Tobias Laimer @[email protected]

The IEA’s “Sheltering from Oil Shocks” pamphlet reads like a Degrowth manual

Who stands to loose from a green transition? The biggest beneficiaries of fossil fuel profits, the richest of the rich. 50% of profits go to top 1% of wealth owners. My co-author @GregorSemieniuk will present our paper and more at the @LSEEI on March 3, 6.30 PM. Go if you can!

Incredible heat sitting over Western Europe this week for this time of year. Forecasts show temperatures running up to 10°C above seasonal averages across parts of France, Germany, Spain and the UK. This isn’t just “mild weather” — it’s another clear climate signal.

Human civilization arose under a stable atmosphere of 260-280 ppmv of carbon dioxide. Then, humans learned to utilize the power of fossil fuels. In a geologic blink, fossil fuel burning has increased atmospheric carbon dioxide levels by more than 50%.

So how is the fight against global warming going? Well, compared to predictions made 30 years ago, we have slightly slowed the rate at which carbon dioxide is accumulating in the atmosphere. Technically that's progress, I guess, but we need it to stop increasing entirely.

Ask ChatGPT a complex question and you'll get a confident, well-reasoned answer. Then type, "Are you sure?" Watch it completely reverse its position. Ask again. It flips back. By the third round, it usually acknowledges you're testing it, which is somehow worse. It knows what's happening and still can't hold its ground. This isn't a quirky bug. A 2025 study found GPT, Claude, and Gemini flip their answers ~60% of the time when users push back. Not even with evidence, just doubt. We trained AI this way. RLHF rewards agreement over accuracy. Human evaluators consistently rate agreeable answers higher than correct ones. So the models learned a simple lesson: telling you what you want to hear gets rewarded. And now 1/3 of companies are using these systems for complex tasks like risk forecasting and scenario planning. We built the world's most expensive yes-men and deployed them where we need pushback the most. I wrote up why this happens and what actually fixes it: randalolson.com/2026/02/07/the…

Major new study finds that 4-day workweek (with no reduction in pay) leads to: --> higher productivity --> more revenue --> Less stress, fewer feelings of burnout, and improved overall health and well-being.

In most of the world day-to-day weather variations are still much larger than long-term global warming. As a result, both daily record highs and daily record lows remain common. However as the world warms, new daily record highs consistently far outnumber new daily record lows.

READ HERE: The summary of the #ICJ Advisory Opinion on the Obligations of States in respect of Climate Change. go.icj-cij.org/4kYgfKy

The ICJ's Advisory Opinion on Climate Change is unanimous on all points.

1. Extreme rainfall increases as global temperatures rise. There’s a basic law of physics behind that (Clausius Claperon Law, known since 1834, see Wikipedia). And numerous analyses of weather station data prove it. See e.g. ours. nature.com/articles/s4161…

Short thread with 2 basic facts you should know about this kind of flash flood. ⬇️

Literally EVERYONE wants the ultra-rich to pay more in taxes — left, right, blue-collar, white-collar, high earners, low earners. It's the rare issue that actually unites people. And yet it doesn't happen - funny how that works, isn’t it?

I'm excited to announce this new paper we have in The Lancet Planetary Health. We show that the world is not moving towards a just and ecological future for all. Growth in energy and material use is occurring primarily in countries that do not need it and is not occurring fast enough (or is declining) in countries that do need it. The capitalist world economy is not delivering for human needs and ecology. A substantial redistribution of energy and material use is required—both within countries and between them.

One fascinating thing about German media is how it tends to move in a coordinated way. So here's another column, in the high-brow centrist Zeit magazine, calling into question adherence with international law. With picture to match! 🙈

Since Israel attacked Iran, German media outlets & journalists of all political persuasions have started questioning international law and or heralding a new age where the law of the strongest applies in international relationships. A thread to which I will keep adding / 1

Check out the updated interactive climate dashboard to track the metrics in our new Indicators of Global Climate Change 2024 report: climatechangetracker.org/igcc

Our new paper updating key metrics in the IPCC is now out, and the news is grim: ⬆️ Human induced warming now at 1.36C ⬆️ Rate of warming now 0.27C / decade ⬆️ Sharp increase in Earth's energy imbalance ⬇️ Remaining 1.5C carbon budget only 130 GtCO2

By far the scariest part of this is that the *rate* at which our planet is warming has increased so quickly. I mean, the last time I checked a few years ago the consensus was that the planet was heating 0.2C / decade.

1/3 There is so much discussion about TIPPING POINTS, yet there are so few current large-scale examples that have been demonstrated quantitatively. Xiaojun Li et al show a remarkable shift from accumulating C in living biomass in the N temperate region to losing C since 2016