If Epstein is Trending, Why Isn’t +1.7°C?

The news cycle has become a hall of mirrors: Epstein, Trumpism, war, outrage, retribution. A thousand scandals designed to keep us anxious, tribal, and tired. We have to hold multiple truths at once: unfolding human atrocities, and something deeper accelerating quietly in the background - the rapid destabilisation of Earth’s climate system, the life-support system on which we all depend.

Eminent climate scientist James Hansen and colleagues have just published a paper from Columbia University with an unmissable premise: we’re likely headed into another El Niño only three years after the last one. And this will drive record warmth - not because El Niño is the cause, but because the baseline is now so high.

They put it starkly. If an El Niño develops this year, they estimate the 12-month running mean global temperature will rise towards about +1.7°C in early 2027. This isn’t a distant warning about 2100. It’s a near-term assessment about the next one to two years, and a decade-scale warning about how fast we are approaching a +2°C world.

Hansen’s team is explicit about what they think is driving this heating. Intensified warming is being driven by high climate sensitivity and a recent increase in net global climate forcing. Translation: the Earth is responding more strongly to greenhouse gases than many mainstream assessments assume, and we’ve also removed part of the pollution that was masking some of the warming.

This is the uncomfortable paradox of cleaning up some air pollution: aerosol particles from industry and shipping have been reflecting sunlight and changing clouds in ways that cool the planet. As aerosol pollution declines, that masking fades. None of this is an argument to keep the air polluted - aerosols kill people. It’s an argument that cutting CO₂ fast is now even more urgent, because the hidden warming we masked for decades is being revealed.

Then comes the assessment that should rattle complacency. Hansen and colleagues argue the main acceleration began around 2015. This means that +2°C is likely in the 2030s, not mid-century. Whether you fully accept Hansen’s modelling choices or not, that is a serious claim, and it is close enough in time to be politically and morally confronting.

And here’s the sickening part: we are still increasing emissions.

The same week a senior climate scientist is arguing that the climate is accelerating, the best global emissions assessment is showing that we are still pushing the pedal to the metal on CO₂ emissions. The Global Carbon Project’s 2025 Global Carbon Budget assesses that fossil fuel emissions rose again and reached a new record of over 38 billion tonnes (GtCO₂) in 2025. That’s not progress. It’s escalation.

So yes: despite the growing evidence base of accelerating climate chaos, we’re still growing the cause. This is the story of our era in one sentence. We are discovering, in higher resolution, the physics of what we have done, while we continue to do it.

There’s a particular kind of denial that thrives in government and political circles. It wears the costume of realism. It says: 1.5°C is already gone, so stop worrying about numbers. It says: adaptation will handle it. It says: three degrees is unpleasant but manageable. We just have to turn up our air conditioners. Hansen’s paper is, in part, an argument against that flippancy.

If the world really is on track for an El Niño rebound late in 2026, then the next 12 to 18 months will function like a torch in a dark room. Not because El Niño is the driver, but because it will make it harder for anyone to pretend the baseline is still stable.

And if emissions are still rising, ten years after Paris, then the primary political failure is no longer ignorance. It’s attention. We are being governed, increasingly, by a system that converts outrage into paralysis and distraction.

This is the hard truth I want to land: climate does not care what’s trending. It’s not interested in Jeffrey Epstein, Gaza, or Greenland. There is no algorithmic mercy. Physics is physics, and it is getting more abrupt.

If we keep expanding fossil fuels while looking the other way or hoping for future technological miracles, we’re not managing risk - we’re locking in more damage. This is the decade that decides whether we stabilise the climate or normalise catastrophe. That should cut through every distraction.

From James Hansen et al: Another El Nino Already? What Can We Learn from It?