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Ed Miliband visits Beijing as part of plan to create global axis working in favour of climate action

• Ed Miliband: ‘The global battle against the climate crisis needs China’

The UK is hoping to shape a new global axis in favour of climate action along with China and a host of developing countries, to offset the impact of Donald Trump’s abandonment of green policies and his sharp veer towards climate-hostile countries such as Russia and Saudi Arabia.

Ed Miliband, the UK’s energy and net zero secretary, arrived in Beijing on Friday for three days of talks with top Chinese officials, including discussions on green technology supply chains, coal and the critical minerals needed for clean energy. The UK’s green economy is growing three times faster than the rest of the economy, but access to components and materials will be crucial for that to continue.

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I will be the first UK energy secretary since 2017 to visit. It is negligence towards today’s and future generations not to engage China on this critical topic

The climate crisis is an existential threat to our way of life in Britain. Extreme weather is already changing the lives of people and communities across the country, from thousands of acres of farmland being submerged due to storms such as Bert and Darragh to record numbers of heat-related deaths in recent summers.

The only way to respond to this challenge is with decisive action at home and abroad. Domestically, this government’s clean-energy superpower mission is about investing in homegrown clean energy so we can free the UK from dependence on fossil fuel markets while seizing the immense opportunities for jobs and growth.

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Exclusive: Officials explore restricting incentive to allocate greater funds to farms with less money and more nature

The richest farmers will not be able to apply for post-Brexit nature funding under plans for England being considered by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra).

Farming groups and climate experts have warned that such a plan would “leave farmers in the cold” and make it more difficult for the UK to reach net zero by 2050.

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The Loess plateau was the most eroded place on Earth until China took action and reversed decades of damage from grazing and farming

It was one of China’s most ambitious environmental endeavours ever.

The Loess plateau, an area spanning more than 245,000 sq miles (640,000 sq km) across three provinces and parts of four others, supports about 100 million people. By the end of the 20th century, however, this land, once fertile and productive, was considered the most eroded place on Earth, according to a documentary by the ecologist John D Liu.

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Facing Trump tariff threats, governments and companies are proposing major investments in American liquefied natural gas projects.

The agency was created to protect the environment and public health, but a series of moves suggests it is transforming under President Trump.

Nearly 200 groups urge Congress to reject fossil fuel industry immunity efforts, fearing long-term damage to climate lawsuits

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As fossil fuel interests attack climate accountability litigation, environmental advocates have sounded a new warning that they are pursuing a path that would destroy all future prospects for such cases.

Nearly 200 advocacy groups have urged Democratic representatives to “proactively and affirmatively” reject potential industry attempts to obtain immunity from litigation.

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The likely next chancellor has staked his government on a move to increase military spending. But the window for change is closing fast.

The ongoing destruction of federal agencies by the Trump team is an illegal effort that not only deprives the American public of essential services, upends lives and destroys livelihoods of federal workers, but steals our legacy of investment in tax-payer-funded institutions and functions. Since our country doesn’t work safely or effectively without these institutions and functions, either the thieves will privatize them and make us pay forever for something we built and already own, or we’ll suffer in their absence. Unless we stop them.

Vital federal agencies face fates ranging from near-total destruction in the case of USAID,  to deeply diminished functioning in the case of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), even as we face an intense and lengthening wildfire season and approach another hurricane season, to dangerous muzzling in the case of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, even as bird flu spreads. The moves are wasteful, harmful, egregious, ill- or uninformed—and in many cases, illegal. They are, as my colleague, Julie McNamara writes, pushing American innovation to the brink. And they are devastatingly costly, not just in wasted taxpayer dollars, but in human lives.

It’s our house and they are hacking it down

Federal agencies represent generational investment in a functional society. They are an asset of today’s generations to pass on in good form to the next. Are reforms important over time? Absolutely. This is not reform, though, it’s wreckage. But rather than verbally light my hair on fire for you, here’s a clumsy but apt metaphor for what the destruction means for everyday people.

You have a home.

It’s nothing fancy, but you’ve been building and investing in it for years and now it has all the necessities and basic comforts. You have to pay each month to keep the lights on, and sometimes you need to do repairs and upgrades, but you’re a careful homeowner on a budget and you make it work. Someday you’re going to pass it on to your kids.

These days, though,  your partner has different ideas.

One Monday you come home from work to find someone has torn your shed down. Your partner says, “it wasn’t doing anything useful”. You say, “but I was using it. Where am I supposed to keep my bike and my tools? Why was this necessary?” But they are taking a call.

On Tuesday, you come home and all your appliances have been hauled away. Your partner says, “they weren’t working efficiently”. You ask, “how are we supposed to keep our food cold? Or have clean clothes?” Your partner says a little short-term pain is worth the long-term gain; you’ve been signed up for an appliance subscription service. “But we owned those ones”, you say, “they worked just fine. How is this good for us?” But they have turned on a show.

On Wednesday, you come home and all your windows have been smashed. “They said they were drafty,” your partner relays as they board up the empty frames with plywood. “But how will we have any light? How will we get fresh air?” you ask. “I guess we’ll pay for more electricity and ventilation,” they say. You ask, “how is this good for us?” But they don’t hear you over the hammering.

On Thursday, you come home to find your solar panels and the roof beneath them are gone. “I don’t believe in them,” your partner says, as you frantically staple a blue tarp over the hole in your house. “Believe in what?!” you ask. “Solar electricity? Roofs? The sun? How is this good for us?!”

The next morning you wake up in a dark room to the drip of rainwater from your exposed attic. You put on dirty clothes and are fumbling your way downstairs when the jack-hammering starts. Outside, a crew is hacking away at your foundation. “Stop!” you yell. “This is my home! What are you doing?” The foreman checks his clipboard and says, “Well, it’s basically worthless now, so we’re going to clear it out”.

You turn to your partner, who is finally looking confused and afraid, and you ask again, “So tell me, how is this good for us?”

Our federal agencies are vital

Your partner in this story is people in America who are either initially supportive of these agency cuts or not paying close attention, but in either case, are due for real harm right along with everyone else. Those of us who can go about our lives with a sense of confidence and security do so in no small part due to the existence and effectiveness of our federal agencies. Check your weather app before you get dressed? Thanks, NOAA. Turn on your tap water with confidence that you can drink the coffee you make? Thanks, EPA. Review your kids’ college aid awards over breakfast? Thanks, Education Department. Opt to wear a mask to work because you heard the flu is surging? Thanks, CDC. Talk with your aging mom over lunch about a promising new dementia trial? Thanks NIH. Ask her how a cousin’s recovery from Hurricane Helene is going? Thanks, FEMA. Stop for some groceries on the way home because a big storm is coming? Thanks again, NOAA…

These agencies and their functions didn’t sprout from the head of some government mastermind. They came to be because we needed and demanded that these functions be filled. They were built over time because we funded them. And they exist today because we need and use them.

Destroying them is theft

Ripping them down like Elon Musk and DOGE, with President Trump’s urging, are doing is not governing in the public interest. It’s ruling by impulse and arrogance and out of the selfish, profit-minded interests of the billionaire class and big polluters. And for the public, it’s the governance equivalent of being carjacked by a gaslighter: violent, illegal, and what the hell—I’m using this car!—all while being told by the carjacker they aren’t taking anything they shouldn’t take…

And like a car-jacking, if and when we rescue these agencies from the chop shop, real damage will be done. To replace and rebuild what we had on January 20th will be incredibly costly and in the near-term, impossible: an unparalleled knowledge bank drained by the hemorrhaging of expert staff; skilled delivery of vital services stopped short by the firing of seasoned, dedicated public servants; decades-long data records vital to science permanently compromised by forced gaps in collection; infrastructure—from buildings to work stations—liquidated. These are all things paid for by us—not just for how they serve us today, but how they will serve us in our unfolding, uncertain future. And these are all things stolen from us.

For what?

The spectacle of the world’s richest man slashing federal programs, services and workers in the name of efficiency would be a bad joke, except for how much it hurts and costs. And for what? Obviously not for efficiency, possibly for ruinous tax breaks for the wealthy, certainly for the privatization of public goods and the colossal grift entailed.

So when we hear of more cuts, we should strongly support and defend the people losing their jobs, and we should feel anger for the blatant destruction and theft of our legacy of investment, say “how dare you,” and fight it all, tooth and nail.

There are also things that this administration is doing of a more blatantly authoritarian nature, like threatening to defund colleges that allow students to exercise their right to free speech, threatening deportation of people for their political views, and working hard to dismantle the free press. They want to rule, not govern, so they are coming for everything that makes a democratic society possible.

And so we need to fight them on every front, get every win we can, punch holes in their fascist power play and petro-masculine money grab. Protecting federal agencies like NOAA from being gutted and privatized is one of those fronts. But fighting on any front is important.

So, what can we do?

What we can do depends on the day and on the kind of risk our personal privilege enables us to take. Not everyone in this country can afford to take risks right now. But for those of us who have privilege, now is the time to use it, and the time to start stretching outside our comfort zone.

For the moment, we have to keep giving Congress hell…

• Over the spring/Easter Congressional recess (April 11th through the 27th), we can go to our members’ local town halls, if they are still holding them. And if they are not, we can demand that they hold them by writing letters to the editor, contacting the local media, building pressure on social media, or standing outside their office with a sign. Republicans have complete control of the federal government; they have no excuse to hide from their voters.
• Write a letters to the editor. Here’s UCS’s LTE guidance for writing an effective one. Feel free to use talking point from this or other UCS blogs!  
• Call members of Congress and tell them to defend against these attacks. Here’s a UCS resource for making calls.
• And write them specifically about protecting NOAA. Here’s another UCS resource.

And we can show up for federal agencies and staff…

• Support federal staff and scientists in our communities. Here’s a UCS resource for folks to have on hand.
• Keep our ear to the ground for opportunities to show up in person and demonstrate support for agencies and rejection of the ongoing harm.
• Help to amplify the stories of fired staff and the stressed staff who remain on social media and other channels.

I’ll be the first to say that this is not enough to turn the tides right now; it’s just about being and staying in the fight. At the same time, taking care of ourselves and each other and not burning out is essential. So let’s stay awake to evolving threats, unify in as big and bold a front as we can, and get ready for when it’s time to go bigger and be braver.

From a high chair to the ocean floor, Can the Seas Survive Us? in Norfolk’s Sainsbury Centre explores our watery world and the climate crisis

One of the most striking things that will be on display at an exhibition in Norfolk this weekend is an oak chair. Ordinary enough, except that it is elevated high in the air. Why? Because this is where it will need to be in 2100, given rising sea levels in the Netherlands, where it was made by the artist Boris Maas.

Entitled The Urge to Sit Dry (2018), there is another like it in the office of the Dutch environment minister in The Hague, a constant reminder of the real and immediate threat posed to the country by rising sea levels.

The Dutch artist Boris Maas with his 2018 work The Urge to Sit Dry, which uses wooden blocks to lift the chair to the height it needs to be to sit above predicted sea levels

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Several US states want to criminalise atmospheric experiments, which could prevent meteorological studies

Conspiracy theories about weather manipulation go back centuries and are more dangerous than you might think.

In the ninth century, St Agobard of Lyon wrote a treatise called On Hail and Thunder attacking the popular superstition that storm-raisers could call up tempests at will. Bizarrely, these magicians were supposedly paid by aerial sailors from the land of Magonia, who sailed in the clouds and collected the crops destroyed by hail and storms.

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Lee Zeldin, the E.P.A. administrator, reframed his agency’s mission, saying it is to make it cheaper to buy cars, heat homes and run businesses.

Activists horrified as EPA reverses pollution laws and reviews landmark finding that gases harm public health

Donald Trump’s administration is to reconsider the official finding that greenhouse gases are harmful to public health, a move that threatens to rip apart the foundation of the US’s climate laws, amid a stunning barrage of actions to weaken or repeal a host of pollution limits upon power plants, cars and waterways.

Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued an extraordinary cavalcade of pollution rule rollbacks on Wednesday, led by the announcement it would potentially scrap a landmark 2009 finding by the US government that planet-heating gases, such carbon dioxide, pose a threat to human health.

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Climate models are the main tool scientists use to assess how much the Earth’s temperature will change given an increase in fossil fuel pollutants in the atmosphere. As a climate scientist, I’ve used them in all my research projects, including one predicting a change in Southwestern US precipitation patterns. But how exactly did climate models come to be?  

Behind climate models today lie decades of both scientific and computer technological advancement. These models weren’t created overnight—they are the cumulative work of the world’s brightest climate scientists, mathematicians, computer scientists, chemists, and physicists since the 1940s.  

Believe it or not, climate models are actually part of the driving force for the advancement of computers! Did you know that the second purpose for the world’s first electronic computer was to make a weather forecast? Predicting the weather and climate is a complex problem that combines computer science and physics. It is a form of applied mathematics that unites so many different fields. 

This is the first blog in a three-part series. This first one focuses on the history of climate models; the second will discuss what a climate model is and what is it used for; and in the third blog I will explore how climate scientists integrate the rapidly-changing field of Machine Learning into climate science.  

Predicting the weather and climate is a physics problem 

Scientists hypothesized early on that we could predict the weather and longer-term climate using a set of equations that describe the motion and energy transfer of the atmosphere. Because there is often confusion about the difference between weather and climate, keep in mind that the climate is just the weather averaged over a long period of time. The atmosphere around us is an invisible fluid (at least to the human eye): we can apply math to that fluid to predict how it will look in the future. Check out this website for a representation of that fluid in motion. 

In 1904, Vilhelm Bjerknes, a founder of modern meteorological forecasting, wrote:  

“If it is true, as every scientist believes, that subsequent atmospheric states develop from the preceding ones according to physical law, then it is apparent that the necessary and sufficient conditions for the rational solution of forecasting problems are: 1) A sufficiently accurate knowledge of the state of the atmosphere at the initial time, 2) A sufficiently accurate knowledge of the laws according to which one state of the atmosphere develops from another.” 

In other words, if we know the right mathematical equations that predict how atmospheric motion and energy transfer work, and we also know how the atmosphere currently looks, then we should be able to predict what the atmosphere will do in the future! 

So why didn’t Vilhelm try to predict the weather in 1904 if he knew it could be done? Well, at the time there was unreliable and poor coverage of observations for how the atmosphere looked. Vilhelm also knew that there would be an immense number of calculations, too many to do by hand, that go into calculating the future of the state of the atmosphere. 

It wasn’t until the early 1920s that Lewis Fry Richardson, an English mathematician and physicist, succeeded in doing what had been, until then, thought of as impossible. Using a set of equations that describe atmospheric movement, he predicted the weather eight hours into the future. How long did it take him to carry out those calculations? Six weeks. So you can see it wasn’t possible to make any reliable weather prediction with only calculations done by hand. 

Computers changed the forecasting game 

So how can we predict the weather and climate so well today? Computers! In 1945, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) was invented in the United States. ENIAC was the first electronic computer that could perform an impressive number of calculations in seconds (here, “impressive” is relative to the era, as ENIAC could make about 5,000 calculations per second, while today’s iPhone can make billions of calculations per second). Note that there were computers before ENIAC, but they didn’t rely on electricity and weren’t as complex. 

Originally, this electronic computer was used for nuclear fallout calculations, but believe it or not, the second use for ENIAC was to perform the calculations necessary to predict the weather. Why? Because weather prediction was the perfect overlap of applied mathematics and physics that required the quick calculations of a computer. 

In 1946, one year after the ENIAC was finished, John von Neumann, a Princeton mathematician who was a pioneer of early computers, organized a conference of meteorologists. According to Jule Charney, a leading 20th century meteorologist, “[to] von Neumann, meteorology was par excellence the applied branch of mathematics and physics that stood the most to gain from high-speed computation.” 

Von Neumann knew that with ENIAC we could start predicting both the short-term weather and the longer-term climate. In 1950, a successful weather prediction for North America was run on ENIAC, setting the stage for the future of weather and climate prediction.  

Two of the ENIAC programmers preparing the computer for Demonstration Day in February 1946. US Army Photo from the ARL Technical Library archives. Left: Betty Jennings, right: Frances Bilas.

Who were the six programmers that ran these calculations? Jean Bartik, Kathleen Antonelli, Marlyn Meltzer, Betty Holberton, Frances Spence, and Ruth Teitelbaum, all women mathematicians recruited by the military in 1942 as so-called “human computers”. I mention this briefly here because women’s contributions to the advancement of computer technology and weather forecasting is often overlooked. During Women’s History Month it is even more important to elevate and remind folks of their critical contributions. 

The first climate model 

The weather forecast run on ENIAC in 1950 was for only a short period of time (24 hours) and included only North America. To successfully model the climate, we would need a model to simulate decades of Earth time that covers at least one hemisphere of the Earth. 

The first general circulation model (GCM)—what climate scientists call climate models— was developed by Norman Phillips in 1956 using a more sophisticated computer than ENIAC that could handle more calculations. However, this GCM was primitive in nature. 

After Phillips successfully demonstrated the climate system could be modeled, four institutions in the United States—UCLA, the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) in Princeton, the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory—independently developed the first atmosphere-only GCMs in the 1960s. Having four models developed slightly differently contributed to the robustness of the discipline early on in climate modeling. 

And thus, the age of climate modeling was born. These GCMs could predict the future state of the atmosphere and its circulation given any change to atmospheric composition (such as heat-trapping pollutants), which is the main application of GCMs to this day. 

Today’s climate models 

GCMs are much more sophisticated today than they were in the 1960s. They have higher resolutions (meaning they perform more calculations per area), they are informed by better physical approximations, and they can replicate the climate much better. With each decade since their conception, different earth system models that simulate phenomena such as carbon cycling, vegetation, and aerosols have been added, improving GCM complexity and accuracy. Present-day GCMs consider changes in not just the atmosphere, but also changes in the ocean, the land, and sea-ice (see figure below). 

Modern climate models incorporate multiple sub-components that simulate land, ocean, and sea-ice conditions to inform modeling of atmospheric conditions.

When scientists run a climate model, they are actually running four different models: one for the atmosphere, one for the ocean, one for the land, and one for sea-ice, simultaneously. These four models then communicate with each other through something called a “coupler” during the calculation stage.  

So, for example, if the ocean model says the temperature of the ocean surface changes by 3°C given a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere, this information is then relayed to the atmospheric model, which can then respond and change the atmospheric circulation based on that temperature change.  

For more information on what a climate model is, how it works, and how climate scientists use them, check out my climate model explainer blog coming soon.

Climate models improve incrementally through decades of scientific work 

Climate models are some of the most reliable models in existence because they have been built upon, tested, and corrected for decades. And while there are some problems we’re still working on correcting, they can replicate the climate system overall with incredible skill and accuracy.  

Climate models are at the foundation of the scientific consensus around climate change. And at UCS, we use climate models to advance our understanding of the climate system in order to predict how communities are affected by a changing climate, and, importantly, to know who to hold accountable for the climate crisis.

Here is what we know about the billions in funds that have led to federal investigations, lawsuits and frozen bank accounts for climate nonprofit groups.

Breakthrough Energy, an umbrella group for energy and environmental efforts funded by Mr. Gates, is resetting for the Trump era.

With apparent support for airport expansion and fossil fuel exploration, it may look as if the party is abandoning the climate challenge, but it’s just pantomime

There’s no getting away from it: in the last few months we’ve seen leaders and corporations do very real damage to the energy transition. Donald Trump has paused future spending on clean energy infrastructure and he’s cancelled decarbonisation targets. And the new European Commission has loudly promised to cut environmental “red tape”.

If you only read the headlines, you might think we’re facing the same issue here in the UK. But overall, Labour has remained committed to its long-term climate goals. Someone close to No 10 has said the prime minister wants to allow a massive new North Sea fossil fuel development (but they know this would still need to pass a climate assessment). The government has invited Heathrow to apply to expand (knowing it will need to fulfil a myriad of conditions). There are reports that Labour could move funds away from carbon capture and storage (but that’s always been a speculative technology). And there were reports that GB Energy’s funding might be cut (but that might be nonsense, or it might just mean spending being moved around government). More concretely, it is moving fast towards supporting a second runway at Gatwick (knowing that planning conditions, and then long political and legal battles, could scupper the scheme).

Richard Power Sayeed is a historian of modern Britain. He is currently researching the politics of energy, and is the author of 1997: The Future that Never Happened

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

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An internal memo directs the closure of offices designed to ease the heavy pollution faced by poor and minority communities.

The US president is making energy deals with Japan and Ukraine, and in Africa has even touted resurrecting coal

Donald Trump’s repeated mantra of “drill, baby, drill” demands that more oil and gas be extracted in the United States, but the president has set his sights on an even broader goal: keeping the world hooked on planet-heating fossil fuels for as long as possible.

In deals being formulated with countries such as Japan and Ukraine, Trump is using US leverage in tariffs and military aid to bolster the flow of oil and gas around the world. In Africa, his administration has even touted the resurrection of coal, the dirtiest of all fossil fuels, to bring energy to the continent.

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Injecting pollutants into the atmosphere to reflect the sun would be extremely dangerous, but the UK is funding field trials

Some years ago in the pages of the Guardian, we sounded the alarm about the increasing attention being paid to solar geoengineering – a barking mad scheme to cancel global heating by putting pollutants in the atmosphere that dim the sun by reflecting some sunlight back to space.

In one widely touted proposition, fleets of aircraft would continually inject sulphur compounds into the upper atmosphere, simulating the effects of a massive array of volcanoes erupting continuously. In essence, we have broken the climate by releasing gigatonnes of fossil-fuel carbon dioxide, and solar geoengineering proposes to “fix” it by breaking a very different part of the climate system.

Raymond T Pierrehumbert FRS is professor of planetary physics at the University of Oxford. He is an author of the 2015 US National Academy of Sciences report on climate intervention

Michael E Mann ForMemRS is presidential distinguished professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Our Fragile Moment: How Lessons from Earth’s Past Can Help Us Survive the Climate Crisis

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