U.N.'s World Meteorological Organization says in its State of the Global Climate Report that our situation really, really sucks

There’s a temptation even still to talk about climate change as if it were a gradual warming — a slow fever rising degree by degree, a long emergency unfolding in disruptive, but manageable increments. During the 1990s and early 2000s, that was perhaps a reasonable perspective.

The United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization’s State of the Global Climate 2025 report ought to finally shatter that illusion for people still clutching it as if it’s a shield against ever being personally affected by what’s happening." Every key climate indicator is flashing red," said U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres in response to the report. "Humanity has just endured the 11 hottest years on record. When history repeats itself 11 times, it is no longer a coincidence. It is a call to act." Sadly he’s been having to say that for his entire nine years in the secretary-general post. 

Don’t expect the report to change the minds of stubborn climate science rejectors nor of fossil fuel merchant princes like U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright. He labels documents like these “alarmist,” and argues there is no climate crisis. The report challenges this stupidity and greed by adding another confirmation to the growing scientific view that the planet is no longer merely warming, but destabilizing by accumulating heat at a rate that far exceeds what emphasis on surface temperatures alone can convey. 

The most recent 11 years were indeed the hottest surface temperatures ever recorded. But the oceans have been absorbing most of the extra heat and have hit the highest level in human history nine years running, with the rate of ocean warming having doubled over the past 20 years when compared with the average over the past 45 years. Glaciers are losing ice mass at a terrifying rate, threatening fresh water supplies in many regions and adding to rising seas. Since 2012, global average sea level has been rising at a faster pace than in the previous 20 years. Marine heatwaves are now widespread. And crucially, heat is penetrating deeper into the ocean, altering circulation patterns and committing the planet to long-term change. The report confirms what the Sixth Assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says has been a steady 40-year increase in ocean acidity. 

The human consequences are already visible. Coastal communities face an accelerating advance of seas and more extreme storms. Coral reefs are bleaching. Fish stocks are shifting or collapsing at a time when some 3 billion people depend on seafood as a primary protein source. The ocean is a foundation of global food security, economic stability, and cultural life. It also is home to hugely diverse lifeforms, including our most ancient forebears. No way around it. The data is ominous.

The most arresting concept in the report is one often discussed by climatologists — James Hansen having been a leader in this — but which has shown up far less commonly in the media and general public discourse: Earth’s energy imbalance, the source of the above-mentioned destabilizing. This isn’t a fuzzy metaphor. It’s physics. At its core, Earth’s climate system is governed by a simple principle: the balance between incoming solar radiation and outgoing heat. For millennia, that balance fluctuated within relatively narrow bounds, allowing ecosystems and human societies to develop in stable conditions. A balance now broken.

Greenhouse gases act like an insulating blanket, trapping heat that would otherwise escape into space, Once the gases reach a certain level, the result is a persistent energy surplus — more energy entering the system than leaving it. 

Unlike surface temperatures, which can fluctuate year to year due to natural variability, the energy imbalance represents a cumulative, long-term forcing. It is the underlying engine of climate change, the hidden momentum that ensures warming will continue even if emissions were sharply reduced tomorrow. For the first time, the WMO formally tracked the growing gap between incoming solar radiation and the heat the Earth can radiate back into space. That gap — driven overwhelmingly by fossil fuel emissions — is accelerating. For 20 years, the ocean has been absorbing about 18 times the energy used by humans each year, according to the report. 

The implications are profound.

This highlights the increasing vulnerability of a planetary system moving ever further out of balance as a result of human activity. The burning of oil, gas, coal, and forests releases heat-trapping carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide. All these are at their highest levels in at least 800,000 years. Think about that. The last time those greenhouse gases were at the level they are now was at least half-a-million years before homo sapiens appeared. 

For more than 30 years, much of our climate discourse has revolved around temperature targets: 1.5°C  (2.7°F), 2°C (3.6°F), thresholds beyond which scientists tell us the impacts of warming become increasingly dangerous. The Earth’s energy imbalance exposes the inadequacy of those benchmarks. Temperature is what we feel. But the imbalance is what drives everything. 

The WMO report makes clear that these changes are effectively irreversible on human timescales. Even aggressive emissions reductions will not halt ocean warming this century, because the energy imbalance has already set processes in motion that will continue unfolding over millennia. This is climate change as inheritance — a legacy of accumulated energy that we and future generations will be forced to manage.

“Scientific advances have improved our understanding of the Earth’s energy imbalance and of the reality facing our planet and our climate right now,” said WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo. “Human activities are increasingly disrupting the natural equilibrium, and we will live with these consequences for hundreds and thousands of years.”

It is, of course, not a new idea, but one of the most important contributions of the WMO report is its emphasis on interconnected impacts. Climate change is not a single crisis but a cascade of linked disruptions across ecological, economic, and social systems.

Since money is the only focus that seems to matter to some people, it should be noted that extreme weather events in 2025 alone — heatwaves, floods, droughts, cyclones — caused thousands of deaths and gobsmacking sums worldwide. The estimated $150 billion in direct and indirect costs of the California wildfires provide one example among many.

The deeper story lies in the secondary effects, although these are not without their own financial costs:

• Heat stress reduces labor productivity, affecting 1.2 billion workers annually.
• Crop failures exacerbate food insecurity and drive price volatility.
• Water scarcity intensifies competition between regions and sectors.
• Displacement — 250 million people over the past decade — creates migration pressures that can destabilize political systems.

The climate emergency is amplifying existing inequalities, turning economic precarity into humanitarian crisis and environmental stress into geopolitical tension. As Secretary-General  Guterres has argued, fossil fuel dependence is now “destabilizing both the climate and global security.” 

No need to await any future examples. Iran sits at the center of the global oil system, not just as a major exporter but a controller of the Strait of Hormuz , through which — as everybody who already didn’t know has learned the past month — roughly a fifth of the world’s petroleum normally passes. Even partial disruption — whether from sanctions tightening, infrastructure strikes, or shipping risk premiums — ripples instantly through global markets, driving price spikes that incentivize increased production elsewhere. In the short term, war may constrain fossil fuel use and jack up prices, but the longer-term political response to supply shocks is rarely conservation — it is expansion. The carbon consequences are predictable. 

At the same time, the war itself is carbon-intensive in often ignored ways. Modern militaries are among the largest institutional consumers of fossil fuels on Earth, burning jet fuel, diesel, and bunker fuel at staggering rates while emitting greenhouse gases that are largely exempt from international accounting frameworks. Strikes on oil infrastructure, refineries, and storage facilities release additional plumes of carbon and methane directly into the atmosphere. Even the explosive materials in the bombs and missiles themselves release prodigious amounts of greenhouse gases. Reconstruction compounds the problem, requiring energy-intensive materials — cement, steel, transport —that lock in further emissions. This is climate change as a byproduct of organized violence, an emissions stream that rarely appears in official inventories but is nonetheless real.

Every additional barrel of oil burned, whether to stabilize markets or fuel military operations, adds to the surplus of trapped heat accumulating in oceans, land, and ice. To reiterate, the WMO makes clear that this imbalance is already driving long-term changes that will persist for centuries. War, in this context, is not a separate crisis running parallel to climate change — it’s an accelerant. It deepens fossil fuel dependence, delays structural transition, and injects yet more energy into a system already pushed, in Guterres’ words, “beyond its limits.”

The accelerating loss of glacial mass across the planet is another of the impacts WMO delved into:

Overall mass balance in 2024/2025 as estimated from a set of reference glaciers was among the five lowest glacier mass balances on record (1950-2025) and less negative than the record loss in 2022/2023. The 2024/2025 mass balance was close to the average for the preceding three years, 2021/2022 to 2023/2024, which saw the largest negative three-year mass balance on record. This continues a trend of accelerated glacier mass loss in recent years: 8 of the 10 largest negative mass balance years since 1950 have occurred since 2016. [...]

Glacier mass balance — the amount of mass gained or lost by the glacier — is commonly expressed as the annual thickness change averaged over the glacier area, expressed in metres water equivalent. One metre water equivalent is approximately the same as one tonne per square metre. Ice loss from glaciers contributed around 21% of the total sea-level rise over the period 1993–2018. By way of comparison, ocean warming contributed 42% of the total rise, and melting of the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica contributed 15% and 8% respectively.²⁷

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For years, climate policy has been framed in terms of gradual transitions: decarbonization pathways, net-zero targets, market-based solutions. While these approaches have achieved some progress, particularly when it comes to installation of renewable sources of power, the WMO report shows these are insufficient for the scale of the crisis. Energy imbalance is growing faster than incremental policies can address. The inertia of the system — particularly in the oceans — means delays today will lock in impacts for centuries.

Clearly, some of this is baked. We stuck with it. But even modestly reducing the ultimate impacts will require the breadth of transformation that no empire or international alliance has ever even pondered much less tried. 

What a Transformation Requires

If the WMO report is a diagnosis, then the treatment must be systemic. The following steps outline a framework for action that matches the scale of the crisis:

Rapid Fossil Fuel Phaseout

• Legally binding timelines to end coal, oil, and gas production.
• Immediate halt to new exploration and infrastructure.
• Just transition programs for workers and communities.

Public Investment at Scale

• Massive funding for renewable energy, grid modernization, and storage.
• Expansion of public transportation and electrification.
• Climate-resilient infrastructure in vulnerable regions.

Global Equity and Justice

• Loss-and-damage financing for countries facing disproportionate impacts.
• Debt relief tied to climate adaptation and mitigation.
• Technology transfer to enable global decarbonization.

Economic Reorientation

• Shift from growth-driven models to sustainability and well-being metrics.
• Regulation of financial markets to align with climate goals.
• Accountability mechanisms for corporate emissions and disinformation.

Adaptation as Survival Strategy

• Integration of climate data into health, agriculture, and urban planning.
• Early-warning systems and disaster preparedness.
• Managed retreat for high-risk coastal areas.

Some readers will no doubt look at that list and think “fantastic” in the sense of I’m dreaming a fantasy. And maybe so. But incrementalism is this matter is slow death. The only option to dealing with accelerating climate change is accelerating our response. Some will say the only way to do that is democratic socialism. and they don’t want that. I say that if that is the only way, then what choice do we have?

We’ve built an economic system that prioritizes short-term profit over long-term stability, that externalizes environmental costs, that concentrates wealth while distributing risk. The atmosphere records that imbalance in rising greenhouse gas concentrations. The oceans record it in heat content. Human societies record it in inequality, displacement, and conflict. The WMO report does not say this explicitly. But it does not need to. The data speaks for itself.

The future is not predetermined. But the range of possible outcomes is narrowing, shaped by decisions made — or avoided — in the present. We can continue on the current path, allowing the energy imbalance to grow, the oceans to warm, the impacts to cascade. 

Or we can act. Decisively. Systemically. Urgently.

The laws of physics are not negotiable. The climate system will respond to the energy we put into it, regardless of political timelines or economic preferences. The only question is whether we can defeat the science-rejecting powers-that-be in the United States and elsewhere who no longer even pretend they have any plan to cut fossil fuels use.

The planet is out of balance. It’s time for those who want a livable future for ourselves and future generations not to be.