What is really to blame for climate breakdown – and does it matter?

By Chris Davey

We’ve just had, again, the hottest summer on record according to provisional data from the UK Met Office. Coal, oil and gas continue to be burnt, releasing greenhouse gases into the air, mostly carbon dioxide, which joins much of the stuff that we have chucked up there for over a hundred years.

There has been some controversy caused by a paper published in March 2025, questioning the way in which the causes of planetary warming are calculated. It seemed to turn on its head the idea that fossil fuel emissions are the chief culprit, and that, while they are still baddies, it is LULUCF (see below) that is the bigger factor. It all gets rather complicated but on his excellent YouTube channel Just Have A Think, Dave Borlace has done a couple of videos explaining this for those who want to dig into it.

It has been broadly accepted that the principal cause of forcing, as the scientists call it, is the combustion of fossil fuels, leading to the emission of greenhouse gases, principally carbon dioxide, CO₂. But other factors are at play, for example deforestation, which generally appears in the figures as “land use or land use change and forestry” (LULUCF). This is a factor in forcing for a number of reasons, which vary with the specific instance: for example, forests are sometimes cleared by burning them, which of course releases masses of carbon into the air. Then those forests no longer exist, so cannot draw down any further carbon from the air, as they had been doing (sometimes for years, decades or indeed centuries). If the cleared forest is then used to raise beef cattle, the forcing ramps up a great deal, as emissions of methane, CH₄, will result, and in the short term, methane is a much more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, so from a climate point of view, very dangerous. And the short term should worry us a lot, since a recent report warns that we have only a few years to act on emissions before we hit 1.5⁰C above pre-industrial levels, and that is where things get quite dicey. (We have already reached that temperature in places, but have not, yet, reached the IPCC definition of global average temperature.) So, considering the various factors involved, the calculations are far from simple.

To my mind, the percentages of forcing from various sources are interesting but not crucial. We know that a number of activities result in the release of greenhouse gases: burning stuff, flying, eating meat from ruminant animals, making stuff — much of which we tend to outsource to China and other countries, and so keep our “territorial” emissions down — and we need to limit severely all of them, all at once. Not as much as is convenient or not too expensive, just absolutely to the maximum. Some are easier than others to reduce — the proverbial “low-hanging fruit” of management speak — others are a bit tougher, like aviation. But we must do what we can, and we must do it now.

The first Conference of the Parties, COP1, was held in Berlin 28 March to 7 April 1995. We shall be having COP30 in November 2025. Since the nineties, how much of a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions has there been? According to EDGAR*, the world’s total emissions in 1990 amounted to about 33 Mt, and in 2023, to about 53 Mt (megatons), all emissions expressed as carbon dioxide equivalent, CO₂e. So, a substantial increase. All the figures available seem to exclude LULUCF, so they are likely to be underestimates. It is important to remember that these are annual emissions, and that each of these eye-watering figures merely adds to the load of gases that are already in the air, and hanging around, creating global heating.

So, I tend to the view of Kevin Anderson; we have failed, for decades, to make real progress, and we continue to fail every day that emissions go up or continue at the current high level. What does real progress look like then?

Emissions falling rapidly right now. Nothing else will do.

Postscript: As I have mentioned previously, I have developed the habit of calling out climate-unfriendly advertising, and indeed I am also on the lookout for greenwash or false information on climate in the media, which will also generate a complaint from me. Here is the text of my latest complaint to the BBC:

- “On the above broadcast**, I heard that some 60% of our electricity is produced by ‘renewables and low carbon clean power’ – this is false. According to the website grid.iamkate.com, which takes data from the National Grid, over the past year, renewables accounted for 37.5%. Another 21.3% was from nuclear and biomass. Nuclear may be low carbon once the concrete-hungry shielding is installed, but given the nuclear waste we bequeath to future generations, ‘clean’ it is not. Also, biomass emits greenhouse gases in some cases (e.g. Drax power station now burning wood chips, compared with years before burning coal) more than the equivalent in fossil fuel. Please issue a correction and ensure that your script writers become better informed on energy and climate issues.”