Whisper it, but things may not be quite as bad as you think.

If you’ve spent the last week feeling as if you can’t face the news, so alarming are the implications of Donald Trump’s re-election, then allow me to inject a tiny bit of hope – on climate change, of all things.

Negotiators from 196 countries meet in Azerbaijan this week at the COP29 climate conference. The world is already badly behind the curve when it comes to cutting the climate emissions that cause global heating and future American obstructionism will make matters worse.

Donald Trump’s appalling cynicism – “drill, baby drill” – could not be worse timed. Depending on how far he goes in attacking America’s green transition, it could result in billions more tonnes of carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere than would otherwise have done.

Deadly flooding in South Sudan, Chad, Spain and Germany; forest fires in Australia, Greece and California; drought and famine in Somalia and Yemen; polar ice melt; deadly hurricanes battering the US eastern seaboard: every continent is already affected by climate change.

The world’s forests are already less able to sequester carbon dioxide than they once were due to extreme heat, forest fires, drought and disease, and there will come a point where they can no longer do so. Without concerted action to drive down emissions, the world will reach a tipping point, a trigger for runaway climate change, perhaps later this century.

Read more from Rebecca McQuillan:

It’s a scenario described with unimpeachable scientific accuracy by the former chair of the James Hutton Institute, Prof James Curran, as........

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