With record extreme cold and heat – in December! – leading scientists finally admit: “The world lost the climate gamble.” What comes after failure? Hear the latest in a full-length talk “Living Beyond Limits” by Professor James Dyke from the Global Systems Institute at the University of Exeter. First, the best estimates of what to expect this year and next in the climate casino.
Listen to or download this Radio Ecoshock show in CD Quality (57 MB) or Lo-Fi (14 MB)
What an astonishing finish to 2025! North America is split into simultaneous extreme heat and cold. The Lower 48 States easily broke the record for the warmest Christmas ever recorded, by a margin of 5 degrees Fahrenheit, almost 3 C. On Christmas Day, Denver Colorado experienced a high of 71°Fahrenheit, (22°C). It was summer-like t-shirt weather a mile high, 1600 meters into the mountains – on Christmas. Dallas was 81 degrees F.
As America was roasting (not the turkey but outside), our listeners in Canada’s Yukon Territory continued their weeks of amazing cold. On December 23, Braeburn Yukon recorded -55.7°C (-68 Fahrenheit). This is the coldest temperature recorded in December across Canada since 1975, when temperatures plunged to -56.7°C, (-70 F).
The Yukon is about the size of Spain, with a population around 45,000 people. Most of them – about 33,000 people – live in the capital city of Whitehorse. Recently, weeks of extreme cold make it dangerous to go outside with unprotected skin freezing in minutes. To keep everyone and everything warm, including all the car block-heaters and pipes, the past few weeks of extreme cold took the Yukon perilously close to it’s peak possible electrical loads. On December 23rd, the government warned the population, saying:
“On December 22, we set an all-time record peak demand of 123 megawatts. This exceeded the previous record set just a few weeks ago. In ideal conditions, with everything running at maximum, our system can produce about 140 megawatts. For a variety of reasons our energy infrastructure, such as renewables like wind and solar, cannot always deliver full output so we rarely reach the theoretical maximum.”
“On December 12, when the LNG plant briefly went offline, we were operating at 90 per cent of capacity. Had we lost the Aishihik hydro connection at the same time, we would have been forced to prepare for rolling blackouts in Whitehorse. “ The government is renting diesel generators to cope. A shout-out to freezing listeners in the Yukon. Radio Ecoshock is broadcast by CJUC 92.5 FM in Whitehorse,and CFET 106.7 FM in Tagish.
A string of meteorologists and weather watchers are blown away by this huge temperature difference: over 150 degrees F. or 83 C on the same continent, without even counting the tropics. A similar split between excruciating cold and unseasonal heat is hovering between Siberia and Central Asia. These extremes are blamed on waves of the Jet Stream altered by climate change. We are setting up for an extreme future.
WHAT TO EXPECT IN NEXT COUPLE OF YEARS
Maps of ocean temperature show very little warming in the Southern Hemisphere and definite cooling around the tropics and into the North Pacific and Atlantic Ocean. This follows three years of record-setting sea surface temperatures. Ocean surface temperatures are the main driver establishing what we experience on land. According to Carbon Brief:
“In 2023, global temperatures reached a new high, after they significantly exceeded expectations.
This record was surpassed in 2024 – the first year where average global temperatures were 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.
Now, 2025 is on track to be the second- or third-warmest year on record.“
At Berkeley, research scientist Zeke Hausfather neatly wraps up predictions for 2026 and ’27. He posts:
“The UK Met Office recently released their 2026 prediction, estimating that it is most likely to end up as the second warmest year on record at 1.46C (with a range of 1.34C and 1.58C) relative to the 1850-1900 preindustrial baseline period.1 This is likely warmer than both 2023 and 2025 and with a small chance of being warmer than 2024.
Not to be outdone, James Hansen released his estimate that 2026 temperatures will also be around 1.47C in the GISTEMP dataset (albeit using a somewhat different 1880-1920 baseline), with the 12 month average dipping down to around 1.4C in the coming months before rising back up by year’s end.
Hansen also adds a prediction for 2027 at 1.7C (1.65C to 1.75C), albeit with the caveat that this refers to the peak 12-month warming during the year rather than the annual average. The prediction is based on an assumed El Nino developing in late 2026 – something that models have suggested is increasingly likely in recent weeks.”
What is Hausfather’s own prediction?
“For 2026 I expect global temperatures to be around around 1.41C, with a 95% confidence interval of 1.27C to 1.55C. This means that it is almost certain to be one of the top-4 warmest years, but quite unlikely to exceed 2024’s record. Global temperatures in 2026 will be slightly suppressed by modest La Nina conditions in the tropical Pacific early in the year, while a late-developing El Nino (if it occurs) will primarily affect 2027 temperatures.”
European climate nerd Jan Umsonst does not expect any record-setting global temperatures in the next couple of years. Comparing the ocean to a capacitor which builds up energy until it discharges heat, he says “the oceans need some years of additional heat uptake to recharge the recharge-discharge oscillator which are the global oceans.” Jan continues:
“Ocean surface temperatures dropped by some ~0.3°C the last months. Its about the amount Sea Surface Temperatures increased from 2023 to 2024 lasting into 2025.
This would then imply that the next temperature jump can only happen in several years as even an El Nino in 2026 – 2027 should not be able to raise SSTs far above previous record values.” [SST = Sea Surface Temperatures]
We must give up the idea that global warming is a steady escalator shown in too many official graphs. The public may expect new records every year, and weaken in climate resolve if we encounter anything lower than that. But the ocean capacitor drives heat up in steps, with each new record building on a higher and higher background as Earth collects more energy.
Just in, this new science for example:
Open access Published: 12 December 2025
Super El Niño events drive climate regime shifts with enhanced risks under global warming
Aoyun Xue et al.
Meanwhile, punishing weather chaos will continue until morale improves. Amazed by humanity’s inability to defend our environment, a growing chorus of “doomers” now think only a prolonged economic collapse or breakdown of the consumer civilization is the best hope. The longer we leave serious cuts to fossil fuel emissions and land raping, the righter they become.
Our Resolution for a New Year: save what is left of the real world.
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JAMES DYKE AND THE LOST GAMBLE
In November, respected European scientists James Dyke and Johan Rockström admit the world “lost the climate gamble.” The safety line of 1.5 degrees C of warming is behind us. Following the new report “Living Beyond Limits”, James Dyke laid it all out in a clear lecture December 10th, 2025, at the University of Exeter in the UK. James is Assistant Director of the Global Systems Institute. Here it is.
Listen to or download this 51 minute presentation by Dr. James Dyke in CD Quality or Lo-Fi
A FEW EXCERPTS FROM DYKE’S TALK
I highly recommend you listen to the whole talk. James builds point on point you won’t want to miss. But just to give readers a flavor of it, here are a few excepts transcribed from the Dec. 10th event.
JAMES HANSEN AND ACCELERATION
“…the rate of climate change or global warming has been increasing over the last 10 years. This is from an article from Carbon Brief. I think it was last year that they did a special on this.
Zeke [Hausfather] contributed, a whole bunch of other climate scientists contributed, and it was kind of this discussing, well, you know, for a while some people, most notably Jim Hansen, previous director of NASA Goddard, has been arguing that the rate of increase of temperatures is much faster. It’s been accelerating, maybe even up to twice as fast as previous decades. And why is that? And there’s been a whole bunch of competing theories and arguments, even dispute that this is a statistically significant signal.
And it is absolutely the case that we need longer in order to determine if that was the case. But I think it’s fair to say that there is increasing consensus that the reduction in aerosol load, aerosol forcing, the reduction in high sulphur content, burning coal, and maybe even marine shipping, could have reduced the global dimming effect that we have inadvertently been producing on the climate, and therefore, in some respects, unmasking the amount of radiative forcing we’re producing through greenhouse gases. And Jim calls it this kind of Faustian bargain that we’ve been playing with the climate system.
Jim is also much more hawkish on climate sensitivity. So when you add in that factor, and when you add in the fact that Jim tends to not be very polite about contemporary climate modelling, I think it’s fair to say, he bases his assessments much more on kind of paleo data, on historical data. When you do that, then his assessment of the actual amount of warming that we’ve got, given cumulative emissions, is much, much higher than you would see in, let’s say, even in like the CMIP6 models.”
YOU DON’T NEED JIM TO BE RIGHT TO BE FREAKING OUT
“Anyway, back to one side. I would argue you don’t need Jim to be right to be freaking out. You don’t need Jim to be correct about aerosols and acceleration for us to conclude that 1.5 is gone and serious consequences are in the pipeline.
But let’s just take a moment to reflect on where we are right now. There are lots of people who don’t think climate change is real for a whole bunch of probably motivated reasons, right? Ask the insurance industry, they’ll tell you, because these are the people, these are the organisations on the hook for paying for climate-related extreme weather impact events. 162 billion dollars this year, climate catastrophes are creating a new market reality for insurance carriers.
One way to interpret that is that there will be some places which become literally uninsurable because the premiums cannot be afforded, no insurer wants to take that risk. Costs pile up as climate change adds 600 billion in insurance losses. We see rising heat deaths.
This is one of the easier ways to determine climate change impacts on morbidity and mortality because the warmer it gets, the more likely you’re going to get extreme weather events, such as lethal heat waves. So the rate of heat-related mortality has increased by nearly a quarter since the 1990s. We’re seeing increasing wildfire and drought impacts and that is having a non-trivial impact on economic strain.
Productivity losses equivalent to maybe a trillion dollars, the cost of heat-related deaths among adults reaching 261 billion dollars. This is “safe” climate change, this is acceptable climate change, this is the decision that society through its either elected politicians or the politicians that come to govern those systems or nation states – have determined is acceptable in the context of how much greenhouse gases can be put into the atmosphere to produce this amount of warming. And none of this should be a surprise.
There is, I think, quite compelling work that in many respects we have potentially seriously underestimated the distribution of risks and therefore how much economic loss, how much morbidity and mortality might be in the pipeline. But these numbers, in some respects, shouldn’t surprise anyone. This is just the unavoidable consequence of living in a climate system which has become significantly warm over a geologically instant time scale.
Yes, the climate’s changed a lot in the past, you know, we’ve got 3.8 billion years of history of life on earth and some of the most intense mass extinction events have been associated with climate change. But probably nothing like this has happened in terms of relative forcing either for millions and millions of years or perhaps even ever, right, so this is really exceptional. So that’s the climate system. In some respects that’s the good news because the bad news is that the earth system is responding to human impacts not just in terms of it’s getting warmer, heat waves are increasing, but there is perhaps evidence that elements of the earth system is losing resilience, is becoming less able to deal with anthropogenic forcing. “
PLANT BUFFER WEAKENING?
“So what this video shows is a visualisation of carbon dioxide emissions. So CO2 is a well-mixed gas, doesn’t really matter where you emit it, but you can see these points here, these are individual power stations, right, and it’s well mixed so it doesn’t matter if it happens in Baltimore or Birmingham or Bangalore, that carbon dioxide would eventually migrate its way throughout the entire planet. But this is what I’m particularly interested in, this pulsing, this is showing the the day-night cycle and it’s the drawing down of carbon dioxide during the day and then respiring carbon dioxide out through the significant areas of terrestrial vegetation, for example, the Asian and the Sub-Saharan African rainforests.
It’s this cycling of carbon through days, through months, through years and over long time scales which has been importantly buffering up our emissions of greenhouse gases. So you probably already know about half of all the carbon dioxide we put into the atmosphere each year, about 40 billion tonnes, half of it ends up in the sea or on land, so about a quarter in the land and a quarter in the sea. If those natural carbon sinks start to fail, if they start to slow down the amount of carbon dioxide they remove from the atmosphere or in some places even begin to put carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere through outgassing, we go for a situation where it becomes a sink to a source, then the challenge we’ve got when it comes to carbon dioxide removal becomes much, much more serious.”
SEVEN OF NINE BOUNDARIES CROSSED
“So I’m thinking about now the planetary perspective. So one of the things we were very mindful of when we met in June was the planetary boundaries concept because our lead author for this paper was Johan Rockström and Johan has pioneered the application and development of the planetary boundaries framework. Here it is in 2009 and it imagined you’ve got these various dimensions of the Earth’s system.
You’ve got climate change, yes, biosphere integrity, land system change, freshwater use, biogeochemical flows, ocean acidification, atmospheric aerosol loading, stratospheric ozone depletion and novel entities and human impacts are radiating out such if you’re in the circle, we’re in this kind of safe zone and as you’re going further from this kind of circle, we’re entering the increasing zone of uncertainty and then into the danger zone. And back in 2009, the big ones were biosphere integrity, just a simple result of land use change, ecosystem destruction, biodiversity loss, whatever the rate of biodiversity loss or species loss was before humans, it’s probably much, much higher now, maybe thousands, maybe tens of thousands higher. They’re tens of thousands times higher than the background extinction rate.
Climate change was of course a concern but then also biogeochemical flows, the sheer amount of nitrogen and phosphorus fertiliser that we put on the ground on farmlands which is having a devastating impact on aquatic ecosystems. Well as the years have gone by, the number of boundaries that have been assessed to have crossed have increased. So we are today in [20]25, we determined that there are about nine boundaries been assessed and seven of those are crossed.
Biosphere integrity is being broken up in terms of functional biodiversity, genetic which is kind of simple and a measure of the total numbers of species – movel entities – is in serious risk because of the increasing number of industrial processes, the new species of chemicals that we’re producing that we have really no idea about. Things like PFAS or plastics, microplastics has been really capturing people’s attention and climate change in terms of CO2 concentrations and rates to force it.”
FORWARDS IN THE WRONG DIRECTION
“So we’re going backwards, right? or forwards in the wrong direction. So this is what we wanted to talk about and the way that we consider we’re going to visualise that is this. And this is a complicated picture and I don’t have much time but I will do my best.
We’ve got this kind of idea of a planetary boundary safe and just space. We were kind of still well within it in 1997, the Kyoto Protocol and we could have turned back then. There were some bold promises made by the international community about stopping the dangerous interference.
There was a whole series of missed opportunities and then something of maybe of a reset in 2015. We could have turned around but we didn’t. We have what we call this missed decade of climate action.
So here we are now in 2025 where we need to undertake a rapid, radical pivot in order to meet our sustainable development goals, many of which are stalling or even going in reverse. So that’s not good. But turn this thing around such that we recover back into a safe space -which is going to have to be net negative somehow by the end of the century.
We don’t do that. We don’t do that. If we continue exceeding these planetary boundaries then we get to this point of a critical juncture with this idea of a planetary threshold tipping point.
So I’ll talk about those briefly in a moment. And then when we were developing this figure I said, no look, it’s not a discrete threshold, right? It’s going to be increasing kind of a graduated range of risk. So don’t make this a solid line.
So the designer came back, okay, I’ll make little dots in it. Okay, fine. But this idea that there is this kind of this notion of a critical juncture which I try to capture with the notion of derailment risk that I’ll talk about later, where if we can’t turn things around it becomes increasingly likely that we just end up making things even worse.
So up here we’ve got social unrest, failure to meet SDGs [Social Development Goals], generally very bad, not just Earth’s system, not just bad climate outcomes but bad social outcomes because we would have failed to both arrest warming, arrest the exceedance of other planetary boundaries, and also fail to meet our sustainable development goals.”
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NEXT WEEK: THE EVIL TWIN
Next week we delve into the “evil twin” of global warming – humans are making the ocean more acidic and that changes everything. I’m Alex Smith. Thank you for listening, and caring about our world.
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