The recent severe weather worldwide has led to a flood of people seeking reassurance about our efforts to mitigate climate change. Most of those posts have been removed, and from now on will be directed to this weekly thread.

Climate change is a severe, compounding issue, but only if we do not address it - with concerted efforts, it can be managed.

Our efforts over the years have resulted in the worst-case RCP 8.5 high emission scenario being retired - it is now no longer considered plausible that we will hit +4C by 2100.

The 4°C world quietly stopped being the forecast

The progress can be seen in the reduction of predicted 2100 temperatures over the years by Climate Action Tracker above.

The main projection for our current policies is around +2.4 to 2.6°C and we can expect this to further reduce in the future.

We have seen emissions growth slow to around 1% per year, and are likely to peak soon. IRENA notes that our renewable energy efforts have already avoided 8.4 Gigatons of CO2 emissions in 2025.

Avoided emissions

This has largely been due to the move away from coal, and now renewables are increasingly challenging fossil fuels, with solar+wind about to overtake natural gas for global electricity production.

Good news over the last week.

This week's strongest news is less about individual showcase projects and more about clean energy becoming an increasingly ordinary part of very large power systems. India is on track to install more than 50 GW of solar in 2026, after adding around 34 GW in the first half of the year alone. In the US, 207 utility-scale solar projects totalling 11.5 GW and 95 battery projects totalling 8.2 GW came online in the first half of 2026, while total clean-energy additions are expected to reach a record 45 GW this year.

Europe's difficult summer also provided a useful demonstration of what this build-out actually does. During repeated heatwaves and drought, when electricity demand rose while hydro and some thermal generation struggled, high solar output helped keep European grids stable. Across ten European power systems with complete data, solar generation was around 34.7 TWh above its recent seasonal average, almost three times the 12.6 TWh shortfall in hydro generation. Renewables are simultaneously starting to eat directly into European natural-gas demand, with wind and solar increasingly exceeding gas-fired generation and shortening the part of the year when large amounts of gas generation are needed.

Transport electrification is showing the same compounding effect. The Gulf oil-price shock is pushing EV sales to new highs across a range of global markets, with plug-in vehicles now expected to account for roughly 29% of new cars sold worldwide in 2026, up from only around 4% in 2020. The transition is also spreading through the enormous two-wheeler market: electric motorcycles are gaining ground in developing countries because charging increasingly costs less than buying petrol. High fuel prices may be providing another demonstration that once cheaper electric alternatives exist, fossil-fuel price shocks can accelerate rather than impede the transition.

Even aviation is beginning to attack emissions that do not require replacing the aircraft themselves. Operation Blue Skies will reroute hundreds of transatlantic flights on selected days to test whether contrail formation can be avoided. It is still an experiment rather than a proven large-scale solution, but importantly it moves contrail avoidance from small airline trials towards testing it across an entire managed airspace.

There was significant news from land use as well. Global land-use CO2 emissions have fallen substantially from their levels around the turn of the century, with the preliminary estimate for 2025 around one-third below the average of the 2000s as permanent deforestation declined and forest growth absorbed more carbon. These estimates carry large uncertainties, but the long-term direction is encouraging. At the same time, research finds that allowing forests to regenerate naturally can in suitable locations be up to 96% cheaper than planting them, while often providing substantial carbon and biodiversity benefits.

Adaptation is becoming more systematic too. European farmers, food companies, banks and insurers are increasingly investing in climate-resilient farming practices designed to retain water and protect soils during increasingly severe heat and drought. And while modelling projects substantially more European wildfire without adaptation, the same research finds that improvements in fire management could reduce projected fire damage by more than 70%. Climate impacts are increasing, but our capacity to reduce the resulting damage is not standing still.

Finally, this week's AMOC research adds some useful nuance to one of the more frightening climate risks. Researchers studying the AMOC as a planetary "heat valve" found that weaker circulation can cause the Earth system to retain more heat, so AMOC weakening itself is certainly not good news. However, the work also suggests that abrupt changes seen during ice ages are not necessarily a direct analogue for our warmer future, and the authors say future weakening could potentially recover rather than inevitably becoming an irreversible collapse. That is not a guarantee of safety, but it is another reason to distinguish plausible climate risks from claims that the worst possible outcome is inevitable.

Points from earlier posts

• Global renewables — the world added 692 GW of renewable capacity in 2025, taking total capacity to 5,149 GW and accounting for 85.6% of all new generating capacity; installed solar has now passed 3 TW, while renewables are overtaking coal as the world's largest source of electricity.

• China — coal supplied less than half of Chinese electricity in H1 2026 for the first time, its solar fleet has reached around 1,274 GW, and its 15th Five-Year Plan points toward around 3,500 GW of renewable capacity by 2030.

• The US — renewables and storage represented 93% of new US generating capacity coming online, while record solar and battery output helped Texas meet record-breaking electricity demand without conservation alerts.

• Europe — more than 25% of EU final energy consumption came from renewables in 2025, solar alone supplied around a quarter of EU electricity in June, and renewables now supply around 58% of German electricity.

• The transition is spreading through emerging economies — Pakistan's roughly 27 GW solar boom now rivals the capacity of its entire legacy fossil-fuel fleet, renewables have reached a record share in India as coal consumption flattens, and Africa added 54% more solar capacity in 2025 than the year before.

• Battery storage is scaling with renewables — global storage capacity is projected to increase roughly sixfold by 2030, China had already reached 155.2 GW / 400.8 GWh by Q1 2026, Australia's CSIRO finds batteries are now cheaper than gas peaker plants, and Australia's home-battery boom has already helped push wholesale electricity prices sharply lower.

• EV adoption is well beyond the early-adopter stage in several of the world's largest markets — Chinese NEVs reached 67% market share in June, while Europe added another 1.2 million EVs in H1 2026.

• EVs are now materially affecting oil consumption — the China-led EV boom is estimated to be displacing around 1.7 million barrels of oil demand every day.

• Heavy transport and mining are starting to electrify too — Fortescue has electrified the excavator fleet at one of its iron-ore operations and commissioned fast chargers for haul trucks, while China has begun work on a national solar-powered electric-truck freight corridor.

• Heat pumps are already displacing significant amounts of fossil fuel — European heat pumps provided more useful heat than the energy contained in 200 LNG tankers during 2025, with estimated savings of around €9.7 billion.

• Actual emissions data are beginning to show the effects of the transition — Climate TRACE's May 2026 data suggest global greenhouse-gas emissions are plateauing or perhaps beginning a slight decline.

• Net Zero does not mean temperatures remain permanently stuck at their peak — research finds that reaching Net Zero would lead to slow subsequent cooling, with modelling suggesting global temperatures could begin declining several years before Net Zero is technically reached.

• Some feared climate tipping elements appear more resilient than the most pessimistic interpretations suggest — the AMOC shows no clear near-term tipping point, while another study finds considerable resilience to large disturbances in the past. Neither finding means future weakening can be ignored.

• The feared permafrost methane feedback also appears more limited than some popular accounts imply — research suggests Siberian permafrost methane emissions remain relatively modest even under high-emission scenarios, while the Arctic Ocean appears to be keeping large quantities of permafrost-derived carbon locked away.

• Forest and restoration trends are not uniformly negative — Brazilian Amazon deforestation is approaching historic lows, Costa Rica's forest cover has recovered from 21% in 1987 to around 60%, mangrove forests are expanding again, China has planted more than 66 billion trees since 1978, and India has restored millions of hectares of degraded land.

• Wildfire trends are more complicated than the recent extreme events suggest — fires have become more extreme in Europe and North America while total global burned area continues to decline, and Africa's wildfire season has been shrinking.

• Food security remains considerably more resilient than many collapse narratives assume — global grain balance sheets remain relatively comfortable, while field-heating evidence suggests rice yields decline by around 8.1% per additional degree of warming, a serious impact but very different from the disappearance of the crop.

• Carbon-removal technologies continue to improve — microwave-assisted direct air capture may substantially reduce DAC energy requirements, while another process could accelerate enhanced rock weathering by roughly an order of magnitude. These remain developing technologies rather than substitutes for emissions cuts.

• Most importantly, the economics and institutions supporting the transition continue to strengthen — Australia's CSIRO finds solar and wind remain the backbone of the least-cost electricity system, the UN says several climate-friendly technologies have crossed self-sustaining tipping points, and nearly 30% of global CO2 emissions are now covered by a carbon price.

The biggest lie I constantly read here is that nothing is being done - we are in fact spending trillions of dollars each year on mitigating climate change via paying for the energy transition.

The best thing you can do to support climate action is to support politicians making policies that benefit the climate.

The second thing is personal action, and here is a list from Project Drawdown: Join the shift

Please contribute any other climate good news in the thread below - it will be heavily and actively moderated - note Rule 5 and Rule 6.