Day: September 17, 2025

Delta County ranchers want state action on conservation: ‘Shepherding’ needed to get water to Lake Powell — Heather Sackett (AspenJournalism.org) #ColoradoRiver #COriver #aridification

From left, Western States Ranches Agricultural Operations Manager Mike Higuera, Conscience Bay Research Program Officer Dan Waldvogle and Colorado State University researcher Perry Cabot. The three held a field day and ranch tour in August for other local ranchers to learn about water conservation and deficit irrigation. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM

Click the link to read the article on the Aspen Journalism website (Heather Sackett):

September 9, 2025

As reservoir levels continue to plummet at the end of another dismal water year, some agricultural water users are asking Colorado lawmakers to consider a bill next session that would make it easier for them to get credit for conserving water. 

It would be the next step in creating a conservation pool in Lake Powell that the Upper Basin states could use to protect against water scarcity.

Over the past decade, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming have dabbled in programs that pay willing participants to use less water on a temporary basis. But so far, that saved water has flowed downstream unaccounted for. Changes to state laws would be needed to allow state officials to shepherd conserved water into a Lake Powell pool. 

“Our message is simple: Protect Colorado agriculture by enabling voluntary, compensated water conservation without causing injury to other water users,” Dan Waldvogle told state legislators at an August meeting of the Water and Natural Resources Committee in Steamboat Springs. “Give us credit for the water we save and guarantee that conserved consumptive use is fairly and fully compensated … . The 2026 legislative session is our last best chance to take action and control our future.”

Waldvogle was speaking on behalf of the Colorado Farm Bureau and Rocky Mountain Farmers Union. He also works for Conscience Bay Co., a Boulder-based real estate investment firm that owns a cattle-ranching operation in Delta County known as Western States Ranches. 

But allowing the state to shepherd conserved water resurrects old concerns for some on the Western Slope. They say it could open the state to speculators and interstate water markets, with Colorado water users selling their water to the highest bidder in the Lower Basin, which includes California, Arizona and Nevada. 

“We’re saying you should not pass a standalone shepherding law or conserved consumptive use law that would allow and enable the state engineer to do that without having a thorough discussion with all stakeholders and encoding in legislation important sideboards and protections for our agricultural industry and our community,” Colorado River Water Conservation District General Manager Andy Mueller told lawmakers at the August meeting. 

State Engineer Jason Ullmann said in an email that he does “not have authority to require water conserved through voluntary programs to bypass other Colorado water users’ headgates unless it is necessary to meet Colorado’s compact obligations.” The bypassing of other users’ headgate to deliver water to a point downstream is more commonly known as shepherding.

The General Assembly would need to pass legislation in order to give him that authority, many stakeholders believe.

Western States Ranches near Eckert enrolled some of its fields in the 2024 System Conservation Pilot Program. The ranch was paid about $278,000 to save about 550 acre-feet of water. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM

The conservation conversation comes at a pivotal time for water users on the Colorado River, which remains wracked by drought and climate change. The most recent projections from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation show water levels at Lake Powell potentially falling below the threshold needed to make hydropower by November 2026. The reservoir is currently about 28% full. 

State Sen. Dylan Roberts, a Democrat who represents several Western Slope counties including Eagle, Garfield, Grand, Moffat, Rio Blanco, Routt and Summit and is the chair of the Water and Natural Resources Committee, told Aspen Journalism that as of now, no bill to address shepherding or future conservation programs is in the works in Colorado. But that may be because the seven states that share the Colorado River are still hashing out how reservoirs will be operated and how cuts will be shared when the current guidelines expire next year.

The potential path forward.

At the beginning of this summer, negotiators from the seven basin states agreed to a concept that would share water based on flows in the river and not on demands, but talks have since stalled. Federal officials have given the states a Nov. 11 deadline to come up with the outline of a deal.

“I remain fully committed to reaching consensus, but I want to be candid, especially with you all,” Becky Mitchell, Colorado’s lead negotiator, told lawmakers. “The discussions with my counterparts have been and continue to be challenging. I understand why this discussion is so challenging for our Lower Basin counterparts. They have developed a reliance on water that is above their apportionment that is simply not there.”

Colorado and the other Upper Basin states have been tiptoeing into voluntary conservation pilot programs since 2015, and the 2019 Drought Contingency Plan allowed for a 500,000-acre-foot conservation pool in Lake Powell. Late last year, Upper Basin officials offered up a 200,000-acre-foot pool in Powell as part of negotiations, and some type of future voluntary conservation program for the Upper Basin appears increasingly likely. 

The System Conservation Pilot Program, which first ran from 2015 to 2018, was rebooted in 2023 and paid water users in the Upper Basin to cut back in 2023 and 2024. Over two years, the program doled out about $45 million to conserve just over 100,000 acre-feet of water across the four states.

A main criticism of the SCPP was that the conserved water was not tracked to Lake Powell, even though one of the program’s stated intents was to boost levels in the nation’s second-largest reservoir. In some cases, the water was probably picked up by a downstream water user, with no net gain to Lake Powell. This is the issue that new state legislation could remedy. Until now, the experimental conservation programs were allowed with temporary approvals from state officials.

“We want action,” Waldvogle said. “And I think the way I define action is for [lawmakers] to move forward in developing a program in order to really catalyze our communities into these discussions. To really develop all the sideboards necessary to have a program is going to take a longer time frame.”

Western States Ranches

Conscience Bay owns about 3,800 acres on parcels scattered throughout Delta County, 3,000 of which the company says are irrigated. About 3,200 of these total acres are clustered in Harts Basin near Eckert, making up the headquarters of the company’s reaching operation known as Western States Ranches. The ranch participated in the SCPP in 2024, with water to some fields shut off June 1 and others July 1. The ranch saved about 550 acre-feet, or 7% of its water, according to ranch managers. 

Ranch representatives see participation in these early voluntary conservation programs as a way to have some control over their operations should water cuts become mandatory in the future. They say they are interested in innovative ways to adapt to water scarcity, and they partnered with Colorado State University scientists to study the effects on forage crops of taking irrigation off their fields that were enrolled in SCPP in 2024.

“We wanted to figure out how this is going to affect us, and if we are required to do this in the future, we want to have the knowledge to make good decisions,” said Mike Higuera, agricultural operations manager of Western States Ranches. “We assume that we are going to have to conserve water in this game.”

Western States Ranches in Delta County participated in the 2024 System Conservation Pilot Program. The ranch is working with Colorado State University researchers to learn what happens when water is removed from fields. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM

Western States Ranches hosted an August field day in Eckert with the Western Landowners Alliance for other local farmers and ranchers to learn about drought-resilient ranching and share the findings from CSU researchers. 

The ranch’s participation in SCPP has resurrected fears that the owners, who began purchasing the Delta County properties in 2017, are speculating — buying up land for its senior water rights and hoarding them for a future profit. With a water-conservation program in the Upper Basin all but guaranteed, some worry that Western States Ranches could be looking to profit off sending their water downstream. 

The question came up at the August field day when a Paonia-area rancher said he had heard the ranch owners were speculators. Conscience Bay representatives have always denied that accusation.

“I can tell you there are a lot better ways to make money,” Higuera replied. 

According to SCPP documents, the ranch was paid $278,372 for their water in 2024. Higuera said that amounted to about 10% of their revenue last year, with cattle sales making up the other 90%. 

Colorado in recent years has tried to tackle the thorny issues of how to fairly roll out a conservation program while prohibiting speculation. Defining what speculation is and who is a speculator is slippery and hinges on determining the water rights purchaser’s intent — a nearly impossible thing to know or police with 100% certainty. The bottom line of the state’s existing anti-speculation policy is that water-rights owners must put that water to beneficial use.

Ultimately, a 2021 workgroup failed to find consensus about ways to strengthen protections against speculation and a drought task force failed to provide recommendations about conserved consumptive programs for lawmakers, underscoring the difficulty of protecting the state’s water without infringing on private property rights. Some agricultural producers balked at laws that could restrict their ability to make money by selling their land and associated water rights.

At the heart of speculation concerns is the fear of large-scale, permanent dry-up of agricultural lands. Mueller has long cautioned that conservation programs, if not done carefully, could disproportionately impact rural agricultural communities. Although SCPP was open to all water-use sectors, all of Colorado’s participants in SCPP in 2023 and 2024 were from Western Slope agriculture.

“Any program that we have must be designed for our state’s best ability to support the longevity of agriculture and the vitality of our communities, and we’ve got to be thoughtful and precise,” Mueller said.

This equipment in a field on Western States Ranches helps figure out how much water crops use. The ranch partnered with Colorado State University researchers to track what happens to a forage crop when water is removed mid-way through the irrigation season. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM

Paying for programs

Another big question about Upper Basin conservation remains: How will it be paid for?

SCPP in 2023 and 2024 was funded with money from the federal Inflation Reduction Act. The bill that could have authorized SCPP again in 2025 is still stalled in the House. Over 2023 and 2024, the program doled out about $45 million to water users in the Upper Basin and saved about 101,000 acre-feet.

Without overhauling the West’s system of water rights, voluntary, temporary and compensated conservation programs are one of the only carrots to entice agricultural water users — who account for the majority of water use in the Colorado River Basin — to cut back. But they are expensive, and it’s unclear how future long-term conservation programs would be funded. 

Colorado’s entire congressional delegation in early August sent a bipartisan letter to federal water managers, in an effort to shake loose $140 million in funding that was promised for projects addressing drought on the Western Slope in the final days of the Biden administration and then frozen by the Trump administration. 

U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., addressed the question at a Colorado Water Congress meeting in Steamboat Springs in August.

“We’re now not going to have a great federal partner for a while, I’m afraid, and we’re going to have to figure out how to rely on each other and do it in more imaginative ways than maybe we have in the past,” Bennet said. 

Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0

The clock is ticking: Negotiations stall on #ColoradoRiver water-sharing pact — #Colorado Politics

Navajo Bridge spans the Colorado River downstream from Lake Powell near Lee Ferry, the dividing line between the upper and lower basin. Upper Basin officials have proposed up to 200,000 acre-feet of water conservation a year in Lake Powell. Photo credit: Aspen Journalism

Click the link to read the article on the Colorado Politics website (Marianne Goodland). Here’s an excerpt:

September 11, 2025

With a critical Nov. 11 deadline fast approaching, negotiators from the seven Colorado River basin states remain at odds over how to manage a river that serves 40 million people — and which, experts long agree, is overallocated. Negotiations are moving so slowly that some basin leaders are questioning whether that agreement will happen before the deadline or whether the Bureau of Reclamation, which still doesn’t have a permanent commissioner, will have to step in. Negotiations over the “divorce,” as some are calling it, or a “conscious uncoupling,” which is how Colorado negotiator Becky Mitchell describes it, began over the year-long stalemate between the upper and lower basin states. And then came the bureau’s 24-month study of hydrology, adding a wrinkle that nobody wanted.

Projected Lake Mead end-of-month physical elevations from the latest 24-Month Study inflow scenarios.
Projected Lake Powell end-of-month physical elevations from the latest 24-Month Study inflow scenarios.

The deadline for implementing the post-2026 operating guidelines agreement is Oct. 1, 2026, although the bureau wants everything ready to go by June 2026. The hydrology report pointed out a near-crisis level at Lake Powell by next year, just as negotiators are trying to come up with a long-term deal that will guide the river’s operations into the future…Current operating guidelines that were put into place in 2007 will expire next year. However, it has become a much more challenging job to manage the river over the past two decades. This river supplies water for agriculture and supports 40 million people across seven states. Experts said that’s due to a 25-year drought that has reduced the river’s historic flow by millions of acre-feet of water per year.

Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2024. Credit: Brad Udall

After national parks hearing, MAGA forces continue public land assault, greens say — Angus M. Thuermer Jr. (WyoFile.com)

Members of the House Committee on Natural Resources convene a hearing on public land funding at Jenny Lake Plaza in Grand Teton National Park on Sept. 5, 2025. Representatives pictured are Troy Downing, Doug LaMalfa, Harriet Hageman, Chairman Bruce Westerman and Teresa Leger Fernandez. (Angus M. Thuermer Jr./WyoFile)

Click the link to read the article on the WyoFile.com website (Angus M. Thuermer Jr.):

September 15, 2025

Four initiatives among federal agencies and in Congress would harm the Western landscape owned by all Americans, conservationists contend.

As Congress conducted a high-profile hearing in Grand Teton National Park 10 days ago to support parks funding, President Donald Trump’s administration and supporters were busy elsewhere eliminating public land protections across the West.

The Grand Teton hearing conducted by the House Committee on Natural Resources on Sept. 5 heard widespread support for resolving a backlog of maintenance at national parks, along with calls to restore DOGE staffing cuts.

But the committee meeting at the spectacular Jenny Lake Plaza came amidst a flurry of attacks against rules protecting wildlife, its habitat and preservation funds, conservationists said.

Those attacks include Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins’ move to rescind the Forest Service roadless rule that protects 59 million roadless acres considered vital to wildlife. Also, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum issued an order restricting use of the Land and Water Conservation Fund, which was created in 1964 to buy and preserve recreation lands.

Meantime, the U.S. House on Sept. 3 put on the chopping block a Bureau of Land Management plan in Montana that restricted coal leasing. If agreed to by the Senate, the bill would open the door to “legal and regulatory chaos” across the West, the Center for Western Priorities warned.

And on Thursday, the BLM opened comment on the plan to roll back its Public Lands Rule that gave conservation an equal footing with industrial uses of property owned by all Americans.

All that happened in 15 days — about one week on either side of the congressional Teton hearing. But while witnesses were supporting parks in the open air of the Teton Mountains, Trump allies were undercutting conservation with less visible methods, one public lands advocate said.

The rule changes, secretarial orders and legislation are complex and sometimes opaque, said Amy Lindholm, an Appalachian Mountain Club director and spokesperson for the Land and Water Conservation Fund Coalition.

“It’s not easy to understand what’s going on here,” she said, using Burgum’s order curtailing the LWCF as an example. “It flies under the radar [but] could be as serious as selling off pieces of federal public land.”

The MAGA messages

The administration and its supporters characterized the changes as necessary to help reduce the federal deficit, rectify allegedly unlawful policies and increase energy production, among other things.

“I am so baffled and mortified that for four years our government intentionally tried to impose energy poverty on the American people, all to please the vocal but minority climate lobby,” U.S. Rep Harriet Hageman said on the House floor when voting Sept. 3 for Joint House Resolution 104.

That bill states that the BLM’s Montana management plan restricting coal leasing in the Powder River Basin “shall have no force or effect.”

Designated roadless areas, like these timber stands on the Shoshone National Forest near South Pass, would be eliminated under rescission of the 2001 Roadless Rule that’s been announced by U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins. (Mike Koshmrl/WyoFile/EcoFlight)

Hageman’s vote was one of three in the 211-208 tally that helped Republicans use the Congressional Review Act to move the bill through the House.

On another front, Agriculture Secretary Rollins’ roadless-rule rollback will allow loggers “to access our abundant timer [sic] resources,” U.S. Sen. Cynthia Lummis wrote to a constituent on Sept. 2. The roadless rule “has done nothing to advance our national interest or strengthen our communities,” Lummis wrote.

The rollback “will give state and local leaders, not distant federal agencies, the authority to manage forests responsibly, improve forest health, and implement real wildfire prevention strategies,” Lummis’ letter reads. “I will push back on any policies that endangers [sic] Wyoming families, communities or businesses.”  

In ordering revisions to the Land and Water Conservation Fund, Interior Secretary Burgum wrote that changes will ensure funds “are managed efficiently and aligned with the goals of the Trump administration.” The account was used to buy and protect the 640-acre Kelly Parcel in Grand Teton National Park. While touting the revisions, Burgum said the Trump administration has “prioritized access to Federal lands and outdoor recreation.”

At the BLM, meanwhile, conservation should not be on equal footing with mining, drilling and grazing, according to a notice seeking public comment on the expurgation of the Public Lands Rule. Also known as the Conservation and Landscape Health Rule, the measure is “unnecessary and violates existing statutory requirements,” the notice reads.

Conservation doesn’t rise to a “principal or major use” of BLM land, the Western Energy Alliance said in a statement supporting rollback of the Public Lands Rule. Those principal uses are “mineral exploration and production, livestock grazing, rights‐of‐way, fish and wildlife development, recreation, and timber,” the statement said.

Greens see an assault

Conservationists and others are challenging those MAGA positions. Using the Congressional Review Act to undo the BLM’s Montana plan for the Powder River Basin coal — a move Hageman voted for — risks unleashing “legal and regulatory chaos across the West,” the Center for Western Priorities said.

“If courts interpret this action broadly, every management plan written since 1996 could be challenged in court — potentially invalidating oil and gas leases, grazing permits, and threatening public access to trails and campgrounds,” the Center’s Deputy Director Aaron Weiss said in a statement.

Without BLM resource management plans, operations would revert to “outdated frameworks … written before today’s recreation economy took off,” he said. “Outfitters, guides and businesses that depend on reliable access for rafting, off-roading, and other outdoor activities could face years of uncertainty, permit delays, and costly litigation.”

Road densities are especially high in Wyoming outside of wilderness areas and wilderness study areas, marked in blue in this map. Roads depicted are from the U.S. Geological Survey National Transportation Dataset. (Wyoming Wilderness Association)

On the roadless front, Lummis’ contention that roads can help prevent wildfires contradicts a 2007 study that found “current road systems increase risk of human-caused fire.” Authored by the Pacific Biodiversity Institute, the 40-page paper found that “[a]reas that are very close to roads have many times more wildfire occurrences than areas distant from roads.”

Roadless areas are critical to outfitter Meredith Taylor, who has worked successfully in them for decades, she told WyoFile. Industrializing them could endanger her family, community and business, she suggested. 

“Unnecessary road development would ruin the value of these public lands for people and wildlife who appreciate them as they are,” Taylor said. The Jackson Hole Wildlife Foundation and others urged the public to comment before Sept. 19.

Conservation should be equal

Conservationists also decried the pending revocation of the BLM’s Public Lands Rule/Conservation and Landscape Health Rule. “The administration is saying that public lands should be managed primarily for the good of powerful drilling, mining and development interests,” Alison Flint, senior legal director at The Wilderness Society, said in a statement.

“They’re saying that public lands’ role in providing Americans the freedom to enjoy the outdoors, and conserve beloved places … is a second-class consideration,” Flint said. The rule “has solid grounding in a nearly 50-year-old directive from Congress,” she said.

Defenders of Wildlife said the existing rule “requires science-based decision-making and consideration of conservation.” The rule is “foolishly being yanked away in service of the ‘Drill, baby, drill’ agenda,” Vera Smith, national forests and public lands director at Defenders, said in a statement.

Addressing changes to the Land and Water Conservation Fund, which receives $900 million a year from oil and gas leasing, LWCF Coalition spokesperson Lindholm warned of dangers in Burgum’s order.

“There’s a provision encouraging states to use their state grant dollars [from the federal fund] to buy surplus federal land,” she said. “We don’t want states to use the funds to buy back federal land that’s already been protected, to pay for continued access to places they already have access to,” she said.

Given Burgum’s advocacy for developing federal land for housing, the changes create “a dangerous potential pathway for the selloff of federal lands,” she said.

The agency already has a process for the sale of property that works, Lindholm said. Burgum’s order will reexamine that process “with the intent of increasing the discretion of the secretary.”

Without Burgum’s stated selloff advocacy, “it’s not something we would have necessarily red-flagged,” she said.

Soul of Wyoming

Healthy landscapes and wildlife are the soul of northwestern Wyoming, state Rep. Liz Storer, a Democrat from Jackson, said. Her district covers Grand Teton and parts of Yellowstone national parks, the National Elk Refuge, parts of the Bridger-Teton National Forest and BLM property.

Those lands and the wildlife on them “define who we are,” she said at a Keep Parks Public rally in Jackson on Sept. 4.

Others at the forum chimed in. “These threats to public lands are very much alive,” Lauren Bogard, senior director of advocacy at the Center for Western Priorities, said after outlining DOGE cuts and threats to conservation.EcoTour Adventures founder and wildlife guide Taylor Phillips told the Teton congressional panel that scientists are scared. “In the next five to 10 years, the wildlife as we see it now will not exist unless drastic measures are taken,” Phillips testified of his talks with scientists.

#ClimateChange is accelerating, scientists find in ‘grim’ report — Dana Nuccitelli (YaleClimateConnections.org)

A restoration project at Virginia Beach. Photo: U.S. Army/Pamela Spaugy

Click the link to read the article on the Yale Climate Connections website (Dana Nuccitelli):

September 15, 2025

They warn that humanity is just three years from overshooting the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C target, with seas rising faster than ever. But the report also contains a little bit of good news.

The amount of heat trapped by climate-warming pollution in our atmosphere is continuing to increase, the planet’s sea levels are rising at an accelerating rate, and the Paris agreement’s ambitious 1.5°C target is on the verge of being breached, according to a recent report by the world’s top climate scientists. 

“The news is grim,” said study co-author Zeke Hausfather, a former Yale Climate Connections contributor, on Bluesky. 

A team of over 60 international scientists published the latest edition of an annual report updating key metrics that are used in reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the leading international scientific authority on climate change. 

Earth out of balance 

Climate change is caused by variations in Earth’s energy balance – the difference between the planet’s incoming and outgoing energy. Nearly all incoming energy originates from the sun. The Earth absorbs that sunlight and sends it back out toward space in the form of infrared light, or heat. Greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide absorb infrared light, and so increased levels in those gases trap more heat in the atmosphere, warming the planet’s surface and oceans.

The new report finds that as a result of this increasing greenhouse effect, Earth’s energy imbalance has been consistently rising every decade. In fact, the global imbalance has more than doubled just since the 1980s. And from 2020 to 2024, humans exacerbated the problem by adding about 200 billion more tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.

This increase in trapped energy has continued to warm Earth’s surface temperatures. The new study estimated that at current rates, humans will burn enough fossil fuels and release enough climate pollution to commit the planet to over 1.5°C of global warming above preindustrial temperatures within about three more years, in 2028.

The most recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, published in 2021, concluded that average temperatures had increased 1.09°C since the late 1800s. The new study updates this number to 1.24°C, driven largely by the record-shattering hot years of 2023 and 2024.

The paper also finds that global surface temperatures are warming at a rate of about 0.27°C per decade. That’s nearly 50% faster than the close to 0.2°C-per-decade warming rate of the 1990s and 2000s, indicating an acceleration of global warming.

Human-caused and total observed average global surface temperature increase since the Industrial Revolution. Created by Dana Nuccitelli with data by https://climatechangetracker.org/igcc from June 17, 2025.

That warming causes the water in the ocean to expand and land-based ice to melt, both of which contribute to rising sea levels. Since 1900, global sea levels have risen by nine inches, at an average rate of 1.85 millimeters per year. But the rate of sea level rise since 2000 has been twice as fast, at 3.7 millimeters per year. And over the past decade it’s risen faster yet, at 4.5 millimeters per year. In other words, sea level rise is also accelerating.

“Unfortunately, the unprecedented rates of global warming and accelerating sea-level rise are as expected from greenhouse emissions being at an all-time high,” University of Leeds climate scientist and the study’s lead author Piers Forster wrote by email.

Global mean sea level rise since the early 20th century, accelerating since the start of the 21st century. Created by Dana Nuccitelli with data by https://climatechangetracker.org/igcc from June 17, 2025.

A thin silver lining

Most, but not all, of the findings in the new paper are grim. For example, although humanity will almost certainly miss the more ambitious 1.5°C target in the Paris agreement, the study finds that its primary target of limiting global warming to 2°C remains within reach. At current emissions rates, 2°C global warming will be breached around midcentury, but that still leaves several decades to bring emissions down.

“Future emissions control future warming,” Forster said. “And if the world were to rapidly act on carbon dioxide and methane emissions, we could halve the rate of warming.”

The study identifies glimmers of hope that climate policies and solutions around the world could soon begin to move emissions in this direction.

“I think there is not much silver lining in the report per se given the apparent acceleration of warming,” Hausfather said in an email to Yale Climate Connections. “But I would note that global CO2 emissions have slowed notably over the past 15 years or so, and the cost of clean energy continues to fall. We are clearly moving away from the worst-case emissions scenarios, even if we are still heading toward potentially catastrophic warming of 3°C by 2100.”

China will be a key player in determining the future evolution of Earth’s climate. Because of its large population and rapid economic growth, China is responsible for nearly one-third of global climate pollution. But as the result of a rapid deployment of clean technologies, China’s emissions have begun to slightly decline over the past year.

“This is also the decade when global [greenhouse gas] emissions could be expected to peak and begin to substantially decline,” the report’s authors conclude. “Depending on the societal choices made in this critical decade, a continued series of these annual updates could track an improving trend.”