Robin Lamboll

‘Too small to matter’ is the laziest-possible excuse in climate debate At a time of crisis, co-operation is the only way to resolve the climate collective-action problem

If Ireland's emissions are "too small to matter" then I might as well evade my taxes and eat doughnuts for lunch.

Read my latest column about the laziest excuse in the climate debate:

www.irishtimes.com/environment/...

The text is also relatively good for indigenous rights, including the first acknowledgement of tribes in voluntary isolation. It also featured distinct progress on loss and damages.

Nonetheless, it has provided a few points of light. The reaffirmation of the importance of keeping 1.5C in reach, implicitly even when it may be temporarily exceeded, is good, but relatively toothless. The need for more on how and who would pay for this is essential going forwards.

This COP has been deeply disappointing. It claimed to be a COP of action, but all comments on fossil fuels, and even most comments on deforestation that this COP was supposed to highlight, have been removed from the final text. Being literally on fire at one point was a fitting metaphor.

Kenya have got their text into the loss and damages agreement and it looks unanimous now, so there will be an agreement coming out of COP!

"how is this COP going?"
"It was literally on fire."

johannesemm.shinyapps.io/HowStocksJud...
@johannesemm.bsky.social

On Wednesday, I'll be on a panel about climate justice at COP30 in Belem. We'll be talking about indigenous rights, community judgement of COPs and what climate justice looks like - I'll be more on the metrics and less on the social side of these questions!

Tracking market reactions to COP30 in real-time!
As COP30 unfolds in Brazil (Nov 10-21), our live tracker shows how different stocks respond. Updated daily.

👉 johannesemm.shinyapps.io/HowStocksJud...

Credits: @robinlamboll.bsky.social (Imperial College) & @johannesemm.bsky.social (CMCC)
#COP30

I'll be presenting on including AI effects in energy models at IAMC this Wednesday. Then next Wednesday I'll be in Belém to give a short talk as part of an event on COPs, indigenous activism and climate justice in the Blue Zone GUAC pavilion at 10.30. If you are around, catch me for a chat!

Brazil's government greenlights oil drilling near mouth of Amazon River ahead of UN climate summit Brazil’s government has approved exploratory drilling by state-run oil-giant Petrobras near the mouth of the Amazon River.

Yes, it's pretty undeniable that they've made huge unforced errors (see also the oil decision apnews.com/article/braz...). We will see if the net effect is good or bad in a few weeks time.

By this measure, nothing else has made any difference either. But there are more precise metrics that show other stories, e.g. emissions per capita are descending. COPs have been woefully insufficient, but the question we pose here is "are they better than nothing", and the answer is "probably".

Warming of northern peatlands increases the global temperature overshoot challenge The study highlights the critical role of northern peatlands in amplifying climate change under overshoot scenarios, that is, when global temperature temporarily exceeds the targeted level. We simulat...

These feedbacks are real, however bear in mind that there are also substantial net negative feedbacks, which largely cancel them in our best estimates. There's some uncertainty but even signs of larger than expected feedbacks don't change this picture that much e.g. www.cell.com/one-earth/fu...

Modelling global total GHG emissions given (current) NDCs and policy.

No, it's the high, medium and low estimates of current policies and conditional/unconditional NDCs economically modelled to 2035 then extended in a variety of ways.

We do a lot of other stuff so I've done a longer writeup here: scienceisshiny.wordpress.com/2025/11/06/h... and the main paper is here again: iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1...

Thanks to coauthors @setupelz.bsky.social and @dralaaclimate.bsky.social for ushering this through in time!

4) If COPs make markets think about the environment, but not about what a sustainable society involves, we expect a premium for companies considered individually green (which we estimate with ESG ratings from Sustainalytics). We see a strong effect here!

3) If COPs are useless, or entirely predictable, markets shouldn’t notice them. If they’re actively greenwashing, FF stocks should grow. We don’t see these things. Some hope!

2) If COPs sometimes signal more climate action and sometimes less, we expect market volatility in transition-relevant sectors to rise, but not necessarily changes in the average stock price. We see slightly raised market volatility in general, but not specific to these sectors.

While there are many ways we can tackle climate change (varying levels of demand reduction, nuclear power etc.), almost all involve much less FF and more REs. Sadly we see weak signs of FF falls (not robust between different statistical approaches), no sign of RE rising.

We considered several possibilities:
1) If governments often show trustworthy signals of higher climate action during COPs, the stock prices of renewable energy (RE) companies should rise and that of fossil fuels (FFs) should fall.

TL;DR: COPs move stocks, but not in the way you might hope. COPs strongly benefit green-rated stocks, but have only mild signs of harming fossil fuels (though getting stronger) and no sign of benefiting renewables (and getting worse).

Do climate conferences actually achieve anything? A lot of people have strong opinions, but we wanted measurements, so we look at how the stock market moves during yearly international meetings called COPs – explanation below, or read the paper here:
iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1...

I can't think of a socio-economic scenarios paper where you'd see such a graph, even aimed at a technical audience. Perhaps you can find one with temperature contributions over some future period for a few scenarios but it would be a tremendous mess to do for even ~5 emissions species x 3 scenarios.

📈COP delivers stock market boost for ‘green’ companies but renewables unaffected, Imperial College London study shows 🧵

Read it here: ow.ly/o6xY50XnEuH

This is for current policies, conditional and unconditional NDCs but not including net zero targets.

This is the methane emissions for the full uncertainty range prior to including the net zero targets. You effectively average over 5 of these scenarios to get the stats, and do something similar for confidence intervals. There isn't an official data product for this (yet?).

No one has ever expressed an interest in any forcings data and I no longer even output them to file. The key point is that they're from FaIR-1.6.4, so you can just complain about that in general and it will apply.

The methodology is largely as laid out in www.science.org/doi/full/10..... Basically the economically modelled emissions are Kyoto totals (since most NDCs refer to this) and this is then split up using a few different model/scenario sets in Silicone for the distribution of emissions.

Something that's worth flagging about this report is the subtle pivot from "current policy" being the worst-case scenario to including discussions of backsliding. Most calculations presented include the USA meeting its new-but-Biden-era NDC commitments, which will formally elapse in Jan.

NEW: The latest climate pledges under the Paris Agreement have driven only a slight fall in predicted global temperature rise over the course of this century.

The UN Emissions Gap Report finds that implementing current policies would lead to up to 2.8°C of warming, down from 3.1°C. 🧵