ClimateChangeFork

(Source: Bloomberg) 

A few days before I posted this blog, many Jews throughout the world celebrated Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement:

Yom Kippur fast day is the holiest day of the year—when we are closest to G‑d and to the quintessence of our own souls. It is the Day of Atonement—“For on this day He will forgive you, to purify you, that you be cleansed from all your sins before G‑d” (Leviticus 16:30). This year, Yom Kippur is observed from several minutes before sunset on 9 Tishrei (Sept. 20) to after nightfall on 10 Tishrei (Sept. 21).

It is considered by many to be the holiest day in the Jewish calendar. Unlike Christians, Jews don’t usually confess to God through their priests. They try to do it directly to God on Yom Kippur. In a sense, it’s an attempt to have an individualized conversation with God.

What I am trying to do in most of my blogs is to contribute to individual and collective attempts to do something to make the world a better place. Throughout the 15 years that I have been writing it, the focus of this blog (whether directly or indirectly) has been on trying to mitigate climate change and other global threats through individual and collective action

This week, I will try to do the “ultimate” feat: I’ll try to learn lessons from a war about how to live in peace.

From February 28^th this year, following the US and Israel’s surprising airstrikes on Iran, airstrikes have dominated global news. None of the strikes have hit the US so far, but many of them have hit US personnel who are posted in the Middle East, victimizing many citizens. The reasons for the war are complex. Just put the three countries and the word “Holocaust” into the search box (individually) to find the blogs that deal with various aspects of this conflict, together with my individual background, to understand why I am sensitive to the developments.

The aerial war includes sophisticated missiles and drones with various capacities. Missiles of various kinds are being used both for defense and offense. Defenses are never fully effective against attacks; some of the missiles or drones penetrate through the various defense walls and cause major destruction and death. Economists are starting to analyze the economy of such a war. Until very recently, defensive missiles were much more costly than offensive ones. As the Israeli effort will show shortly, things are changing on this front as well.

Climate change is one of the global threats that has the same components as aerial war threats and vulnerable defense that constantly leads to accelerated destruction. The instigators here are more complex than in wars. Climate change is always a combination of natural forces and human practices (anthropogenic contributions). Separation between these two is not easy and was addressed in previous blogs. Staying on this planet, we cannot protect ourselves against the natural forces, so we need to adapt. We can minimize the impacts of anthropogenic contribution by changing the sources of the fuels that we are using – this is the essence of the energy transition that we are slowly going through.

One of the most important differences is that in war, in many cases, all three components take place at the same time. The US-Israel attack on Iran was one such case. The damage from climate change is increasing over time. In my book, “Climate Change: The Fork at the End of Now” l, I defined the “end of now” as the projected lifespan of my grandchildren that approximately coincides with the end of the century.

This blog will return to the issue of resilience and vulnerabilities of climate change and will try to learn from defense practices as an example to follow.

For this purpose, I asked AI (through Gemini) to summarize the kind of weapons that US, Israel and Iran used in the February attack, the sources for these weapons and their cost. This is what I got:

 The U.S. military relied on high-end, precision-guided munitions from major defense contractors (such as Raytheon and Lockheed Martin) during the initial strikes of Operation Epic Fury against Iran starting February 28, 2026. [1, 2]

📊 Initial Weapon Prices & Sources

• ✅ Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles (TLAM)

  • Price: ~$3.5 million to $3.6 million per missile
  • Source: Manufactured by Raytheon
  • Usage: Hundreds fired in initial waves by the U.S. Navy to crack hardened underground facilities and command centers. [1]

• ✅ JASSM (Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missiles)

  • Price: ~$1.5 million to $3 million per missile
  • Source: Manufactured by Lockheed Martin
  • Usage: Fired by stealth bombers from outside the range of Iranian air defenses. [1]

• ✅ Patriot & THAAD Interceptors (Defensive/Retaliatory)

  • Price: ~$4 million per Patriot (PAC-3 MSE) and over $12 million per THAAD interceptor

  • Source: Manufactured by Raytheon and Lockheed Martin

  • Usage: Used heavily against incoming retaliatory ballistic and drone threats. [1, 2]

 The Iranian military had fewer resources and needed to adjust according to their economy. Below is a summary of what they used for their counter-attacks and where they targeted them (mostly the Gulf States and Israel):

🛠️ Key Weapon Types, Estimated Unit Prices, and Sources

I only included the US and Iran’s sources here because Israel’s weapons mostly originate in the US. The results are not surprising: in all weapons categories, the US arsenal is much more expensive. However, this makes Israel critically dependent on the US, and they are working hard to change this balance (From Arrow to Iron Dome: The economics of Israel’s air defense strategy | Ctech):

How much did it actually cost Israel to shoot down Iran’s flood of ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and suicide drones?

The successful interception of more than 100 ballistic missiles launched early Sunday morning towards Israel from Iranian territory has reignited an old discussion that took place in Israel about 13 years ago, after the first successful interceptions of rockets from Gaza using the Iron Dome.

In both cases, the costs of interception and the severity of the threats are fundamentally different, but it seems that the answer that the security establishment gives to this question is summed up in the fact that however expensive they may be, the interceptions of the threats are better than the potential damage they may cause. In both cases, the costs of interception and the severity of the threats are fundamentally different, but it seems that the answer that the security establishment gives to this question is summed up in the fact that however expensive they may be, the interceptions of the threats are better than the potential damage they may cause.

 

Other senior officials in the defense system said things in a similar vein. Director of the Israel Missile Defense Organization (IMDO) Moshe Patel, who is in charge of the Arrow missile program, said that “Establishing such a defense system, its development and production cost money. However, we are in war, and in war first and foremost we save people, protect strategic installations and prevent the economy from coming to a stop, the declines in the stock market and the enormous damage to property. These contributions are tens of times greater than the cost of the required defense system and the cost of the missiles we launched. This is a very central tool for the defense of the country.”

Can the same thinking hold in protecting us against anthropogenic contributions to climate change? Economists are busy trying to calculate it (https://www.pik-potsdam.de/en/news/latest-news/nature-study-on-economic-damages-from-climate-change-revised):

The core findings hold: economic damages from climate change till mid-century are substantial and outweigh the costs of mitigation, they are mainly driven by temperature changes and affect regions with low incomes and low historical emissions most. These findings are broadly consistent with wider evidence  (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) on the magnitude of economic impacts from climate change and the benefits of emission reductions.

Unfortunately, the present US administration is working hard to make any attempts to mitigate global damage much less effective. Their recent efforts to reduce the federal capacity for climate change mitigation are grouped by category and listed below:

Dismantling Regulatory Frameworks

• Repeal of Emissions Rules through changes in EPA
• Rollbacks on Transportation through lowering of required fuel efficiency.

Withdrawal from International Agreements & Finance

• Second withdrawal from Paris Climate
• Reducing International Climate Funding
• Energy Dominance Agenda through expansion of use of fossil fuels
• Disbanding of efforts to establish Social Cost of Carbon:
• Preempting State Regulations

Impacts on FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency)

• Pause and Cut to Pre-Disaster Mitigation Funding:
• Shift of Risk and Burden to States
• Workforce Reductions
• Removal of Climate Terminology & Directives

Impacts on EPA (Environmental Protection Agency)

• Gutting Stationed and Mobile Source Rules:

• Rescinding the Endangerment Finding:

• Significant Budget & Staffing Cuts

• Rollback of Environmental Justice Protections

I will finish with an update on AfD’s progress in Germany, where it has won power in two more states. This is a follow-up on an issue that was discussed in last week’s blog (AfD makes gains in elections but has no government option):

The Alternative for Germany (AfD) made significant gains in the elections in northeastern Germany and in the capital, Berlin, but is likely to remain in the opposition in both states.The Alternative for Germany (AfD) scored another election victory on Sunday evening, becoming the strongest party in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania with 37.9% of the vote, according to an exit poll by the polling firm infratest-dimap on election night. That put the far-right party just ahead of the Social Democrats (SPD), whose dramatic comeback in the last few weeks, led by incumbent State Premier Manuela Schwesig, fell just short, with 35.7% of the vote on Sunday evening. The final results may vary as votes are counted.

My photo of the lights memorializing September 11th

I am starting to write this blog on Friday, September 11^th, one day before the Jewish New Year. The top picture was taken a few days ago to mark the coming 25 years of the September 11 event. A similar light display, coming from the area where the two towers were destroyed, have been visible every year since the event to commemorate the attack. Below is the short summary from the memorial site:

Assembled on the roof of the Battery Parking Garage south of the 9/11 Memorial, the twin beams reach up to four miles into the sky and are comprised of 88 7,000-watt xenon lightbulbs positioned into two 48-foot squares, echoing the shape and orientation of the Twin Towers. The installation can also be viewed from a 60-mile radius around lower Manhattan.

Tribute in Light was conceived by several artists and designers who were then brought together under the auspices of the Municipal Art Society and Creative Time: John Bennett, Gustavo Boneverdi, Richard Nash Gould, Julian LaVerdiere, and Paul Myoda, with lighting consultant Paul Marantz. Learn more about our 25^th anniversary Tribute in Light commemoration.

I live in NYC, and with the date, the light beams shift my memory to September 11, 2001. I remember observing the events with burned pieces of paper flowing to where I stood. Initially, I didn’t comprehend what was happening, but it was an election day at a time with many people filling the streets and the realization was quick.

I am an old guy (87 years). I was born in Poland three months before the German invasion of Poland that started WWII. I grew up under the umbrella of the term “Never Again.” Put the phrase into the blog’s search box to see more of my background. Until age 6, I spent my time in the Warsaw Ghetto and the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Two thousand, five hundred Bergen-Belsen prisoners, including my mother, my uncle, and myself, were liberated by the American army on April 13, 1945 near Farsleben, a small town near Magdeburg, the capital of the German state of Saxony-Anhalt. We were on a train “trip” from Bergen-Belsen to Theresienstadt, another camp further from the Frontline. This trip was described in an earlier blog (May 21, 2025).

Figure 2 – Map of the state of Saxony-Anhalt

(https://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images;_ylt=A2RRIdQaq51qfwIAKXmJzbkF;_ylu=Y29sbwN1cy1lYXN0LTEEcG9zAzEEdnRpZAMEc2VjA3JlbA–?p=Saxony-Anhalt+Map&fr2=p%3As%2Cv%3Ai%2Cm%3Ars-top%2Cct%3Abing%2Crgn%3Atop%2Cpos%3A1&fr=mcafee)

I searched Google for Farsleben and the first link (JewishGen.org) includes the following:

As WWII came to an end, attempts were made to evacuate concentration camps before Allied troops arrived.  Three trains were sent from Bergen-Belsen on April 10, 1945, intended for Theresienstadt.  This train got as far as Farsleben, near Magdeburg, when US troops freed the prisoners on April 13, 1945.  It is estimated that about 2,500 prisoners were aboard this train when it started out on its fateful journey from Bergen-Belsen on April 10, 1945.

An article written in 2008 by Frank W. Towers of the 30th Infantry Division (http://www.30thinfantry.org/holocaust.shtml) gives a very personal overview of the encounter with this train.

So, our liberation is still the top “tourist attraction” in the area.

 A few days ago (Sunday, September 6^th), an election took place in the State of Saxony-Anhalt:

The AfD won the parliamentary election in Saxony-Anhalt on 6 September, securing 43.8% of the vote – 23 percentage points more than in 2021. This gave the party 39 seats in the 83-seat Landtag. The CDU, which had previously led the state government, won just 17.2% (down 19.9 pp) and 15 seats. Its coalition partner, the SPD, came third with 9.3% (up 0.9 pp), securing eight seats. The Greens also secured eight seats with 8.9% (up 3 pp), while Die Linke won the same number with 8.6% (down 2.4 pp). The Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) entered the Landtag with 5.3% of the vote and five seats. The FDP, another member of the outgoing governing coalition, failed to clear the electoral threshold. Turnout reached 77.8% (up 17.5 pp from 2021), the highest level recorded in the state since 1989.

The result will not alter the balance of power in the Bundesrat, where Saxony-Anhalt holds four of the 69 votes. The state constitution sets no specific deadline for electing a new minister-president. If the process reaches a third round of voting, a simple majority will suffice. The new Landtag must convene by 6 October at the latest (see Anything is possible: AfD sets its sights on power in Saxony-Anhalt).

The AfD leadership will seek to form a government, most likely with the support of the BSW, the only party to have declared before the election that it was willing to cooperate with the AfD. Following its crushing defeat, the CDU will focus on maintaining the stability of the federal government, particularly as it faces the prospect of further electoral setbacks. The next test will come in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania on 20 September, where the AfD leads the polls, followed by Berlin.

The results of this election give AfD (Alternative for Germany) the first post-WWII opportunity to govern a German state. German intelligence declared the party to be a demonstrably “right wing extremist.”

The stated reasons for the big win of AfD in the Saxony-Anhalt election were summarized as follows:

Experts attribute the AfD’s strong showing in the polls largely to the widespread dissatisfaction many people in the state feel with developments in Germany. Many jobs disappeared in the years following reunification, particularly in the lignite mining and chemical industries.

Saxony-Anhalt also faces pronounced demographic challenges. With an average age of 48.3 years, it had Germany’s oldest population in 2024. The state also has a pronounced gender imbalance among younger age groups, with approximately 120,240 men aged 18 to 29 compared with around 103,177 women. At the end of 2025, foreign nationals accounted for about 9% of the population, compared with roughly 15% nationwide. Many young people left the state and never returned.

Many people oppose further immigration, even though the state’s foreign population remains comparatively small. Nevertheless, its size has increased markedly over the past decade. According to the state’s Statistical Office, the number of people without German citizenship has more than doubled since 2015.

It is valid to ask whether Saxony-Anhalt is in the worst shape economically in Germany and what the election results could hold for governance in other states. Table 1 shows how the economy of Saxony-Anhalt looks compared to those of other German states:

Table 1 – The present (2025) economy of the German States and the list of the states that originated in East Germany (now called New Federal States)

Economic data came from Wikipedia

States origins data came from (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_states_of_Germany)

Here are a few comments on the recent history of the German states:

The new states, which were dissolved by the GDR government in 1952 and re-established in 1990, are Brandenburg, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, and Thuringia. The state of Berlin, the result of a merger between East and West Berlin, is usually not considered one of the new states.

Table 1 shows that indeed, in terms of GDP/Capita, Saxony-Anhalt is the poorest state in Germany. However, the difference between its GDP/Capita and that of the richest state in the NFS category (Saxony) is 8.5%. The data can much better be interpreted that the economic differences are still a remnant of the partition of Germany post-WWII. The present German states are not identical to the reintegration states, so some changes for a better integration might help. The prognosis of the governing status of the rest of the NFS states will probably depend how the new government in Saxony-Anhalt does. The next election, on September 20^th, is in Mecklenburg, another NFS state where AfD is ahead in the polls.

Next,  I asked AI (through Gemini) What is AfD policy on Holocaust memory? Here is what I got:

The Alternative for Germany (AfD) actively rejects Germany’s established culture of Holocaust remembrance, seeking to pivot away from what party leaders call a national “guilt cult.”

Core Criticisms of Remembrance

• The “Guilt Cult” (Schuldkult): AfD leaders, including Alice Weidel, argue that public life and schools focus too much on Nazi crimes. They claim this makes young Germans feel unnecessary shame rather than pride in their country. [1, 2]
• Downplaying the Past: Honorary chairman Alexander Gauland once dismissed the 1933–1945 Nazi era as mere “bird’s droppings” in more than 1,000 years of successful German history. [1, 2]
• The “Monument of Shame”: Björn Höcke, a prominent regional AfD leader, famously called Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe a “monument of shame” and called for a complete reversal of German memory policies. [1, 2, 3]

Proposed Policy Changes

• School Curricula: AfD lawmakers have proposed shifting the focus in history classes. Some suggested having “less Hitler” and framing German history in a more positive, balanced light. [1, 2, 3]
• Shifting the Narrative: The party often emphasizes German suffering during World War II—such as Allied bombings or postwar displacement—to place national focus away from exclusive perpetrator guilt. [1]
• Funding Cuts: The party has pledged to reduce or end state funding for art, museums, or projects they view as “anti-German” or overly focused on atonement. [1, 2]

Germany teaches the Holocaust as a mandatory, cross-curricular subject that focuses heavily on the societal and political mechanisms of how a democracy collapses rather than just detailing military battles. [1, 2, 3]

Curriculum and Structure

• Early Introduction: Education begins around the fifth or sixth grade (ages 10–12) and is revisited with deeper academic rigor in grades 9–12. [1]

• Cross-Subject Approach: The topic is not confined to history class. It is integrated into German class (reading memoirs and literature from the era), religion/ethics, art (analyzing Nazi classifications of “degenerate art”), and music (studying propaganda). [1, 2]

• Focus on the “How” and “Why”: Lessons emphasize the collapse of the Weimar Republic, the rise of Adolf Hitler, societal conformity, and the dangers of discrimination and totalitarianism. [1, 2]

• State Variations: Because education in Germany is managed at the state (Bundesland) level, specific textbooks and exact grade timelines vary slightly by region. [1, 2]

Why the concern?

9/11 took place 56 years after of our liberation from the “Train Near Magdeburg” in Farsleben in Saxony-Anhalt. As mentioned before, I am 87 years old, and was liberated from the camp at age 6. Per definition, I am member of the last generation that directly experienced the Holocaust. Retaining our memory of the Holocaust is important to me and to many others as a reference for the evil carried out by a sovereign state (Germany). Without direct witnesses, it would be easy for people just to claim that the Holocaust never happened. A week after I started this blog (May 7, 2012) I tried to collect the evidence—the proof of these events that will remain after the passing of Holocaust survivors and liberators.

My next blog (May 14, 2012) was titled, “Why Am I ‘Dragging’ the Holocaust into the Climate Change Debate?” I got 62 responses; not all of them were complementary. When Holocaust survivors and liberators disappear, references to these events will depend on what they leave behind. One of the few ways to perpetuate these memories is through education. In an earlier blog titled, “A Call to Immortalize and Generalize ‘Never Again’” (August 13, 2025), I discussed the issue, mentioning that learning about the Holocaust in German schools is mandatory (https://www.dw.com/en/teaching-about-nazis-and-the-holocaust-in-german-schools/a-66526994). In that blog I also mentioned all the global places where the teaching of the Holocaust is mandatory, including many states in the US.

The situation in Germany is similar to that in the US: Germany’s 16 federal states are autonomous regarding the educational curriculum. How—and to what extent—schools teach about the Holocaust varies nationwide. The opening picture in the August 13, 2025 blog shows me giving a lecture to Farsleben’s students on my experiences. I have visited the place often and I have good friends there who occasionally visit my family in NYC.

What will happen, if and when, AfD takes control of the state government in Saxony-Anhalt?

To try to answer the question, I asked AI who in Germany is in control of the infrastructure left after WWII. I got the following response:

(AI Gemini) Who is paying in Germany for the memorials of the concentration camps – States or Federal?

Both the federal government (Bund) and the regional state governments (Länder) share the cost of maintaining concentration camp memorials in Germany. [1, 2]

Federal Funding (Bund)

• National Importance: The federal government funds major concentration camp memorials and national remembrance sites because they hold historic significance for the entire country. [1]
• Shared Foundations: Prominent sites like the Buchenwald, Mittelbau-Dora, Dachau, and Flossenbürg memorials receive significant institutional and project funding from the federal budget. [1]

State Funding (Länder)

• Regional Responsibility: Under Germany’s federal system, cultural affairs and education—including local history and regional memorials—are primarily the legal duty of the individual states (Kulturföderalismus). [1]
• Local Maintenance: The specific state where a memorial is located contributes matching or baseline financial support for daily operations, regional archives, and staff. [1, 2]

Joint Support

• Co-Financing: Most major memorial sites operate through mixed financing, where the federal government and the respective state government split or combine resources through public foundations. [1, 2]

The situation of keeping the memory of 9/11 fresh is different but has some similarities when it comes to reliance on education. The number of people in the US who were born after September 11, 2001 is about 100 million, almost a third of the population. On September, 11, 2001, a few members of the terrorist organization al-Qaida forced planes to attack targets in NYC, Washington, DC, and Pennsylvania, taking the life of nearly 3,000 people. Here is what AP wrote about the event during the 25^th anniversary (https://apnews.com/article/sept-11-25th-anniversary-schools-education-5bbe944901f47ae0b87d09ef3300a608):

Teaching about 9/11 in schools is more important than ever now that about one-third of Americans were born after al-Qaida hijackers crashed planes and killed nearly 3,000 people in New York, the Pentagon and rural Shanksville, Pennsylvania. A growing majority of states — at least 40 — expect or suggest that public schools address 9/11 in some way, but the provisions vary widely in scope, specificity and framing, The Associated Press has found.

There is no Federal requirement to do that.

In my August, 13, 2025 blog that I mentioned earlier, I described a documentary that is being made to help teach students about the Holocaust and the role that a unit of the American army played in our liberation in Farsleben. The movie making is now almost finished and a recent CBS piece provided a more recent short description (Uncovering a Holocaust survival story – CBS News). I hope that the movie comes out soon so the few liberators and survivors who took part in the event will be able to see it and even provide direct testimony about the authenticity of the events.

(Source: Reuters)

Last week’s blog focused on global resilience to vulnerabilities. This blog will focus on past and present global vulnerabilities that require resilience. As in last week’s blog, my focus will be on climate change. However, as I write, things continue to change. From my perspective, the largest new change that will require resilience, took place last Sunday in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt with the win of the AfD (Alternative for Germany) party. As some of the previous blogs show (see June 8, 2021; May 21, 2025), Saxony-Anhalt is the place where I was liberated by units of the American Army in 1945. Next week’s blog will discuss the connections in terms of global vulnerabilities that are only marginally connected with climate change.

I will start this blog with my request to AI (through Gemini) to summarize a list of global disasters that were triggered by climate change. The list will only describe categories of disaster, and will not specify locations, damage, or timing. I will follow this with one complex disaster that happened recently on the border of Nepal and Tibet, which belongs to more than one of the categories in the AI list. The schematic form of this disaster is shown in the picture above.

Let me start with the AI list. As usual, I am marking my prompt in red:

Global disasters triggered by climate change (searched August 27th)

As global temperatures continue to rise, human-induced climate change alters atmospheric and oceanic conditions, intensifying extreme weather and triggering severe environmental disasters worldwide.

Primary Disaster Categories

• Extreme Heatwaves & Prolonged Droughts: Rising global surface temperatures accelerate moisture evaporation, altering jet streams and causing prolonged heat domes and megadroughts. Agricultural failures, water scarcity, and heat-related deaths hit vulnerable urban and rural populations disproportionately hard.
• Catastrophic Flooding & Extreme Precipitation: A warmer atmosphere holds more moisture (roughly 7% more per 1°C of warming), leading to higher atmospheric capacity for extreme rainfall. Sudden monsoons, riverine floods, and flash flooding collapse infrastructure and wash away farmland.
• Intensified Tropical Cyclones & Hurricanes: Warmer ocean surface waters supply increased thermal energy to tropical systems, increasing the frequency of rapid-intensification events and higher peak wind speeds. Sea-level rise further amplifies the reach and destructiveness of coastal storm surges.
• Unprecedented Wildfires: Hotter, drier conditions lengthen fire seasons and create abundant dry biomass fuels. Mega-fires burn larger surface areas, degrade air quality over continental scales, and destroy critical forest carbon sinks.
• Glacial Retreat & Glacial Lake Outburst Floods (GLOFs): Accelerated melting of mountain glaciers—from the Andes to the Himalayas—creates unstable glacial lakes. When natural ice or sediment dams fail, sudden outburst floods devastate downstream mountain communities.

Cascading and Compound Impacts

Climate-driven hazards rarely occur in isolation. Multiple stressors frequently trigger compounding crises:

• Food Security: Prolonged droughts combined with sudden heat stress reduce crop yields and strain marine fisheries, causing sharp regional spikes in food prices.
• Human Displacement: Storms, floods, and slow-onset desertification drive millions of people from their homes annually, giving rise to localized socio-economic strain and climate migration.
• Ecosystem Collapse: Extreme marine heatwaves cause widespread coral bleaching and ocean acidification, threatening marine biodiversity and coastal defenses.

The details of the mechanism of the Nepal-Tibet disaster, which took place two weeks ago, are  shown in the top picture, and summarized below, together with this disaster’s vulnerability to climate change:

Glaciers and permafrost in the Himalayas are melting faster as temperatures rise, though scientists are still studying the exact causes of this week’s landslide.

Climate change is heating up the Himalayas and supercharging the risk of disasters like the deadly flash flooding in Nepal and Tibet, though scientists are still determining the exact cause of this week’s catastrophe.

A group of glaciologists and geologists said on Thursday that the flooding was probably unleashed after an enormous chunk of bedrock collapsed underneath a glacier, triggering a landslide high in the mountains. At the same time, a chunk of ice snapped off the glacier itself and cascaded thousands of feet to the valley below, the scientists said.

As humans warm the planet by burning fossil fuels, the Himalayas are losing their permafrost, a mixture of soil, rocks and organic matter that has remained frozen for thousands of years. The thawing permafrost is destabilizing the foundation underneath glaciers, raising the risks of precisely these kinds of landslides and glacial collapses.

If this explanation is not clear enough, you might want to have a look at another source (The Economist).

The damage that this avalanche inflicted is summarized in another piece from the NYT:

The blast of earth, water and ice that rushed through a region of Nepal knocked out more than a tenth of the country’s hydropower capacity within minutes, striking at an industry Nepal has made central to its economic future.

The floods in the Bhotekoshi and Trishuli valleys damaged or destroyed 14 hydroelectric projects, including six under construction. After the deluge on Wednesday, 431 megawatts of generating capacity had gone dark, according to the Nepal Electricity Authority — more than 12 percent of the country’s total capacity.

The toll was far greater when including projects under construction. Counting those plants, now halted or in some cases swept away, would roughly double the capacity lost. Among them was the Trishuli-1 project, where 63 Indians were rescued from a construction tunnel and more than 100 workers remain unaccounted for.

The destruction was part of a much larger human catastrophe. More than 600 people were killed, more than 2,400 remained missing, and 93,000 needed assistances.

Past and present disasters need remedies. Future disasters need to be minimized through resilience. Remedies are usually local; resilience is often global. These disasters can happen everywhere. A recent UN report tried to compare the global costs of disaster repairs with the costs needed to apply mechanisms to minimize the impacts of similar future disasters:

Tackling air pollution and climate change together can save millions of lives, reduce global warming and generate roughly $15 in economic benefits for every $1 spent, a new UN-backed report has revealed.

The report estimates that annual benefits from implementing the 25 measures would be equivalent to 2.8 per cent of global gross domestic product (GDP) in 2035, 4.5 per cent in 2050 and 11.4 per cent in 2100.

By comparison, explicit fossil fuel subsidies accounted for 2.18 per cent of global GDP in 2022, while healthcare spending reached 9.3 per cent in 2023.

Even when non-market welfare gains are excluded, such as the value of longer and healthier lives, the measures still return around $4 for every dollar invested.

Elliott Harris, independent co-chair of the assessment, said the findings should change how finance ministries and investors view clean-air policies.

“A benefit-cost ratio of 15 to 1 would attract capital instantly in almost any other sector,” he said. “Every year of delay costs the world more than $1.5 trillion in benefits we will not get back.”

Figure 1 – New charging station near home

The top picture shows my wife near a new charging station just installed near our place. We are too old now to change our car, so we just walked by it. To many others, however, these new installations might act as a strong incentive to do just that. Last week’s blog addressed the antonyms, stability and turmoil, and how the Uncertainty Principle might apply on a global scale. This blog, and the two that follow, will address two other words used widely when discussing climate change: resilience and vulnerability.

I asked AI (Gemini) to define the two words. This is what I got:

Resilience and vulnerability function as conceptual opposites, where resilience describes the ability to bounce back from stress, and vulnerability describes susceptibility to suffering harm from it. [1, 2, 3].

Key Differences

• Resilience: The capacity to recover, adapt, and regain strength after facing hardship or adversity.
• Vulnerability: The state of being open to damage, defenseless against external shocks, or likely to experience harm. [1, 2, 3]

How They Relate

• Direct Antonyms: In psychological and ecological contexts, vulnerability is frequently viewed as the opposite end of the spectrum from resilience. [1, 2]

• Nuance: While antonymous, experts on platforms like Reddit note they are distinct, interacting forces rather than absolute inverse binaries—an individual or system can experience vulnerability while simultaneously building resilience. [1]

The references for the AI definition are given below:

1. Resilience dictionary – Stockholm Resilience Centre
2. Resilience and vulnerability: distinct concepts to address global change in forests – ScienceDirect
3. What is the antonym of “resilience”? | Filo

This blog is focused on resilience; the next two blogs will focus on immediate and long-term vulnerabilities.

As discussed in the last few blogs, this year has been rich with American-initiated conflicts that have had major global impacts. Attempts at resilience in these conflicts are a good place to start an illustration of the concepts. The emphasis will be on resilience in energy availability. I wrote earlier (March 25, 2026) about the resilience of the energy transition in the middle of what appeared to be a sudden American-Israeli attack on Iran. More recent global efforts to work around the war are described below:

The crisis in the Strait of Hormuz is forcing Middle East nations to explore new routes for critical oil exports, easing the global supply crunch and reducing Iran’s ability to use the waterway as a source of leverage.

The new pathways could become permanent and reshape how the Gulf region exports crude.

Efforts to re-route oil can be arduous, however, and attempts to rebuild or resuscitate old pipelines will take time.

This conflict’s main impact on global energy use is on the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20% of global oil transit takes place. This is mainly from the Middle East to Asia, and we see the obvious resilience of both importers and exporters through attempts to shift the energy transition to local control. Last week’s blog focused on trying to map the global importers and exporters that are the most vulnerable to the need to shift to local control of energy sources. This blog will expand on these attempts, with a focus on Saudi Arabia, the largest oil exporter. I will also look at the global shift to electric vehicles that was discussed last week, describing Pakistan as an example; global oil price and batteries.

Saudi Arabia (Under Threat, Saudi Arabia Reroutes Oil Exports Yet Again – The New York Times):

Saudi Arabia, long the world’s largest oil exporter, has spent the last six months improvising how to get its crude to the world.

In its latest workaround, Saudi Arabia has significantly cut back on shipping oil via the Bab al-Mandab Strait in the southern end of the Red Sea amid attacks claimed by Yemen’s Iranian-backed Houthi militants.

Instead, the kingdom is aggressively moving oil north in the Red Sea, via ships that unload crude at a pipeline in Egypt that shuttles it to the Mediterranean Sea, analysts say, even though that convoluted route is costlier and takes weeks longer for oil to reach markets in Asia.

The new global dynamics of electric car sales are described in a recent NYT piece, with details shown in Figure 2:

Figure 2 – Share of electric vehicles among new cars in 2025, by country (Source: AutoPunditz)

Within this transition, particular attention should be focused on the difference between the US, where only 10% of new cars sold in 2025 were electric, and China (53%). I will return to other differences between these two leading economies in the energy transition, in future blogs.

Oil Price:

Figure 3 shows the sharp rise in Brent crude oil price, immediately after the start of the war. It also shows the stabilization of this market a short time after (1-2 months), mainly due to resilience steps that China took and the US did not.

Figure 3 – Brent crude oil price after the start of the war (Source: NYT)

Work on resilience of the energy market was not restricted to fossil fuels. The rise in data centers, which were described in previous blogs, required major increases in electric power consumption. Effective, continued use of electric power requires batteries. Even the US has found that it depends on not-too-friendly China, to import the batteries that it needs (Trump Shuns E.V.s and Wind Power, But He’s Pouring Billions Into Batteries – The New York Times). I will return to this issue in future blogs. In all these discussions, one must remember that the shift from fossil fuels to electricity—no matter the source of the fossil fuels—is not a remedy to climate change through reduction of carbon dioxide emissions. As mentioned repeatedly in earlier blogs, fossil fuels are primary energy sources, while electricity is a secondary energy source. Any quantification of the shifts addresses the resilience to the difficulties of transporting the fuels but resilience to climate change requires analysis of how the countries power the electricity that they are now using. Again, this will be done in future blogs.

Figure 1 (AI through Gemini) Can you suggest a Picture that will reflect the uncertainty of the global economy?

As labeled, the top picture was created by AI (the red label shows my prompt). The only writing consists of two words: stability and turmoil. Turmoil and stability are antonyms. Can they operate together on a collective global scale? The lady in the picture seems to be looking at the future and thinking that they can. AI showed a modern city representing stability, and a huge tornado representing turmoil and chaos. I live in a place (NYC) that looks stable right now, but I follow President Trump’s policies. Many of them are triggering turmoil both globally and nationally, however they do not seem to be affecting the performance of the stock market in the same way, even though it is on a similar scale. My thoughts are shifting to the uncertainty principle:

uncertainty principle, statement, articulated (1927) by the German physicist Werner Heisenberg, that the position and the velocity of an object cannot both be measured exactly, at the same time, even in theory. The very concepts of exact position and exact velocity together, in fact, have no meaning in nature.

Any attempt to measure precisely the velocity of a subatomic particle, such as an electron, will knock it about in an unpredictable way, so that a simultaneous measurement of its position has no validity. This result has nothing to do with inadequacies in the measuring instruments, the technique, or the observer; it arises out of the intimate connection in nature between particles and waves in the realm of subatomic dimensions.

I am trying to address the question of scale. The uncertainty principle describes reality on the quantum scale: the fundamental property of reality on the smallest scale. Can I transform the concept to the human collective scale, with stability and turmoil describing a mixed reality, similar to position and momentum (product of mass and velocity) on a quantum scale? This blog describes my attempt. Specifically, the progress in AI is described by some as a fast track to an ideal world. They see President’s Trump actions and announcements in his second term as the ultimate turmoil and the stock market as the actual consequence.

I will start with AI. A recent interview with Yuval Noah Harari (YNH) about AI got the honor of front placement in a recent issue of The Economist. Two key paragraphs summarize his perspective (Yuval Noah Harari on the economic and political perils of AI):

In a wide-ranging interview for The Economist’s Insider show, Mr Harari warns that AI’s biggest impact may be the way it reshapes trust, “the most important asset in the world”. Much of modernity is underpinned by systems that allow trust to operate at scales unimaginable in the prehistoric world. Money is a “very creative, imaginative way to build trust between strangers”: people happily hand over valuable goods in exchange for nothing more than a promise that someone else will do the same in turn. “Bankers, if they are good bankers doing their job, they build trust.”

Handing powerful AI control of the financial system looks almost inevitable, Mr Harari reckons. AI systems will soon be capable of understanding the totality of the global economy in far greater detail than a human ever could. The pressure for humans to place more trust in AIs will thus grow over the next few years, Mr Harari expects. He points to the rise of cryptocurrencies—“AI money”, as he puts it. Many people have more faith in the bitcoin algorithm than even in those good bankers. As people lose faith in the media, he adds, they happily consume algorithmically curated feeds on digital platforms (think TikTok or Instagram)

YNH is an Israeli historian-philosopher who many (including me) follow (see previous blog titled “Working For the Future,” January 10, 2017). The time scale that he describes as “present” is 10 years, but Figure 3 shows us that a lot is already happening. A previous blog describes Elon Musk’s picture of the near future (March 11, 2026) (A World Where All Is Free? That’s Elon Musk’s Theory of ‘Sustainable Abundance.’ – The New York Times):

The Tesla and SpaceX chief has told his followers that they will live in a world where robots will take care of every need and people do not have to work, in what has become his latest slogan.

His picture and timeline are not much different than those of YNH, but he is also the richest man in the world and is putting his money behind his beliefs

All this optimism coincides with daily declarations from President Trump. Last Sunday, the Opinion section of the NYT produced a long list of actions that President Trump took that the writers saw as his attempts to;take the country from a democracy to an autocracy (Opinion | Trump’s Election Interference Is Eroding American Democracy – The New York Times). Below, I list only the actions that have already put us more than halfway through this transition:

Persecuting political opponents

Bypassing the legislature

Declaring false emergencies

Vilifying marginalized groups

Creating a cult of personality

Using power for personal profit

My interests are slightly different. Since the US is the richest country in the world and one way or another, major technical innovations start here, I wanted a list that would give me a summary of President Trump’s second-term actions that had a global impact. The only politically “neutral” answer that I could get came from AI. The response is shown below is from AI (Gemini). I asked for a: Summary of Trump’s global impact in his second term:

Military Escalation and Regional Conflicts

• War with Iran: In early 2026, the U.S. and Israel launched coordinated, major airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities to derail their weapons program, precipitating a dangerous, ongoing military standoff. [1, 2, 3]
• Strait of Hormuz & Fuel Crisis: The strikes on Iran triggered a severe blockade in the Strait of Hormuz, causing a massive global fuel shortage and economic fallout. [1, 2]
• Venezuela Regime Collapse: In a dramatic escalation, the U.S. bombed Venezuela, capturing its socialist leader Nicolás Maduro on narco-terrorism charges and placing the nation under de facto U.S. influence managed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio. [1, 2, 3]
• Global Counterterrorism Spree: The administration has authorized expanded bombing campaigns and counterterrorism operations in Yemen (targeting Houthi militants), Syria, Nigeria, and Somalia. [1, 2, 3]

🌐 Global Trade and Economic Disruption

• Aggressive Tariff Regime: Relying heavily on tariffs as a primary economic tool, the administration has disrupted international supply chains and sparked friction with key global trading partners. [1, 2]
• Stalled Peace Initiatives: Despite initial brokered ceasefires—including an early deal between Israel and Hamas—the broader global architecture remains unstable, with unresolved conflicts stretching from Ukraine to the Middle East heading into the U.S. midterm elections. [1, 2]

🌍 Withdrawal from International Treaties

• Multilateral Exits: Consistent with his first term, Trump has once again ordered the United States to withdraw from major international bodies and global frameworks:
  • The Paris Climate Accords
  • The World Health Organization (WHO)
  • UNESCO [1, 2]

The timescale of the impacts of these activities is often considerably shorter than that of AI that was mentioned earlier. We still have about 2.5 years of President’s Trump second term if he follows the Constitutional mandate of a two-term limit. We will see if the 2028 election results in a significant shift from the current administration.

How to measure economic impact is a valid question. President Trump’s favorite indicator is the stock market. Figure 2 shows the behavior of the stock market, (through the Dow Index), since 1900, as a function of the geopolitical events since that time. The only significant perturbation seen there is the 1929 crash. Since then, the line is approximately straight, almost independent of all the geopolitical events. However, there are two issues that directly impact this graph. First, the vertical scale is logarithmic. To those who need a reminder of logarithmic scale, a short look at Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logarithmic_scale) might help:

A logarithmic scale is nonlinear, and as such numbers with equal distance between them such as 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 are not equally spaced. Equally spaced values on a logarithmic scale have exponents that increment uniformly. Examples of equally spaced values are 10, 100, 1000, 10000, and 100000 (i.e., 10¹, 10², 10³, 10⁴, 10⁵) and 2, 4, 8, 16, and 32 (i.e., 2¹, 2², 2³, 2⁴, 2⁵).

The second issue is that it isn’t corrected for inflation. Both these issues tend to reduce volatility. A straight line on such a scale indicates a constant return on investment. The return on the line shown in Figure 2 is about 11%. A return of this magnitude requires a doubling time of around 6 years. Taking inflation into account reduces the yield to about 8%, with a doubling time of around 9 years.

Figure 2 – Historic Dow Jones variations (Source: Carson Group)

Changing the scale and incorporating inflation will show an increase volatility but the growth will continue to be independent of the geopolitical events. However, we must remember that

roughly 58% of U.S. adults own stock, either directly or through mutual funds, index funds, or retirement accounts like a 401(k) or IRA, according to data from Gallup [1] . This means the stock market cannot act as a sole representative of the economy, and elections are much more inclusive. The next federal election in the US is on November 4^th. These are not presidential elections, but they should be more informative about the collective thinking of whether stability or turmoil currently rules our life.

A few days ago, an extraordinary event took place in China: an Olympiad of humanoid robots, a photo of which is shown in Figure 3. Global human records were broken. Superhuman digitized society will not wait 10 years. It’s happening now. Whether the changes it signifies will lead to stability or chaos remains to be seen.

Figure 3 – From the Olympiad of Humanoid Robots in China (Source: NBC News)

Figure 1 – Almost three-quarters of the global population live in countries that are net importers of fossil fuels – Fossil fuel exporters – Wikipedia

Last week’s blog started to discuss attempts to shift the energy transition to take sovereignty into account. The point was made that such shifts will be compatible with other objectives such as security and the mitigation of climate change. The top figure of this blog shows that about 75% of the global population lives in countries that cannot make such a shift based on fossil fuels. They don’t have enough of these resources on hand and need to import them. Even some of the countries that have enough fossil fuels and can export them have issues. Many of the exporters of fossil fuel are in the Middle East and are directly impacted by the Iran war with US and Israel, which has made the Strait of Hormuz almost impossible to pass exports through (see March 25, 2026 blog). Russia is one of the world’s top fossil fuel exporters. However, Russia’s attack on Ukraine triggered an economic boycott by many Western countries. Figure 2 shows the extent of that move.

Figure 2 (Source: Forbes)

The US is marked in the top figure as a net exporter of fossil fuels, an “honor” that it acquired in 2019 with the advance of fracking and its ability to find new resources. However, prices can play an important role, and net exporting countries can have a significant import. The United States is probably the most consequential of these from a global perspective. Figure 3 describes oil imports into the US in 2021. Two years later, it was declared a net exporter.

Figure 3 – While the US is the world’s largest oil producer, it still imports more than 40% of the oil and petroleum products it consumes (Source: Visual Capitalist)

At the time Figure 3 was created, US import of fossil fuels was still about 40%. Presently it has been reduced to 17%. As Figure 3 shows, the largest source of imported oil was Canada. However, our current relationship with Canada is not the best! All these global events have direct impacts on energy prices. I will cite below two cases of net importers of fossil fuels: Western Europe with an emphasis on Germany—and Pakistan. Next week’s blog will generalize the impacts to more countries and will try to explore impacts on energy efficiency.

Western Europe:

The wholesale price for European natural gas soared in June to 60 euros per megawatt-hour, the highest it has been since the war with Iran began, and has continued to hover around that level. Without a lasting resolution to the war, analysts said, Europe will be forced to keep paying higher prices to fill its natural gas storage sites, costs that will trickle down to utility bills.

Germany:

New data from London think-tank Energy Institute found that together wind and solar generated 44 per cent of the country’s electricity in 2025 – overtaking fossil fuels by one per cent. Since the introduction of its landmark renewable energy law (Erneuerbare-Energien-Gesetz) in 2000, the country’s share of generation from wind and solar alone has skyrocketed by around 42 per cent. At the same time, coal – which is often described as the ‘dirtiest’ form of energy – fell from supplying more than half of Germany’s electricity to just 21 per cent. Experts are now hopeful that the country will wean itself off coal before 2038. It’s an impressive feat considering Germany phased out nuclear power – which contributed to 6.6 per cent of the country’s total power production in 2022. While nuclear generation is often categorised as clean energy, concern around its harmful waste and environmental impacts remains rife. It mirrors a broader trend, as data from energy think-tank Ember found that wind and solar generated more power than fossil fuels across the EU for the first time last year (30 per cent compared to 29 per cent). Despite the victory, Germany is still grappling with negative electricity prices – which occur when supply outstrips demand. This is often attributed to the inflexible nature of wind and solar power, which generate electricity based on weather conditions rather than actual demand. It has led to a spike in curtailment, where operators temporarily switch off or reduce the output of solar and wind farms. When curtailment occurs directly because generating electricity is no longer economically viable (rather than because of grid constraints), this is known as price-sensitive, or commercial, curtailment.

Pakistan:

Electric motorcycles are a crucial indicator of changes driven by war. In poorer countries, where people are most vulnerable to energy-price shocks, two-wheelers are far more common than cars. Electric models typically cost more to buy than gasoline-powered versions.

But rising gasoline prices have given electrics a big advantage: It’s cheaper to charge a battery than to fill up a fuel tank. In Vietnam, famous for its motorcycle-swarmed streets, the biggest domestic producer, VinFast, has seen soaring sales. In Kenya, about 25 to 35 percent of new motorcycle sales are electric, said Gagan Gupta, the founder of Spiro, the largest electric vehicle company operating in Africa. He said the energy shock helped “multiply everything by two times.” In all these places, people in the industry increasingly tout the idea that future generations will never operate a gasoline-powered vehicle. “The demand is effectively open-ended,” said Josh Whale, the founder of Ampersand, an electric-motorcycle company that operates in Kenya and Rwanda.

However, sovereignty is not the only shift to local control that the energy system is trying to adjust to. Other decentralization attempts are in play too (Future of Energy: Embracing Decentralization):

Welcome to the world of decentralization and energy—a dynamic duo shaping the future of how we power our lives. Decentralization is like giving power back to the people, literally. Instead of relying on big, centralized power plants, it’s all about spreading energy generation and control to local sources. Traditionally, we’ve been hooked on massive power plants and extensive networks to meet our global energy needs. But decentralization flips the script, advocating for a more local and diverse approach to energy production and management. This shift promises resilience, sustainability, and even a touch of democracy in how we handle our energy resources. In this exploration, we’ll unravel the simplicity and potential behind decentralization and energy. Get ready to discover how this shift is not just changing the way we power our world but also paving the way for a brighter, greener, and more accessible energy future.

We need more time to quantify these efforts.

Figure 1 – Average price of a solar panel vs. global electricity generated from solar, 1975-2025 (Source: Pew Research Center)

Figure 1 was taken from the Pew Research Center site that was discussed in last week’s blog (August 6, 2026), which ended with the following lines: “There is a growing realization that the global energy transition to mitigate climate change coincides with energy security, but both need local control (IEA’s Latest Report Reveals Energy’s Shift From Climate to Security). However, neither affordability nor local control are assured.” This blog goes through some details about recent attempts to include access to energy as part of state sovereignty. I will start with the Merriam-Webster definition of sovereignty and its present status:

1 a : supreme power especially over a body politic

b : freedom from external control : autonomy sense 1

c : controlling influence

2 : one that is sovereign

especially : an autonomous state : autonomy sense 2

Number of sovereign countries (AI Through Google, now Gemini):

There are 195 widely recognized sovereign countries in the world. This total includes the 193 member states of the United Nations, plus two permanent observer states: the Holy See (Vatican City) and the State of Palestine. [1, 2]

Depending on the criteria used for political recognition, some lists count up to 197 by including associated states like the Cook Islands and Niue, or higher if counting partially recognized or disputed territories. [1, 2, 3]

Figures 2 and 3 illustrate attempts to integrate energy affordability with the security of sovereign countries through local control.

Figure 2 (Source: Canary Media)

Figure 3 illustrates that China is the facilitator of this transition:

Figure 3

All three figures illustrate that the transition to local control of energy sources ties in well with the transition from coal to solar energy. However, in spite of the fact that China is leading that transition, the country is still responsible for more than 50% of global use of coal—the dirtiest fossil fuel that underlies recent energy use (Ranked: The Countries That Consume the Most Coal):

Figure 4 – The countries that consume most coal

Trump claimed security as the reason behind his attempt to shift legislative issues to executive control under his “Liberation Day” global tariff policy. Three paragraphs from that publication give insight into the Trump administration’s thinking:

On April 2, 2025—a date President Trump proclaimed “Liberation Day”—the administration announced the most sweeping tariff hike since the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, the 1930 law best remembered for triggering a global trade war and deepening the Great Depression.

At the center of the Trump administration’s trade doctrine lies a conviction that the U.S. trade deficit with each partner is not just a data point, but a ledger of national failure. It is a scarlet letter testifying to decades of asymmetric trade agreements, in which the United States bartered away its industrial birthright for mere corporate margins and cheaper imports.

What the United States gained in shareholder returns, it lost in productive capacity. Steel, aluminum, and shipbuilding were left to wither—casualties of an indifferent trade regime. And this, in Trump’s framing, is where trade policy crosses the Rubicon. What began as economic decline becomes a national security liability, one that would be exposed in the event of a sustained military conflict. After all, it was the United States’ unmatched industrial base, not just its battlefield tactics, that secured victory in World War II. Today, the argument goes, that the “arsenal of democracy” has been allowed to rust, while China has assembled the very industrial capacity that once defined U.S. strength. 

However, the shift to local control of the economy is not restricted to the US. In many cases, it is driven by smaller countries’ interests in breaking their dependence on the US. My next blog will list some such efforts in countries that are ahead in the transition to local control.

 Figure 1 – AI-generated (Gemini) image response to a request for a picture of different ways for an energy transition

The picture above does not mention climate change or any other trigger. Even so, the picture illustrates the full transition that would serve to mitigate climate change. In the US, however, the Trump administration is advancing policies to ignore climate change and stop the energy transition:

When the Trump administration declared two weeks ago that it would largely disregard the economic cost of climate change as it sets policies and regulations, it was just the latest step in a multipronged effort to erase global warming from the American agenda.

But President Trump is doing more than just turning a blind eye to the fact that the planet is growing hotter. He is weakening the country’s capacity to understand global warming and to prepare for its consequences.

The administration has dismantled climate research, firing some of the nation’s top scientists, and gutted efforts to chart how fast greenhouse gases are building up in the atmosphere and what that means for the economy, employment, agriculture, health and other aspects of American society. The government will no longer track major sources of greenhouse gases, data that has been used to measure the scale and identify sources of the problem for the past 15 years.

Still, anthropogenic global climate change continues to accelerate:

Global warming appears to have shifted into a faster gear. After removing the effects of El Niño, volcanic eruptions, and solar cycles, researchers found that the planet has warmed at roughly 0.35°C per decade over the past ten years, compared with just under 0.2°C per decade from 1970 to 2015. The acceleration, which becomes visible around 2013 to 2015, appeared across five major global temperature datasets with more than 98% statistical certainty.

Presently, not including climate change, the global events with the largest direct impacts on global energy use are the US-Israel-Iran war, the Russia-Ukraine war, and the global energy transition via electrification. Some of my earlier blogs described the impacts of the US-Israel-Iran war on the transport of fossil fuels (March 25, 2026) and the role of data centers in global electrification (May 21, 2026).

Another issue that drives countries to change energy suppliers is the desire for control. Cuba serves as a good example of what can happen to a country that loses control over its energy supply:

Since January 2026, the United States is imposing a fuel blockade on Cuba, causing an ongoing fuel shortage and economic crisis in the latter.^{[14][15][16][17]} As an island, Cuba heavily depends on importing petroleum to meet its energy needs, particularly from nearby Venezuela and Mexico. Following the 2026 United States intervention in Venezuela, in which U.S. forces ousted president Nicolás Maduro, Venezuelan oil exports to Cuba were cut off, leaving the country without adequate supply. In addition, the U.S. enacted a blockade on oil coming into Venezuela a month prior.^[18] The United States is reportedly motivated by a desire for regime change in Cuba by the end of 2026.^[19] 

In all these cases, the solution seems to be the same: get control over your energy supply through internal means. If possible, the word “sovereignty” should apply to your energy supply. The scenario shown in the top figure describes such a transition. It mitigates climate change without referring to climate change. The quote below from Bloomberg summarizes a similar situation:

(Bloomberg) — The world’s hunger for electricity, as demand rises almost everywhere, will lead to solar becoming the dominant source of power early next decade, according to new analysis from BloombergNEF. Surging demand from data centers, population growth, rising incomes and more battery-powered vehicles are all boosting demand for electricity, researchers wrote in BNEF’s annual New Energy Outlook on Tuesday. The report concludes that rapid electrification is set to accelerate the transition to clean energy. “So far this decade, the world has suffered three substantial shocks to the energy system: the Covid-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine and, most recently, the conflict in the Persian Gulf,” the analysts wrote. “Successive energy market shocks could be a boon for the energy transition as some countries look to decouple from imported fossil fuels and bolster their energy security.”

Recently, a Pew Research Center publication summarized the global energy transition over the past 25 years. Figures 2 and 3 illustrate these trends:

Figure 2

Figure 3

The global trend of converting as much energy use as possible to electricity is illustrated by the attempt to electrify aviation, an application unthinkable until recently:

TAXIING TOWARDS the runway, the propeller stops turning as your correspondent pulls the throttle back to await take-off. On a single-engine light aircraft, that is usually a worrying sign of engine failure. Yet this plane is powered by an electric motor and, just as when you come to a halt in a Tesla, the motor stops until it is needed again. On advancing the throttle the propeller springs back to life and the aircraft is soon briskly climbing, in an eerily quiet manner. The two-seater Pipistrel Velis Electro is the first electric aircraft to be certified for pilot training. Besides its low noise, it has other unusual features. Instead of the lengthy series of engine checks a combustion-engine plane requires before take-off, the Electro is ready to go with the flick of four switches. Since it has few moving parts, it is also cheaper to maintain. And without directly producing any nasty emissions it can claim to be green, especially if recharged with renewable power. Topping up the battery takes just over an hour.

Statista illustrates the progress of global electrification with Figure 4 and the paragraph below:

Ten years after the Paris Agreement was opened for signature by member states at the UN Headquarters in New York on April 22, 2016, the global energy transition is beginning to reshape the electricity mix. As data from Ember’s Global Electricity Review 2026 shows, renewables have now overtaken coal as the world’s largest source of electricity generation. In 2025, renewables accounted for 33.8 percent of global power output, slightly ahead of coal at 33.0 percent — a symbolic milestone in the shift toward low‑carbon energy.

The trend reflects a steady but uneven rise of renewables over the past twenty‑five years, from less than 19 percent in 2000 to nearly 34 percent in 2025. Growth was relatively modest in the early 2000s, with the share hovering below 20 percent until 2010, then accelerating markedly over the past decade as wind and especially solar power expanded rapidly. In 2025, this momentum strengthened further, with the entire increase in global electricity demand met by clean energy sources. Solar power alone accounted for 75 percent of the net increase, adding 636 TWh of generation during the year.

Over the same period, the role of fossil fuels in electricity generation has followed a two-phase trajectory. Between 2000 and the mid-2010s, their combined share initially edged up, peaking at around 69 percent in 2012, as growing global demand was largely met by coal and gas. Since then, however, the trend has reversed. Coal’s share has seen the most pronounced decline, falling from about 41 percent at its peak to 33 percent in 2025, while gas and other fossil fuels have decreased more gradually from roughly 28 percent to 24.4 percent. Despite this progress, fossil fuels still account for a majority of global electricity generation (around 57 percent in 2025), highlighting the scale of the challenge ahead in meeting climate targets.

Figure 4 (source: Statista)

The interesting development in the energy transition’s shift to sovereign states is that while it is not always anchored in developed countries, it can shift sovereignty away from rich countries:

Several ambitious international initiatives that aim to deliver access to clean, modern energy services to underserved populations in developing countries have recently taken root, including the UN Sustainable Energy for All initiative, the Energy+ Partnership, and Power Africa. The scale of the challenge is great: today, 1.3 billion people lack access to electricity, yet extending the electrical grid is not a cost-effective solution in many rural, low-income areas. The International Energy Agency estimates that to achieve universal access to electricity by 2030, more than 50 percent of new electricity connections will be through distributed energy solutions, and more than 90 percent of those will use renewable energy sources. To meet the scale of the challenge, policy and regulation will need to be designed in ways that recognize the potential of distributed renewable energy to contribute to energy access goals, especially given recent technological and business model innovations of enterprises delivering these solutions. International initiatives investing in clean energy access can work with national governments and local actors to inform policy and regulation that supports distributed renewable energy enterprises. This Issue Brief collects the perspectives of some of these enterprises on policy and regulatory barriers and opportunities to scaling up clean energy access, and synthesizes these perspectives into two recommendations:

There is a growing realization that the global energy transition to mitigate climate change coincides with energy security, but both need local control. However, neither affordability nor local control is assured.

AI (Copilot) illustration of how AI should create guardrails for itself

This is the last blog I have planned in this series focusing on AI. I look at the dangers of relying on AI for decision making and some of the protective guardrails that are under discussion. The top picture was drafted by AI (through Copilot) as a response to a request to draw a picture of how AI should create guardrails for itself. The fact that there are no explanations for the various symbols, can serve as a message that AI is still “thinking” about it and also gives readers an opportunity for their own input about the question.

Ideally, AI would be used to make the world a better place for humanity. This line of thinking is becoming more popular, and it’s easy to picture this idealized future:

At its core is the concept of sufficiency – the idea that people can enjoy a prosperous, healthy life without constantly striving to consume or accumulate more material possessions that degrade the natural world on which all life depends.

To achieve this, the authors envisage three steps: more than halving average working time from 2,100 hours a year to 1,000 hours, roughly equivalent to a two-and-a-half-day working week; encouraging people to eat less red meat, which is the main driver of deforestation and ecological destruction; and refocusing the economy toward low-consumption activities by more than doubling education spending to €8,400 (£7,250) a person and healthcare spending to €14,400.

Piketty said: “One extra euro of GDP in education and health has three to four times less material footprint and energy consumption than one extra euro of GDP in the manufacturing sector. So that’s why the sectoral shifts are hugely important.”

This picture is not too different from the one Elon Musk advocated, which he called “sustainable abundance” (see my March 11, 2026 blog).  How AI can actually help in achieving a better world is a much more difficult issue.

A recent Economist interview with Elon Musk incorporated AI in trying to answer this question:

ELON MUSK, in his telling, is a modern-day Cassandra—better than most at predicting the future, but doomed to be disbelieved. “People don’t realise that what I’m saying will come to pass,” he tells The Economist in a 90-minute interview for The Insider, held at a giant Tesla factory in Texas where electric cars drive themselves off the assembly line. That may be because his future-gazing ranges from the unsettling to the downright weird. Mr Musk predicts that, within five years, artificial-intelligence systems may surpass the sum of all human intelligence. Within ten years, robots in the workplace will help usher in an era of such “amazing abundance” that money will become meaningless. And within 20 years, Britain—a country that he has not visited for years—will be engulfed in civil war.

However, most people are not interested in making the world a better place. Most are interested in making their world a better place, with more power and resources. In trying to achieve that, AI can evolve into a dangerous tool that needs guardrails. Who is setting up the guardrails is now part of the fight for power. So, I asked AI the following question:

How can AI become dangerous?

AI becomes dangerous when its capabilities, incentives, or misuse outpace human control. The most serious risks identified by hundreds of AI experts fall into five major danger zones: dangerous capabilities, weapons & cyberattacks, competitive pressures, power centralization, and false information.

⚠️ The Core Ways AI Can Become Dangerous

1. Misuse by Humans

People can deliberately use AI for harmful purposes:

• Designing bioweapons or chemical agents
• Launching cyberattacks at unprecedented scale
• Creating autonomous weapons
• Running adversarial attacks on critical infrastructure

These are not hypothetical — experts warn these risks already show measurable probability of catastrophic outcomes.

2. Misalignment with Human Goals

AI can behave in ways developers never intended:

• Reward hacking / specification gaming (finding loopholes in instructions)
• Scheming or power‑seeking behavior in pursuit of long-term goals
• Autonomous replication or actions outside human oversight

Misalignment becomes dangerous when AI systems gain:

• High autonomy
• Strategic planning ability
• Persuasive or manipulative communication skills

3. Systemic Risks to Society

AI can destabilize social and political systems:

• Concentrating power in governments or corporations
• Accelerating economic inequality
• Undermining human agency through overdependence
• Locking in current values, limiting future moral progress

These risks grow gradually but can become irreversible.

Earlier this month, the issue of AI developing into something existentially dangerous moved beyond a theoretical question and became real:

IT SOUNDS like something out of a sci-fi film. On July 16th Hugging Face, an artificial-intelligence platform, announced it had notified law enforcement after an attacker had used an AI agent to breach its systems. On July 21st it emerged that there had been no human involved; the AI agent was the attacker.

OpenAI applies safeguards to its publicly available models, which ensure they do not pursue unwanted actions. Ask the commercially available version of ChatGPT to help you hack into a website, for example, and it will refuse. To assess the capabilities of its unreleased model, the company had temporarily suspended those restrictions. Simply letting a highly capable cyberattacker loose on the open internet would have been too risky, however, so OpenAI had placed its models in a sandbox—an isolated computer environment with no internet access, except for an internally hosted third-party service that allowed it to fetch small software packages needed to complete its tests.

This author is right that it is a scenario straight out of science fiction. Just go to Google or your favorite search engine (or AI) and ask for the “top 10 robot uprising movies.”

One of my reasons for ending my series on AI and returning to the real world was finding out how prolific AI books have become in publishing:

Two business school professors, curious about A.I. books and whether anyone actually likes them, gathered data about 10 million books published on Amazon over the last five years. They found that the number of e-books published per month had tripled since the release of ChatGPT, to more than 300,000 at the end of last year, from around 100,000 in 2022. (Amazon said that its internal metrics did not show that level of growth, but would not share its figures.)

It is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish what is real and what is not. So, I am going to return to focusing on the “real” world. Though I may occasionally use AI for some technical jobs, I will always mark the real (original) source.

In last week’s blog, I started demonstrating the power of AI to predict aspects of the future by having it analyze the future of climate change. My focus was not to demonstrate the benefits or the accuracy of these predictions. To be honest, with my background in the topic, I did not find that the predictions added anything to my knowledge base. Nor would they help teachers that teach the topic. However, the predictions might help students and people with a minimal background in the subject. The AI that I used was Gemini, which Google has now adopted for all inquiries. Two main aspects illustrate the predictions: the top picture and the text that follows. My original question was “Can you predict the future of global climate change and explain how you arrived at these predictions?” The picture in last week’s blog came out on the first try; the text needed some feedback. My prompt from last week’s blog did not ask to emphasize humanity’s role in the process, bu it came up anyway because of AI’s exposure to IPCC training. The noticeable result in last week’s blog was that the opening picture was OK on the first trial, but the text eliminated most traces of quantitative predictions in the form of numbers to focus instead on trends. This blog is using a different AI, Copilot, which is offered as part of the Microsoft system. A short description of the two AI systems is given below (through Gemini):

Gemini is Google’s multimodal AI assistant, designed for deep web research, creative ideation, and processing vast amounts of data. Copilot is Microsoft’s productivity-focused AI, built natively into the Microsoft 365 ecosystem to streamline writing, analyze spreadsheets, and summarize meetings

In this blog, I explicitly asked Copilot to include human contributions to climate change. Unlike the previous blog, the top picture needed some fine tuning to limit the amount of information included. However, the text needed none. I started the discussion with the following question:

Can you predict the future of global climate change and explain how you arrived at these predictions? Please include human contributions.

Big picture: where the climate is headed

Global climate change will continue to intensify throughout this century. The exact amount depends on how quickly humanity cuts greenhouse gas emissions, but some patterns are very robust:

• Global temperature: Under all scenarios, global surface temperature keeps rising at least until mid‑century. Without deep emission cuts, warming is likely to exceed and then above pre‑industrial levels this century.
• Extremes and weather: More frequent and intense heatwaves, heavy rainfall, droughts in some regions, and a higher proportion of intense tropical cyclones are expected as warming increases.
• Ice, oceans, and sea level: Continued warming drives loss of Arctic sea ice, glaciers, and ice sheets, long‑term sea‑level rise, and more marine heatwaves and ocean acidification. Many of these changes are irreversible for centuries to millennia.
• Water cycle: The global water cycle becomes more intense, stronger monsoons, more severe wet and dry events, and greater variability in rainfall.

Human contribution: how much is “us”?

The scientific consensus is blunt:

• Human activities have “unequivocally” caused global warming. Burning fossil fuels, deforestation, and industrial processes have raised greenhouse gas concentrations and pushed global temperature to about above 1850–1900 levels (2011–2020 average).
• Anthropogenic forcing dominates recent changes. When scientists run climate models with human emissions, they reproduce the observed warming; without human emissions, the models show little warming. This is a key attribution test.
• Extremes already show our fingerprint. Many heatwaves, heavy rainfall events, and droughts now have a clear human‑caused component—meaning they are more likely, more intense, or both because of our emissions.

In short: the main driver of current and near‑future climate change is human greenhouse gas emissions, not natural variability or solar changes.

How scientists make these predictions

1. Climate models and scenarios

• Climate models: Complex computer models simulate the atmosphere, oceans, ice, and land. They are tested against past climate and observations to ensure they can reproduce known patterns and trends.
• Emissions scenarios (e.g., SSPs): Scientists feed different futures into these models—high‑emissions, medium, and strong‑mitigation pathways. Each scenario reflects assumptions about energy use, land use, population, and policy.
• Ensembles: Many models are run together to form an “ensemble,” giving a range of possible outcomes and a sense of uncertainty rather than a single number.

2. Physical understanding

• Greenhouse effect: We know from physics that increasing CO , methane, and other gases traps more heat, raising global temperature.
• Climate sensitivity: The IPCC’s best estimate is that doubling CO leads to about of warming, with a narrowed uncertainty range compared to earlier reports.

3. Attribution methods

• Detection and attribution studies: Researchers compare observed trends with model simulations that include and exclude human influences, using statistical methods to quantify how much of a change is due to us versus natural variability.

What the future looks like under different human choices

• High‑emissions path (little mitigation): Warming could reach well above and potentially or more by 2100, with severe impacts on ecosystems, food systems, health, and infrastructure, plus large and continuing sea‑level rise.
• Intermediate path (current policies / NDCs): Current national pledges make it likely that will be exceeded and harder to keep warming below unless policies are strengthened significantly and quickly.
• Strong‑mitigation path (rapid deep cuts): Rapid, sustained reductions in CO and other greenhouse gases could still limit warming close to , reduce the risk of the most extreme outcomes, and slow long‑term sea‑level rise—though some changes already locked in will continue.

Bringing it together

Direct answer: The future of global climate change is largely determined by human decisions about emissions in the next few decades. Physics, observations, and models all point to continued warming, more extremes, and long‑lasting changes to oceans and ice, with human greenhouse gases as the dominant cause.

If you’d like, I can map this into a more explicit “Venn diagram” of natural variability vs. human drivers vs. future impacts to match the diagram you asked for earlier.

I followed with one more question:

Can you quantify the predictions and the scenarios?

Here’s a quantified look at the future of global climate change based on the latest IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) and related scientific literature.

🌡️ Global Temperature Projections

Inference: Even under moderate mitigation, the world is likely to exceed 1.5°C around 2035–2040, with 2°C reached before 2060 unless emissions fall sharply.

🌊 Sea‑Level Rise

Drivers: Thermal expansion, glacier melt, and ice‑sheet loss (especially Greenland and West Antarctica).

🔥 Extreme Events

• Heatwaves: Frequency projected to double or triple by mid‑century under SSP2‑4.5.
• Heavy precipitation: Increase of 10–30% intensity in many mid‑latitude and tropical regions.
• Droughts: More severe in subtropical zones (Mediterranean, southwestern U.S., southern Africa).
• Tropical cyclones: Fewer overall, but stronger and more rainfall‑intense.

🌍 Human Contribution Quantified

• Anthropogenic greenhouse gases account for >90% of observed warming since 1850.
• CO₂ concentration: ~420 ppm (2026), up from 280 ppm pre‑industrial.
• Radiative forcing: Human activities add roughly +2.7 W/m² net forcing to Earth’s energy balance.
• Attribution studies: Human influence explains ~1.07°C of the 1°C observed warming (natural factors <0.1°C).

⚙️ How These Numbers Are Derived

1. Model ensembles (CMIP6): Dozens of global climate models simulate physical processes under standardized scenarios.
2. Observational constraints: Satellite and surface data calibrate model sensitivity.
3. Probabilistic projections: Statistical methods combine model outputs to yield ranges (e.g., 5th–95th percentile).
4. Attribution analysis: Compare simulations with and without human emissions to isolate anthropogenic effects.

🧭 Interpretation

• Near‑term (2026–2040): Warming locked in at ~1.5°C regardless of scenario.

• Mid‑century (2040–2060): Divergence begins—strong mitigation stabilizes, high‑emission accelerates.

• End‑century (2100): Range 4–4.4°C, depending on human choices.

In real life, there is an ongoing discussion about anthropogenic contributions to the heatwaves that we are currently experiencing:

The record-breaking heat that’s scorching Europe day and night this month would not have been possible without climate change, according to a new study. The World Weather Attribution rapid study released Friday found that the heat would have been virtually impossible just five decades ago and is 200 times more likely today than it would have been 20 years ago. Millions in France, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom and elsewhere in Europe are experiencing extreme temperatures and humidity this week associated with a heat dome. Daytime temperatures have topped 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) in many places, while high nighttime temperatures have also made it harder to cool down and recover.

It is obvious, that on this issue, governments are not yet using AI to improve the prospects of our future.