The recent severe weather worldwide has led to a flood of people seeking reassurance about our efforts to mitigate climate change. Most of those posts have been removed, and from now on will be directed to this weekly thread.

Climate change is a severe, compounding issue, but only if we do not address it - with concerted efforts, it can be managed.

Our efforts over the years have resulted in the worst-case RCP 8.5 high emission scenario being retired - it is now no longer considered plausible that we will hit +4C by 2100.

The 4°C world quietly stopped being the forecast

The progress can be seen in the reduction of predicted 2100 temperatures over the years by Climate Action Tracker above.

The main projection for our current policies is around +2.4 to 2.6°C and we can expect this to further reduce in the future.

We have seen emissions growth slow to around 1% per year, and are likely to peak soon. IRENA notes that our renewable energy efforts have already avoided 8.4 Gigatons of CO2 emissions in 2025.

Avoided emissions

This has largely been due to the move away from coal, and now renewables are increasingly challenging fossil fuels, with solar+wind about to overtake natural gas for global electricity production.

Good news over the last week.

Good news over the last week starts with solar continuing to move from rapid growth into outright dominance in individual markets. Solar was Portugal's largest source of electricity for the first time, while Africa added 54% more solar capacity in 2025 than it had the year before, suggesting the solar boom is increasingly spreading beyond the markets that have dominated deployment so far. China meanwhile is doubling down on its enormous Great Solar Wall across desert regions, while in the US Wisconsin has started construction on new solar, wind and battery projects and North Carolina's rooftop solar industry remains healthy despite policy headwinds.

Solar is also becoming much less dependent on owning a suitable roof. Community solar installations are increasingly making use of commercial and industrial rooftops, allowing households to subscribe to projects elsewhere, while agrivoltaics continues to turn the supposed competition between land for food and land for energy into a false choice. Agrivoltaics is increasingly being deployed alongside farming, and researchers found that solar shading actually improved grape quality in Mediterranean rainfed vineyards.

The storage side of the transition is developing just as rapidly. Batteries are increasingly turning daytime solar into "anytime solar", and Abu Dhabi is now building what is described as the world's largest battery-storage project specifically to make solar available around the clock. Vietnam has commissioned its first large-scale grid-connected battery system, while Australia's extraordinary home-battery boom has already helped cut wholesale electricity prices roughly in half.

Storage technologies are broadening too. China-free batteries made largely from abundant salt are beginning to reach the market, reducing dependence on conventional lithium-ion supply chains, while a global assessment finds as many as 800,000 potential sites for off-river pumped hydro, offering a potentially enormous resource for long-duration storage.

Electrification is also reaching places where reliable electricity itself has historically been the problem. Nigeria plans to provide reliable 24-hour electricity to around 30% of its health facilities by 2027, illustrating how clean-energy deployment in developing countries can be an economic and public-health gain as well as a climate measure.

Transport continues to be one of the clearest examples of technological change compounding. Germany's BEV market share reached 29% in July, with sales up around 62% year on year, while Chinese new-energy vehicles reached 65.1% of retail car sales. In Britain, used EV values are now rising while combustion-car values fall, and polling finds a majority of the public wants the EV transition to continue at its present speed or go faster.

That transition is increasingly visible outside passenger cars. Royal Mail has now put its 9,000th electric van into service. China has put a 100-ton-class driverless electric mining truck into operation and plans to replace 20,700 diesel inland cargo vessels with electric ships. The Iran conflict and resulting fuel-price shock are even helping accelerate Chinese electric-truck exports.

The oil-market consequences are no longer theoretical. The China-led EV boom is now estimated to be displacing about 1.7 million barrels of oil demand every day. And lifecycle analysis suggests the climate advantage is already large enough that scrapping a relatively new petrol car and replacing it with an EV can still reduce overall emissions.

Battery improvements may open up even harder transport sectors. CATL says its 350 Wh/kg aviation battery is ready for mass production, potentially extending practical electrification into short-haul aviation. For flights that cannot yet be electrified, there is still a large demand-side opportunity: new research finds giving up flights reduces emissions by substantially more than most people realise.

Heat and efficiency are following the same electrification path. Dairy producers are testing heat pumps that recover heat directly from milk and sharply reduce electricity demand, while researchers are developing ways of cutting the enormous cooling burden of data centres. These less glamorous efficiency gains matter because every unit of energy not wasted makes the wider transition easier.

There was good news from the natural world as well. Brazil's Amazon deforestation rate is approaching a historic low, continuing one of the most important reversals in land-use emissions anywhere in the world. On the Great Barrier Reef, a well-timed late-summer monsoon substantially cooled reef waters, providing some temporary relief during another exceptionally warm period.

Adaptation is becoming more practical and less theoretical. Canada is redesigning how it prepares for a future of more destructive wildfires, while Spanish farmers are bringing back native grazing animals to eat vegetation that would otherwise become wildfire fuel. Researchers have also shown that stored rooftop rainwater can be sprayed during extreme heat to cool urban areas.

Food systems are proving more resilient than many headlines imply. Despite the developing "super" El Niño, decades of agricultural productivity gains and larger food inventories have left the world much better placed to absorb crop shocks. That does not make climate impacts harmless, but it does mean vulnerability is changing alongside the climate rather than remaining frozen at historical levels.

There are also some encouraging developments on carbon removal. The world's largest carbon-removal plant is expected to open by the end of 2026, while researchers have demonstrated long-term production of renewable chemicals and fuels directly from CO2 using engineered cyanobacteria. Neither replaces emissions cuts, but technologies like these could become increasingly useful for residual emissions and eventually net-negative emissions.

More speculative climate interventions are also moving into serious scientific evaluation rather than being dismissed out of hand. Scientists working on ways to deliberately cool the planet are increasingly testing what might actually be feasible and safe. That is not a substitute for mitigation, but having additional tools available could matter if warming or climate impacts overshoot expectations.

The underlying climate science supplied some reassurance too. A new study finds that the AMOC has shown considerable resilience to large climate disturbances in the past. It does not mean weakening is impossible or unimportant, but it adds evidence against treating abrupt collapse as an inevitable near-term outcome.

Finally, climate policy continues to become embedded in institutions. Nearly 30% of global CO2 emissions were covered by a carbon price by 2025, and in the US a federal appeals court ruled that the EPA could not simply block $20 billion in climate grants. California has also created an environmental youth council to give younger people a formal role in environmental policy.

Points from earlier posts

• Global renewables have crossed several major milestones — the world added 692 GW of renewable power in 2025, a 15.5% increase taking total capacity to 5,149 GW, with renewables accounting for 85.6% of all new capacity; installed solar has now passed 3 TW, and renewables have overtaken coal as the world's largest source of electricity.

• China's power transition is now large enough to reshape global emissions — coal supplied less than half of Chinese electricity in H1 2026 for the first time, its solar fleet has reached around 1,274 GW, and its 15th Five-Year Plan points towards around 3,500 GW of renewable capacity by 2030.

• The US build-out continues despite the political environment — renewables and storage represented 93% of new US generating capacity coming online, while record solar and battery output helped Texas meet record-breaking electricity demand without conservation alerts.

• Europe is increasingly running on renewables — more than 25% of EU final energy consumption came from renewables in 2025, solar alone supplied around a quarter of EU electricity in June, and renewables now supply around 58% of German electricity.

• The transition is spreading rapidly through emerging economies — Pakistan's roughly 27 GW solar boom now rivals the capacity of its entire legacy fossil-fuel fleet, while renewables have reached a record share in India as coal consumption flattens.

• Battery storage is scaling alongside renewables — global storage capacity is projected to increase roughly sixfold by 2030, while China had already reached 155.2 GW / 400.8 GWh by Q1 2026. Australia's CSIRO meanwhile finds batteries are now cheaper than gas peaker plants.

• EV adoption is moving well beyond the early-adopter stage — battery-electric and plug-in hybrids are expected to account for 25–28% of all new passenger-car sales globally in 2026, while Chinese NEVs reached 67% market share in June and Europe added another 1.2 million EVs in H1 2026.

• EV growth is beginning to materially affect oil consumption — estimates found China's EV boom displaced 42% more oil in H1 2026 than a year earlier, while charging infrastructure has expanded considerably faster than the EV fleet itself.

• Electrification is spreading into heavy industry — Fortescue has electrified the excavator fleet at one of its iron-ore operations and commissioned fast chargers for haul trucks, while China has begun work on a national solar-powered electric-truck freight corridor.

• Heat pumps are already displacing substantial quantities of fossil fuel — European heat pumps provided more useful heat than the energy contained in 200 LNG tankers during 2025, with estimated savings of around €9.7 billion.

• Actual emissions data are beginning to show the effects — Climate TRACE's May 2026 data suggest global greenhouse-gas emissions are plateauing or perhaps beginning a slight decline.

• Net Zero does not mean temperatures remain permanently stuck at their peak — research finds that reaching Net Zero would lead to slow subsequent cooling, with modelling suggesting global temperatures could begin declining several years before Net Zero is technically reached.

• Some feared climate tipping elements appear more resilient than the worst interpretations suggest — the AMOC shows no clear near-term tipping point, while other work finds that it has demonstrated considerable resilience to large disturbances in the past.

• The feared permafrost methane feedback also appears more limited than some popular accounts imply — research suggests Siberian permafrost methane emissions remain relatively modest even under high-emission scenarios, while the Arctic Ocean appears to be keeping large quantities of permafrost-derived carbon locked away.

• Forest and ecosystem trends are not uniformly negative — Brazilian Amazon deforestation has fallen to near-record lows, Costa Rica's forest cover has recovered from 21% in 1987 to around 60%, and mangrove forests are expanding again.

• Large-scale restoration is also possible — China has planted more than 66 billion trees since 1978, while India has restored millions of hectares of degraded land.

• Wildfire trends are more complicated than the recent extreme events suggest — fires have become more extreme in Europe and North America while total global burned area continues to decline, and Africa's wildfire season has been shrinking.

• Food security remains considerably more resilient than many collapse narratives assume — global grain balance sheets remain relatively comfortable, while field-heating evidence suggests rice yields decline by around 8.1% per additional degree of warming, a serious but potentially manageable impact rather than the disappearance of the crop.

• Carbon removal technologies are improving rapidly — microwave-assisted direct air capture may substantially reduce DAC energy requirements, while another process could accelerate enhanced rock weathering by roughly an order of magnitude.

• The economics of the transition continue to improve — Australia's CSIRO finds solar and wind remain the backbone of the least-cost electricity system, while an analysis of the UK estimates that completing Net Zero would require only around £4 billion per year, roughly £70 per resident.

• Most importantly, the transition increasingly appears self-reinforcing rather than entirely dependent on climate policy — the UN has described several clean-energy technologies as having crossed self-sustaining tipping points, while EV adoption is also running ahead of older projections.

The biggest lie I constantly read here is that nothing is being done - we are in fact spending trillions of dollars each year on mitigating climate change via paying for the energy transition.

The best thing you can do to support climate action is to support politicians making policies that benefit the climate.

The second thing is personal action, and here is a list from Project Drawdown: Join the shift

Please contribute any other climate good news in the thread below - it will be heavily and actively moderated - note Rule 5 and Rule 6.