We've also got video, opinion essays and a behind-the-scenes look at COP26 in Glasgow. Plus, this week's non-summit news. |
 | | President Biden at a news conference in Glasgow on Tuesday. He told reporters the meeting had re-established the United States as a leader in fighting climate change.Erin Schaff/The New York Times |
|
| PAID POST: A MESSAGE FROM Morgan StanleyHow Carbon Farming Can Help Save the Earth Regenerative farming can help boost crop yields and fight climate change, and one nonprofit plans to incentivize more farmers to make the switch. My Soil Organic Carbon (MySOC) aims to create a database of soil carbon for farmland across the United States, while providing farmers with low-cost tools to collect and analyze their soil samples for crop production and carbon sequestration farming, while modeling prospects for more profitability. Learn More | |
Over the next week and a half, with the heads of state and government gone, diplomats will try to agree on deeper greenhouse gas reductions and figure out how to deliver on a still-unmet promise from more than a decade ago to deliver $100 billion annually by 2020 to help poor countries pivot away from fossil fuels and prepare for the impacts of climate change. |
Most critically, vulnerable countries are pressing major emitting nations to agree to increase their climate targets each year in order to keep global temperatures from heading past 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, compared with levels before the Industrial Revolution. |
Get live updates from COP26 |
Your summit questions, answered |
Listen: A last chance to avert climate disaster? |
'No More Blah, Blah': Greta Thunberg joined demonstrators outside the United Nations climate conference and accused political leaders of inaction in the fight against the climate crisis. |
$3.5 trillion is a pittance: What we don't spend now to fight climate change will cost us much more later, writes Abrahm Lustgarten, an environmental reporter for ProPublica, in a guest essay. |
The road to climate recovery: It runs through our forests, writes John Reid, senior economist at the nonprofit group Nia Tero, and Thomas E. Lovejoy, a biologist and senior fellow at the United Nations Foundation. |
Also important this week: |
What it's like to cover COPs, past and present |
 | | Kieran Dodds for The New York Times |
|
Hello from Glasgow, where I'm reporting on the United Nations climate summit with my Times colleagues Somini Sengupta, Brad Plumer and our editors. |
This conference is the 26th time that the U.N. has tried to spur governments to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that are warming the planet. Each meeting has had its own distinct personality. Having been to 10 of them, I'd describe the mood this time as far more somber than in years past. |
Six years ago, world leaders, diplomats and activists were jubilant when nearly 200 countries struck a landmark climate deal in the Paris suburb of Le Bourget. Under the Paris Agreement, every nation promised to curb emissions enough to collectively keep global warming "well below" an increase of 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, compared with preindustrial levels. |
Well, the Earth's global surface temperature has already increased by about 1.1 degrees Celsius compared with the average before 1900. So, the pressure is on in Glasgow to see countries do far more to cut emissions — and to do it before the end of this decade. |
These talks also feel less energetic because environmental groups are being kept out of the main negotiating halls, largely because of coronavirus restrictions. |
| We'd love your feedback on the newsletter. We read every message, and reply to many! Please email thoughts and suggestions to climateteam@nytimes.com. |
|
