitis, are especially at risk from dust inhalation. The finest particles can even get into the bloodstream and the brain, raising the risk of heart issues and strokes. In sub-Saharan Africa, just a 15 percent rise in the level of fine dust particles in the air has been linked to the infant mortality rate jumping by a quarter.

Worse still, dangerous bacteria or fungal spores can piggyback on dust storm particles, which can then spread them far and wide. Across the Sahel, south of the Sahara, high levels of dust are strongly correlated with incidences of deadly bacterial meningitis, defining a meningitis ‘belt’ that stretches from Senegal in the west to Ethiopia in the east.

In the US, there has been a huge uptick in occurrences of a fungal infection known as Valley Fever, and dust storms have been fingered as the cause. The illness, which often presents similarly to bronchitis or pneumonia, can last for months and is sometimes fatal. Valley fever is endemic to the dry and dusty south west, but it is being diagnosed increasingly often in other parts of the country.

A number of pieces of research have linked a rise in the occurrence of the infection with dust storms, suggesting that spores in the soil are picked up and dispersed far beyond their source, but there is, as yet, no robust evidence for such causality. Nonetheless, the hotter, drier, dustier conditions brought by global heating are widely thought to be playing a role in pushing up the infection rate across the whole country, which increased tenfold between 1998 and 2011. The illness is already claiming victims in Oregon and Washington State, and is predicted to spread to the Midwest and into Canada in the coming decades.

At the heart of renewed dust storm activity in the US are the drought states of New Mexico, Arizona and Texas. In 2025, the city of El Paso in Texas, experienced the most dust storms since the 1930s, following two years of record heat that resulted in the further loss of vegetation and soil moisture. This coincided with the country as a whole experiencing its windiest early spring on record.

To the west, New Mexico endured 50 dust storms in 2025, one of which spawned a dust cloud that extended all the way to the east coast and into the Atlantic. In August of the same year, a fast-moving wall of dust slammed into Phoenix, Arizona, grounding flights and cutting power to 40,000 homes.

Beyond the drought region, the mid-west state of Oklahoma – once at the epicentre of the Dust Bowl – saw a combination of strong winds, dust storms and wildfire smoke lead, in March last year, to extremely poor air quality and the declaration of a state of emergency. And there is no sign that things will improve. On the contrary, prospects for a less dusty future are poor.

A new study of past drought conditions across the south west United States, published in the journal Nature, suggests that global heating could lead to them persisting to the end of the century and quite possibly far beyond. Timothy Shanahan, a researcher at the University of Texas at Austin, and a co-author of the paper, warned that: “water managers need to start planning for the possibility that this drought isn’t just a rough patch – it could be the new reality”.

And the reality is that dust costs money – and lots of it. For example, sand and dust storms cost North Africa and the Middle East an eye-watering $150 billion (£112 billion) every year. While dust storms can be devastating to the lives and livelihoods of those residing close to the great deserts of Africa and Asia, their economic impact is greatest in developed countries with complex infrastructures. In the US, wind erosion and dust in 2017 is estimated to have cost the economy an extraordinary $154 billion (£115 billion), four times higher than an estimate for 1995, and it would be reasonable to think that it has gone up again since.

This huge cost arises from the widespread negative impacts dust has on both arable and livestock farming, air and surface transport, power and communications networks, and health. Damage caused to US homes and gardens by blowing dust alone, in 2017, totalled an astonishing $40 billion (£30 billion), while the price of road traffic accidents due to poor visibility during dust storms added up to $250 million (£187 million) in the same year. Dust also added $4 billion (£3 billion) to the nation’s energy costs in 2017, in particular due to its impact on renewable energy; the gritty air made wind turbines less efficient, while dust-covered solar panels produced up to 30 per cent less power.

These destructive dust storms, and their close relatives, sandstorms, are becoming more frequent right across the planet. The reason: persistent and intensive drought conditions made worse by global heating, alongside poor land and water management. Something like 80 per cent of the global dust budget comes from the deserts of North Africa and the Middle East, but around 330 million people across 150 countries are now affected by dust storms and sandstorms. An estimated two billion tonnes of dust and sand – equivalent to the combined volume of more than 300 Great Pyramids of Giza – now routinely floods the atmosphere every year.

Dust, as we know from personal experience, gets everywhere. In a big enough volume, and driven by powerful winds, it is all-pervasive and highly disruptive. As Secretary General of the World Meteorological Organisation, Celeste Saulo observes, “Sand and dust storms do not just mean dirty windows and hazy skies. They harm the health and quality of life of millions of people and cost many millions of dollars through disruption to air and ground transport, on agriculture and on solar energy production.”

When the wind is set fair, dust can be carried many thousands of miles beyond its source. In 2024, giant plumes of African dust reached across the Atlantic to the Caribbean and into South America, while the northward passage of Saharan dust to Europe is becoming ever more common. In the UK, it is not unusual – especially in summer – to find car windscreens and paintwork covered in a thin film of North African dust.

Such dusty conditions can bring orange-tinted skies and spectacular sunsets, and even so-called ‘Blood Rain’. This forms when precipitation falls through air thick with dust, forming muddy droplets that often have a reddish or orange tinge, and which leave every exposed surface covered in a sticky, rust-coloured layer.

In April 2025, it was Spain and Portugal’s turn to be deluged in blood rain, as a dust plume heading north from the Sahara, mixed with a storm moving westwards into Europe. This dispersal of dust across great distances by winds and weather systems isn’t just a nuisance – it’s a health hazard. Between 2018 and 2022, 3.8 billion people – getting on for half the planet’s population – were exposed to dust levels above the World Health Organisation’s safety threshold, a hike of more than 30 per cent compared to 2003-2007. In some places, populations were breathing air containing unsafe levels of dust on almost every day of the year.

To understand what’s driving these storms to become increasingly destructive, we must first look at where they come from. The raw material of most dust storms is loose surface soil. The 1930s Dust Bowl was largely a consequence of thoughtless farming methods, which involved digging up the tough prairie grasses that held the topsoil together, roots and all. When drought conditions destroyed the crops that replaced them, there was nothing to anchor the dried-out soils, which were spun up into the huge dust storms.

The Dust Bowl provided a salutary lesson in how not to farm, and led to better agricultural practices that mean a repeat is unlikely. Nonetheless, a combination of global heating, reducing water resources, and the spread of invasive plant varieties that increase the amount of bare soil, means that the US is rapidly becoming dustier, with the south west of the country leading the way – dust storms in the region increasing almost two and a half times from the 1990s to the 2000s.

The US megadrought is now into its third decade, marking the most severe dry episode in more than a thousand years. Drought inevitably means more in the way of loose surface soil, so it is no surprise that dust storms are becoming more frequent and more intense across the region. They are further galvanised by stronger winds and falling soil moisture levels, both related to changes in ocean and atmospheric circulation associated with large-scale variations in Pacific sea-surface temperatures.

Wind is just as important an ingredient as dry soils in the dust-storm recipe, essential as it is to lofting the dust high into the atmosphere. As Thomas Gill, an environmental scientist at the University of Texas, El Paso, points out, “You need wind as much as anything to get dust. The number of dust events will rely on the number of windstorms.”

A moderate breeze may be sufficient to promote a so-called dust ‘event’, which sees visibility reduced to somewhere between one and ten kilometres. Stronger winds will whip up more dust, slashing visibility to less than a kilometre, which marks the upper limit for dust storm conditions. Less commonly, the violent downdraft associated with an intense thunderstorm can mobilise immense quantities of dust, driving a roiling, fast-moving wall of dust or sand particles known as a haboob.

As the planet continues to heat up, so it is getting far more arid. The Sahara Desert expanded by almost a fifth in the 20th century and an astonishing three-quarters of the Earth’s land has become permanently drier in the last 30 years. Inevitably, a drier planet will also be a dustier one. But there are still actions that can be taken to damp down the dust – at least to some extent.

Increasing plant cover will obviously help by binding the soil together, though growing them is not easy in regions impacted by extreme drought conditions. Dirt roads, a big source of dust in the south west US can be paved, and the surfaces of dried out lake beds – known as playas in this part of the country – can be carefully loosened and seeded with local flora. Improved dust storm forecasting and warning systems can ensure that the elderly and vulnerable find shelter, while schools have time to send students home or keep them safe from the invading particles.

The spread of disease, like Valley Fever, will be a harder nut to crack, but strict masking guidelines can help to keep cases down. The bottom line, however, is that bigger and bolder dust storms are here to stay, and until we act to prevent the remorseless rise of global heating, they are only going to get worse.

A version of this article was published in BBC Science Focus magazine on May 25th 2026

The unprecedented heat and humidity that has gripped the UK and Europe this week has done wonders to focus minds, and even those who have long turned away from all talk of global heating and climate breakdown, are beginning to wonder if all is not as it should be. In the UK, the five hottest days have happened in the last seven years, and temperatures this week were up to 12°C higher than they should be for June – the temperature record for the month having been broken three times in as many days. Across the Channel, Europe is experiencing its worst heatwave on record – one that, in the absence of global heating, would have been impossible just 50 years ago.

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In my new book – The Fate of the World: a History and Future of the Climate Crisis – I have a chapter titled Carbon Planet, and for good reason. Altogether, our world is thought to hold a staggering 1.85 billion, billion tonnes of carbon, nearly all of which is beneath our feet - two-thirds in the planet’s core and most of the rest in the surrounding mantle. A relatively small fraction of the total – a mere 100 million billion tonnes – resides in carbon-rich rocks in the Earth’s crust, such as limestones, or in hydrocarbon (oil, gas and coal) deposits. While containing sufficient carbon to roast the planet if burned, hydrocarbons only make up a little more than 4,000 billion tonnes of this total – about 400 times the amount of carbon currently pumped out annually through burning fossil fuels.

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As well as being British, Chinese, Iranian, or whatever, we are now all citizens of a much bigger place. It’s called the Anthroposphere, which incorporates – in relation to their influences and impacts on the Earth – the sum total of humanity, its habitats and its activities. Humankind’s signature is now scrawled across every nook and cranny of the planet, and almost everywhere it has been destructive, some of it cataclysmically so. Extraordinarily, in 2020, the weight of human-made ‘stuff ’ exceeded the weight of all life on Earth.

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Estimates of the amount of carbon dioxide we have added to the atmosphere since the industrial revolution range up to 2.5 trillion tonnes. If we stopped emitting today, this would slowly be scrubbed from the atmosphere by ocean absorption and by chemical weathering of silicate rocks. It would take hundreds of thousands of years for all the carbon dioxide we have added to the air to be naturally removed, and for atmospheric levels of the gas to be rewilded back to normal levels for an interglacial period.

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If you think the temperature uncomfortable today, let me take you to the last day of July 2052. The rays of the climbing sun reveal a city still sweltering in the residual heat of the day before. From the air, London resembles a colossal refugee camp. Streets, gardens and parks are teeming with tents and cobbled-together shelters, within which the city’s residents have spent another uncomfortable night away from the heat traps that their houses and flats have become. After six days when the temperature peaked at about 40C, another scorcher is on the way.

Half-hearted attempts to upgrade insulation across the country’s housing stock ran out of steam and cash decades earlier, and most homes still have few barriers to the infiltrating heat. Almost all the country’s electricity is now from renewables, which has brought the cost down, but the relentless onslaught of extreme weather has driven an ever-deepening economic depression across the world. Many now have air conditioning, but can’t afford to run it.

Early risers yawn and stretch as they queue at standpipes for water. A succession of dry winters and a spring drought have brought water rationing across the south-east of England, adding to the woes of those waking from another sticky, broken sleep. Ironically, there is plenty of rain now, and every day ends with an electric storm and torrential rain. Most of this, however, cascades directly into storm drains that can no longer cope, bringing surface flooding to lower-lying parts of the capital, but no end to the dearth of potable water.

Growing crowds cluster around state-run grocery stores that provide the basics at affordable prices. Failed harvests at home in the previous two years, and massively reduced food imports, as other nations stricken by extreme weather hold on to what they have, has meant the rationing of bread and other staples. Supermarkets still exist, but they are struggling to keep prices down, and so cater almost entirely to the wealthy.

The power is out again, as it has been intermittently since the start of the heatwave. The problem isn’t generation but transmission; the extreme temperatures making cables sag and break and causing transformers to overheat. The doors of houses are open to let in the relatively cool air of the night, although the temperature hasn’t fallen below 29C. Trailing cables lead to televisions that some have shifted outside to watch, when the power is on, and to laptops over which crouch office workers marooned at home by widespread transport problems. A combination of the heat and extended power outages has brought chaos to rail and tube networks, while damage to road surfaces and malfunctioning traffic lights means that getting to work by car is a lottery.

Every hospital is overwhelmed as the incessant heat and humidity take their toll on vulnerable people, the old and the very young, and the final death toll across the country once the heat has abated is likely to be in the tens of thousands.

The picture I paint here is one that few today would entertain as a future reality, but it has every chance of coming to life if we continue to blunder unprepared into a climatically challenging future. We have just experienced the hottest May day on record, setting the scene for even greater summer heat that would not be possible without global heating. The temperature exceeded 40C for the first time in the UK during the baking summer of 2022, which resulted in the early deaths of more than 3,000 people. Network Rail issued a “do not travel” warning at the peak of the heat, while thousands of homes in the north of the country lost power. Parts of London only avoided blackouts because the National Grid paid record amounts for electricity imported from Belgium.

Now imagine this level of heat lasting for a week or more. Having accelerated in the past 10 years or so, the global average temperature is currently climbing at a rate that will see a 1C rise every 28 years, meaning that the planet will be more than 2C hotter than pre-industrial times by mid-century. Given this level of heating, temperatures of close to 43C will be possible by 2050, so the playing out of my scenario is perfectly feasible. In fact, even under the current climate conditions, three or four consecutive days above 40C can happen.

As the UK Climate Change Committee flagged last week in its latest report to the government, our country is not built to handle such heat and its all-pervasive ramifications. More than nine in 10 homes are not well insulated enough to keep out the heat, while by 2050 there is forecast to be a daily shortfall in water supply of 5bn litres. The three worst UK harvests all occurred in the period from 2020 to 2025, contributing to the loss of grain equivalent to a year’s worth of bread supply. We currently import 40% of our food, but as the harvests of other countries are also increasingly affected by extreme weather, we will no longer be able to rely on this continuing. The world’s second-biggest producer, India, recently banned all exports of sugar for four months. Such a policy of “we hold what we have” will only become more prevalent as climate breakdown takes an ever greater toll on global agriculture.

But this isn’t all a done deal. We can’t stop what’s coming, but we can do plenty to help us cope better. At the top of any to-do list is the critical importance of properly insulating our entire housing stock, so that homes can become refuges from the heat rather than potential death traps. At the same time, the large-scale roll out of generously subsidised rooftop solar power, combined with battery storage, will do much to make homes at least partly independent of the grid, and able to run air conditioning during peak heat, even when the power is out. Home rainfall harvesting, which is already big in Germany and other countries, will also help to address the predicted water deficit. While we need to seriously rethink the country’s food strategy as a whole, encouragement and incentives for as many people as possible to grow at home their own fruit and vegetables can also help to ease the burden of inevitable shortages.

While such measures will help to mitigate the worst, casting a shadow over our efforts will be the impact of a failing climate on the global economy, and the consequences for the UK – with a number of analyses forecasting significant reductions in global GDP by mid-century. Inevitably, this will translate into increased hardship for many UK citizens, compromising their ability to cope with the new conditions. At the same time, a seriously weakened national economy will leave government with less money to build the resilience the country needs to successfully prevail in a hotter world.

Bearing in mind that we continue to pump out CO₂ equivalent to the weight of 800,000 Titanics every year, and fossil fuel corporations are actively planning to expand operations, it is practically impossible for emissions reductions to happen fast enough to reduce the rate at which our world is heating. Consequently, 40C-plus mid-century heat in the UK is now baked in. We need, then, to face the fact that life in the 2050s is going to be very different from today, and act now. The sooner we recognise this and begin – as a nation – to prepare and adapt accordingly, the better we will be able to meet these enormous challenges to our everyday lives.

A version of this article was published in The Guardian on Tuesday, May 26th 2026

The sun is the ultimate arbiter of the temperature of our world, which is largely a function of the amount of solar energy that arrives compared to that which finds its way back into space. Known as the planet’s energy balance, this should hover around zero. It is, however, now massively out of kilter, as the ever-thickening blanket of anthropogenic greenhouse gases allows the sun’s energy in but stops ever more of it leaving. This growing energy imbalance is – in a nutshell – what global heating is all about.

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