Cities around the world are planting more trees to cope with rising urban heat. But our research shows trees alone are often not enough. In some cases, the wrong kind of greening can even make streets feel less comfortable on a hot day.

We compared field measurements from Melbourne, Munich and Hong Kong to test how different kinds of urban planting changed the heat people experience outdoors.

The results showed layered vegetation – where trees are combined with shrubs and ground cover – often cooled cities more effectively than trees alone. We also found local climate and street design strongly shaped whether greening worked well.

These findings matter because urban greening is no longer just about aesthetics. As cities spend billions adapting to extreme heat, planting design may matter as much as planting quantity.

Cities are getting hotter

Cities trap heat. Roads, buildings and asphalt absorb solar energy during the day and slowly release it back into the air, especially at night.

This “urban heat island” effect, combined with climate change, is making heatwaves more intense and more dangerous in our cities.

Trees are one of the most popular responses because they provide shade and reduce the amount of heat absorbed by surrounding surfaces. But outdoor comfort depends on more than air temperature alone.

People experience heat through sunlight, reflected heat, humidity and airflow. A shaded street can still feel uncomfortable if humidity is high or if wind cannot move through the space.

That is why a “one-size fits all” greening strategy can fail. A planting design that works well in Melbourne may behave very differently in Hong Kong or Munich.

What we found

To better understand how urban vegetation affects heat stress, we did field measurements in three cities with different climates: temperate Melbourne, cooler Munich and humid subtropical Hong Kong.

Rather than relying only on computer models, we measured real conditions in streets and green spaces during summer.

We compared open urban spaces (with no plantings), sites with trees only, and layered planting (which means trees, shrubs and ground cover together).

Importantly, we did not just measure air temperature. We also measured “mean radiant temperature”, which captures the heat radiating from roads, walls and other surfaces onto the human body.

In Melbourne, street trees reduced radiant heat absorbed by pedestrians by more than 18°C, compared with open streets. Even where air temperatures changed only slightly, shaded streets felt substantially cooler.

Munich showed the strongest benefits from layered planting. There, streets and green spaces containing trees, shrubs and ground cover reduced afternoon heat stress by almost 8°C compared with more open spaces.

Hong Kong also benefited from vegetation, especially through shade created by overlapping tree canopies. But the results there were more mixed because the humid climate changed how cooling worked (more on that later).

Across all three cities, one finding stood out: vegetation structure matters.

Combining trees with shrubs and ground cover often performed better than trees alone, but the benefits depended on how the planting interacted with the local environment.

Why some greening can fail

The study showed that more vegetation is not automatically better.

In Hong Kong, dense vegetation sometimes increased humidity enough to reduce some of the cooling benefit. Plants release water vapour into the air through transpiration, which can help to cool dry climates. But in already humid cities, extra moisture can make outdoor spaces feel sticky and uncomfortable because sweat evaporates less efficiently.

In some Munich streets, dense vegetation reduced airflow through narrow urban corridors, trapping warm air and slowing the movement of vehicle pollution away from pedestrians.

These findings highlight why cities cannot rely on generic canopy targets copied from elsewhere. Climate, street width and airflow all shape whether vegetation improves comfort or creates unintended side effects.

Designing cooler cities

The solution is not to stop planting trees. It is to design urban greening more carefully.

Cities need planting strategies tailored to local conditions rather than universal greening formulas. In parks and open green spaces, layered vegetation can provide strong cooling while also supporting biodiversity. In dense streets, planners may need to balance shade with ventilation.

The findings also suggest cities should move beyond measuring success through tree numbers alone. The arrangement, density and type of vegetation matter just as much as canopy cover.

Designing for local conditions

Our research shows urban vegetation can reduce heat stress, but the benefits depend on how and where cities plant it.

Melbourne demonstrated the strong cooling effect of street trees on radiant heat, Munich showed the added value of layered vegetation, and Hong Kong revealed how dense planting can sometimes backfire in humid conditions.

Cities need climate-smart green spaces designed for local conditions, airflow and human comfort to remain liveable as temperatures rise.

Mohammad A Rahman receives funding from the German Research Foundation (DFG), TREE Fund, Humboldt Foundation, Bavarian State Ministry of the Environment and Consumer Protection, German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), Sustainable Consumption Institute (SCI), University of Manchester and the European Union.

Artificial intelligence (AI) giant Anthropic has expanded access to a highly advanced model deemed too dangerous for public release, including Australia in the select handful of users.

The large language model, known as Claude Mythos, is now being rolled out to an additional 150 organisations across 15 countries, including the Australian government and several local businesses, as part of Project Glasswing.

In an era where large-scale AI launches are happening on a day-by-day basis, this limited, gradual release may seem particularly surprising. But Mythos is not like most other AI systems. Instead it’s an automated tool for assessing software to find critical bugs and vulnerabilities.

This managed release is deliberate, as the discovery of vulnerabilities in computer systems is useful for those who want to defend them and those who want to hack them.

However, the real nature of the impact of AI systems on cybersecurity is significantly more complex.

Finding hundreds of severe vulnerabilities

Under initial testing, Mythos has been able to identify multiple new high-risk vulnerabilities. Left unfixed, such flaws allow attackers to easily steal data or induce system crashes.

While these reports are promising, the raw data needs context. Of the 23,000 vulnerabilities flagged by Mythos, only 6,200 were estimated as high-risk by Mythos. However AI isn’t perfect, as human experts could only validate two in every three of these vulnerabilities as high-risk. Even still, the nature and severity of identified vulnerabilities has led developers to say that with Mythos “defenders finally have a chance to win, decisively”.

And winning this battle is extremely valuable.

Over the last few years, Australians have repeatedly been the victims of costly cybersecurity incidents, including Optus, Medibank Private, the Melbourne International Film Festival, and Canvas.

This barrage of attacks likely explain why the Australian Signals Directorate welcomed Australia’s inclusion in Anthropic’s Project Glasswing. While this AI-driven security offers huge potential benefits, the government so far has been tight-lipped on the specifics of how Mythos will actually be used.

Dangerous in the wrong hands

While discovering vulnerabilities is useful, defenders need to be able to respond to them. This is problematic when tools like Mythos produce large numbers of false reports, which have the potential to overwhelm unprepared cybersecurity teams.

More concerningly, while access to Mythos is currently tightly controlled, it will not be long until similar tools are available to help support hackers.

And it’s not just the vulnerabilities that AI can discover that pose risks.

AI systems more broadly are incredibly vulnerable to being tricked or exploited, with highly damaging consequences.

Just this week, hackers used Meta’s AI powered chatbot to gain access to high-profile Instagram accounts, including Barack Obama’s. They did so by tricking AI chatbots into changing account details. And, even after Instagram announced it fixed the issue, within hours there were reports of further accounts being compromised.

A similar attack known as Echoleak last year revealed how tying Microsoft Copilot to email accounts could introduce significant risks. This was made possible by sending emails to accounts monitored by Copilot’s AI. These emails tricked the AI into leaking large amounts of private and confidential information, without the email ever needing to be opened by a human. No longer do we live in a world where hackers need to convince users to click a malicious link, if they can instead convince the AI that reads emails to act dangerously.

Both Echoleak and the Instagram hacks underscore the risks we face as more and more organisations tie their critical functions to AI systems that are difficult to audit, and easy to exploit – even by just being persuasive.

A new balance point

All of this suggests the current cybersecurity landscape might be shifting to a new balance point, where defenders and hackers race to develop and exploit powerful AI tools.

Tools like Mythos aren’t a silver bullet. While they provide defenders with an additional set of eyes on where to look, it still will require expertise to work out what is real, and what isn’t.

But the advent of the AI era has already fundamentally changed the risks associated with poor cybersecurity practices. Every day a user or service provider delays a software update on one of their devices is a day where a vulnerability can be exploited.

For cybersecurity teams, ensuring compliance is already a difficult enough process that will only get worse when the speed of vulnerability discovery increases.

While they are high value targets for hackers, large organisations will likely remain safe, as they will have the resources to access and deploy tools like Mythos. But smaller, less resourced companies will likely not have the capacity to access these tools – or to react to the upcoming tsunami of cybersecurity updates.

And if they fall behind on these updates, these smaller companies will likely find themselves at far more risk than they ever have been before.

The cybersecurity divide between those with and without resources will only grow. Bridging this gap is not just an IT challenge – it’s a public safety concern that will affect us all.

Andrew Cullen does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

A special Redbridge poll that was mostly taken before the federal budget had Labor winning 76 of the 150 House of Representatives seats (a majority of one), with One Nation on 53 and the Coalition 12.

Three more regular polls that were all taken since the budget have One Nation continuing to gain, with DemosAU having One Nation first on primary votes. The Essential and DemosAU polls both have the total vote for the Coalition and One Nation at 51%, while Morgan has the total right vote at 48.5%.

MRP polls (Multilevel Regression with Poststratification) use modelling and large sample sizes to estimate seat outcomes. A national Redbridge and Accent Research MRP poll for The Financial Review, conducted April 29 to May 14 from a sample of 6,015, had Labor winning 76 of the 150 House seats as its central estimate (down 18 since the 2025 election), a bare majority for Labor.

One Nation was winning 53 seats (up 53), the Coalition 12 (down 31), the Greens zero (down one) and others nine (down three). Seat ranges were 70–82 for Labor, 46–59 for One Nation, 7–21 for the Coalition, 0–1 for the Greens and 5–11 for others.

A total of 62 seats would change hands in the central estimate, with the Coalition losing 37 seats to One Nation while gaining five from Labor, and Labor making a few gains.

National primary votes in this poll were 31% Labor, 28% One Nation, 21% Coalition, 11% Greens and 9% for all Others. Most of the poll was taken before the May 12 federal budget. Polls since the budget have usually had drops for Labor, so the seat projections would probably be worse now.

DemosAU has One Nation leading on primary votes

A national for Capital Brief, conducted May 15–20 from a sample of 1,502, gave One Nation 28% of the primary vote (up two since the mid-April DemosAU poll), Labor 26% (steady), the Coalition 23% (steady), the Greens 13% (steady) and all Others 10% (down two).

No two-party estimate was provided, but seat projections gave Labor 65–74 of the 150 House seats (68–78 previously), One Nation 47–58 (40–51 previously), the Coalition 16–28 (16–30), the Greens 1–5 (1–4) and others 2–6 (3–8). This poll suggests Labor would lose their majority and that One Nation and the Coalition combined could have a majority.

In a three-way preferred PM question, Anthony Albanese had 34% (down one), Pauline Hanson 27% (up three) and Angus Taylor 23% (up one). Albanese’s net positive score was unchanged at -20 (47% negative, 27% positive). Taylor’s net positive was up four points to +1 (28% positive, 27% negative). Hanson’s net positive was up eight points to +3 (39% positive, 36% negative).

By 43–23, respondents thought the budget was bad. By 53–16, they thought the tax changes would make it harder for the average Australian, and by 44–17 they thought the changes would hurt the economy. By 34–29, respondents approved of the changes to negative gearing, but they disapproved by 29–28 of the changes to capital gains tax and by 34–27 of the changes to family trusts.

By 42–38, respondents thought income from investments should be taxed at a lower rate than work income, rather than similarly to work income.

Essential poll: One Nation’s rise continues

A national Essential poll, conducted May 20–24 from a sample of 1,062, gave Labor 29% of the primary vote (down one since the late April Essential poll), One Nation 28% (up three), the Coalition 23% (down one), the Greens 11% (steady), all Others 5% (steady) and undecided 4% (down one).

Despite One Nation’s primary vote surge, a better flow of respondent preferences to Labor gave them a 48–47 lead over the Coalition including undecided (previously 49–47 to the Coalition). By 2025 election preference flows, Labor would have led by about 50.5–49.5, a one-point gain for the Coalition. No Labor vs One Nation two-party estimate was given.

Albanese’s net approval slumped seven points to -17, with 54% disapproving and 37% approving. Taylor’s net approval was down four points to -4 (37% disapprove, 33% approve).

By 39–25, respondents disapproved of the overall budget. By 32–27, they supported the wind back of negative gearing and the capital gains discount for property. By 32–29, they supported the wind back of the capital gains discount for shares and investments. But by 38–26 they opposed the introduction of a 30% tax on family trusts.

By 45–21, respondents thought the budget would be bad for the economy overall and by 44–18 bad for “you personally”. By 30–28, respondents thought the negative gearing and capital gains changes would make the housing system less fair for younger people.

In contrast to the DemosAU poll, 32% thought profits from investments and assets should be taxed more than wages and salaries, 33% said they should be taxed at the same rate and just 13% thought wage income should be taxed more.

On the Albanese government’s performance since winning the May 2025 election, 55% said it had fallen short of expectations, 28% met expectations and just 6% said it had exceeded expectations.

By 46–41, respondents thought governments should stick to election commitments no matter what, over it being reasonable to change when circumstances change. By 53–8, they thought social media companies should be regulated more, not less.

On AI opportunities and risks, 36% said there were more risks (down 11 since May 2025), 22% more opportunities (up two) and 41% thought risks and opportunities about the same (up nine).

Morgan poll: Labor still ahead on primary votes

A national Morgan poll, conducted May 18–24 from a sample of 1,613, gave Labor 27.5% of the primary vote (down two since the May 11–17 Morgan poll), One Nation 25.5% (up one), the Coalition 23% (down one), the Greens 13.5% (up two) and all Others 10.5% (steady).

By respondent preferences, Labor led the Coalition by 53–47, a one-point gain for the Coalition. Labor led One Nation by 53.5–46.5, the first time Morgan has done a Labor vs One Nation two-party estimate. By 2025 election preference flows, Labor led the Coalition by 52–48, a 0.5-point gain for the Coalition.

Adrian Beaumont does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

If you’ve ever stood on a Victorian beach and felt the wind from the Southern Ocean, you’ll know this is not a gentle force. Whipped up across thousands of kilometres of cold ocean, these winds are relentless and powerful.

More than that – they’re one of Australia’s most valuable untapped sources of energy. Australia has many windfarms, but all of them have been built on land.

The stronger, more reliable winds blowing over oceans now turn truly enormous turbines in nations from Denmark to China. Offshore wind would work particularly well in Victoria. The state government wants large windfarms built out at sea to replace the remaining coal plants.

But will these strong winds keep blowing as reliably under climate change? Our recent research is reassuring. Despite small drops in wind strength, the winds will remain strong and reliable over the next 30-50 years.

What’s so good about offshore wind?

Offshore wind farms produce power more reliably than onshore wind or solar. They can produce a great deal of power and require minimal land. This is why offshore wind has been seen as a good fit for Australia.

Coupled with big batteries and transmission lines, offshore wind could contribute significantly to the energy transition.

Victoria has most at stake. For decades it has relied on brown coal and gas. But its gas supplies are depleting fast and ageing coal plants in the Gippsland region will not be replaced with more coal. Instead, the state wants to tap Gippsland’s offshore wind resources, which rank among the world’s best.

Despite the interest, the offshore wind sector has been slow to start. Political and economic headwinds have led some projects to be cancelled. But the sector looks set to finally begin in August, when Victoria will host the nation’s first offshore auction with a goal of securing 2 gigawatts of capacity.

Victoria is not alone. Offshore wind zones have been declared along Australia’s entire southern and western coastline, including Victoria, South Australia, Tasmania and parts of New South Wales and Western Australia.

Will the winds stay strong?

As the climate changes, wind patterns are likely to change too.

The powerful westerly winds of the Southern Ocean are forecast to be gradually pushed closer to Antarctica. Wind speeds across southern mainland Australia could drop by up to 5% by the end of the century.

If wind speeds drop too much, it could pose a problem for offshore wind. Weaker winds would mean less electricity can be generated, potentially making projects less viable and slowing the energy transition.

An offshore windfarm commissioned today will operate for 25–30 years. That means it will still be operating mid-century, when climate change is likely to have intensified.

To find out what climate change will mean for offshore wind, we worked with climate scientists and offshore wind researchers to simulate winds 30-50 years from now using seven high-resolution regional climate models.

We projected future wind speeds at the ocean surface and offshore wind energy production across Australia’s existing offshore wind zones under two scenarios – ambitious climate action limiting global warming to around 1.8°C and continued fossil fuel dependence driving warming to roughly 3.6°C by 2100.

We validated our projections against the best available records of historical wind speeds, which date back several decades. This is because it’s not just about whether wind speeds change, but whether they will change more than the natural variability offshore wind farms can already cope with.

What we found was broadly reassuring. Yes, the winds are likely to weaken over the next 30 to 50 years. But the changes are minor, falling 0.1% to 2.6% on average. That’s within the bounds of natural variability. Unlike projections of future rainfall or temperature, our findings hold across both emissions scenarios. This suggests offshore winds will remain strong and reliable overall.

While reassuring, one area is likely to see a larger drop. Under the high emissions scenario, wind speeds are likely to fall up to 20% over winter in Western Australia’s offshore wind zones near Bunbury.

Good news for offshore wind?

It’s good news that average wind speeds across Australia’s offshore wind zones are not likely to change significantly.

Our research is not the whole story, however. We didn’t model whether extreme winds or strong swell conditions will become more likely. These events can stop windfarms from operating, damage infrastructure and shorten the window of time when turbines can be installed and maintained.

To give offshore wind developers full certainty, it will be important to study what climate change will do to these extreme events.

Shiaohuey Chow receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Alberto Meucci and Guisela Grossmann-Matheson do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Picture sea ice in your mind. You probably imagine brilliant white, snow-covered floes floating on the surface of the ocean, home to penguins in the south of the globe or polar bears in the north.

But our new research shows Antarctic sea ice can turn into rafts of rotting floes (the free-floating pieces of ice) or an icy green slush when it interacts with waves in the stormiest ocean on the planet.

We now know the wave-driven processes that cause the surface of the sea ice to melt are a “missing link” in understanding what’s driving the increasing Antarctic sea ice melt each summer.

These processes can dramatically increase the rate the ice melts, with major implications for the global climate and Antarctic marine ecosystems.

Our planetary heartbeat

Each year, the sea ice that hugs the coast of Antarctica expands from 3 million square kilometres in summer to 19 million square kilometres in winter, stretching far north into the Southern Ocean. As the sun rises and the temperatures increase, it retreats again.

This remarkable seasonal change is like a heartbeat within our planet’s climate system, moderating global temperatures, driving ocean circulation and forming a unique habitat for a plethora of living organisms, all adapted to its seasonal rhythms.

The annual summer sea ice melt is particularly remarkable because it occurs over only three months. But even the most sophisticated climate models underestimate the rapid rate of sea ice retreat each summer.

How do waves melt sea ice?

Until now, the waves travelling from the ice-free ocean into the area covered in sea ice had only been studied for their role in breaking up ice floes. We knew these smaller floes were prone to melting around their sides and bottoms as the ocean was heated by the sun as summer progressed.

But this is not the full story.

We now know waves also flood over ice floes, washing away the bright snow cover that shields the underlying ice from sunlight and creating ponds of seawater on the floe surfaces.

Due to their reduced brightness, the snow-free ice and these “wave ponds” absorb substantially more solar heat than snow-covered ice, and this melts the ice from the top down. Moreover, the snow-free ice and wave ponds are oases in which algae thrive, turning the ice and ponds green and absorbing even more heat from the sun.

The waves also pulverise the floes into small fragments and slush. Under the right conditions, the combination of wave flooding, algal greening and pulverisation turns the sea ice cover into a slushy mixture, resembling a green soup.

We estimate that flooding, ponding and pulverisation can increase summer-time ice thinning by over 4 centimetres per day. Algal greening can add an additional 1 centimetre of thinning per day. These are extraordinary accelerators of ice melt, considering that most Antarctic sea ice is less than 1 metre thick at the end of winter.

Waves are also generated deep within the Antarctic sea-ice region by winds blowing over large openings in the ice cover. In this way, wave melt processes eat away at the ice cover from within, as well as from the edge throughout summer.

Feedbacks could trigger further melt

Our ice melt estimates are significant, yet they are likely underestimates. They do not account for amplifications to melting caused by so-called “positive feedbacks”.

For example, the ice darkening caused by waves removing the snow, ponding and pulverisation substantially increases the amount of sunlight absorbed by the ice. This causes additional surface and interior melting, which further reduces the ice brightness. And this causes more vertical melting, and so on, in an amplifying cycle.

We propose that this positive feedback is strengthened by algal greening that further darkens the ice, leading to further absorption of sunlight and melting.

Exactly how much these feedbacks would cause further ice melt is tricky to quantify, so we have left this as an exciting future research challenge.

Ponds at both poles

The Antarctic “wave ponds” we have observed are the seawater equivalent of “melt ponds”. These form extensively across Arctic sea ice in summer from pooling snow meltwater.

These freshwater melt ponds have been intensively studied and integrated into climate models, because of their important role in the rapid decline in the coverage and thickness of Arctic sea ice over recent decades.

Unlike melt ponds, seawater wave ponds occur year-round. Although they only occur in regions where sea ice interacts with ocean waves, this encompasses a large proportion of Antarctic sea ice over the course of a year.

The future of Antarctic sea ice

The effects of wave melt, greening and associated feedbacks are likely to intensify on sea ice around Antarctica over coming decades. Climate change is predicted to increase wind speeds and wave heights across the polar Southern Ocean.

This disruption of the annual sea ice cycle and further sea ice loss has serious consequences for global climate and marine ecosystems.

We need further observations using autonomous camera systems on icebreakers and modelling research to better understand these wave processes and their overall influence on Antarctica’s sea ice cycle.

These advances are vital to understanding the causes of recent dramatic sea-ice losses around Antarctica, and promise vital insights about the future of the icy south and our Earth system.

Luke Bennetts receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Bonnie Light receives funding from the United States National Science Foundation and the United States Office of Naval Research.

Petteri Uotila receives funding from the Research Council of Finland.

Rob Massom receives funding from the Australian Government's Australian Antarctic Program Partnership and the Australian Research Council.

Philip Reid does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

When major new climate change scenarios are released, there’s always strong interest. These scenarios lay out what our future climate will look like, depending on how fast we act to cut emissions.

But what was surprising about the seven new scenarios announced last week was that United States President Donald Trump took an interest.

Why? Because a high-emissions scenario – known as RCP8.5 and its successor SSP5-8.5 – had been removed. Under these worst-case scenarios, nations would make no effort to cut emissions and expand fossil fuel use. By 2100, carbon dioxide levels would almost triple, to 1,135 parts per million and the world would be around 4.5°C hotter than the pre-industrial period.

The climate scientists responsible for laying out the range of possible futures removed the RCP8.5 scenarios for a very good reason. Although often slow and incomplete, our efforts to tackle climate change have made a tangible difference. We have averted the worst climate future once thought possible.

The job is far from done. Emissions are at record highs and global warming is speeding up.

But the removal of this high-emissions scenario isn’t, as Trump and other climate sceptics have claimed, a sign of failed modelling, or that climate change was a hoax. It’s a sign the expansion of solar, wind, electric vehicles and batteries have slowed emissions growth.

How are these scenarios made?

Many climate impacts are becoming evident after about 1.4°C of warming – the level we’re roughly at now.

Because this period of extremely rapid climate change is due to human activities, it means we also have the opportunity to shape the future.

What will this look like? Will the world keep heating up, or will rapid action cut emissions and bring warming to a halt? The answer will make a big difference to the future humanity faces.

Predicting anything is difficult. But a group of scientists has created scenarios representing a range of possible climate futures.

Because the future is not set, scientists lay out a range of possible pathways for our future greenhouse gas emissions. They base them on what’s happened so far and what might happen in politics and technology over coming decades.

Then they select the emissions pathways deemed most plausible and then sample a range of different futures which are more or less optimistic about our fossil fuel use.

Scientific groups around the world then model these scenarios in depth using different climate models to ensure there’s a large amount of data available at global, regional and local levels.

These scenarios aren’t ranked by how likely they are. All are considered to be plausible futures. The huge range of temperature outcomes – approaching 2°C between the most and least optimistic scenarios by 2100 – points to how much of the future is in our hands.

Why the fuss about RCP8.5?

The two previous releases included two closely related scenarios – RCP8.5 and SSP5-8.5 respectively.

Here, “8.5” refers to radiative forcing – the level of extra heat (in watts) trapped per square metre by 2100.

In these worst-case scenarios, the world sharply boosts fossil fuel use. Unsurprisingly, this leads to very high amounts of global warming. Scientists have long argued over whether this was plausible in the first place.

None of the new scenarios are as pessimistic as RCP8.5/SSP5-8.5. The worst possible scenario now envisions high emissions leading to warming of around 3.5°C by 2100. That would still be very, very bad.

Sceptics acting in bad faith

Climate sceptics leapt on the removal of RCP8.5 as a sign the projections were wrong. These attacks were not made in good faith, but to cast doubt on climate science.

A clear eyed assessment is that RCP8.5 was removed because climate action is starting to work.

But while the worst outcome has been averted, we have also missed the window for the best future climate.

The new scenarios have no pathway as optimistic as the lowest emissions scenario from the last round of major climate projections. That scenario – SSP1-1.9 – envisaged strong climate action and rapid cuts to emissions, leading to global warming peaking at around 1.5°C.

Because global emissions haven’t yet begun to fall, the most optimistic new pathway would lead to warming peaking at about 1.9°C.

While we will definitely now pass 1.5°C, the hope is to only temporarily overshoot that level of warming while working to draw carbon dioxide back out of the atmosphere to get back to 1.5°C.

Our current emissions trajectory is somewhere in the middle – below the high emissions path but well above the most optimistic scenario. Based on current policies and countries’ actions, we’re looking at around 2.6°C warming by 2100.

You might wonder why we need to keep redoing these climate scenarios.

One reason: facts change on the ground. Solar keeps rolling out far faster than expected, but fracking has opened up large new fossil fuel deposits. Political shifts make climate action more or less likely.

Another is because our climate models are continually improving. The better the models get, the more accurate and detailed our projections of sea level rise and other climate impacts can be.

Yes, this is progress

Taking RCP8.5 off the table is a sign of progress – we’ve avoided the worst-case scenario. But we have also missed the best case future.

The next five years could play out in many different ways, leading to better or worse future climates. We must understand and prepare for what we’re facing – and double down on our efforts to create the best future possible.

Andrew King receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the National Environmental Science Program.

In recent weeks, a female prisoner in Queensland lost her fight to have her eggs frozen while incarcerated.

Rachel Smith is currently serving a ten-year sentence for drug trafficking. She will be between 39 and 41 years of age when she is released. Smith’s fertility will decline significantly while imprisoned.

Smith was 33 when she first applied to freeze her eggs and was prepared to fund the treatment herself. She applied to Queensland Corrective Services, the Brisbane Supreme Court and the Court of Appeal. Each application failed.

By denying her access to egg freezing, the state may have denied her the chance to have a child. This goes beyond the intended scope of criminal punishment, and should be reviewed.

Your rights depend on which state you live in

Queensland prisoners are prohibited from accessing assisted reproductive technology under the Corrective Services Act 2006.

In Smith’s case, the court ruled that the processes of extracting and freezing eggs was a form of assisted reproductive technology and therefore fell within that prohibition.

The court also justified the ban on grounds of consistency. It applied a blanket ban to ensure prisoners were treated equally and avoid correctional authorities having to make judgements about which prisoners should be permitted to have children.

The outcome may have been different had Smith been imprisoned in a different jurisdiction. In Victoria, for example, access to assisted reproductive technology is a recognised human right.

In 2010, the Supreme Court of Victoria ruled that a prisoner was entitled to access assisted reproductive technology, specifically IVF, recognising it as a legitimate medical treatment and a human right necessary for the preservation of health.

In 2024, another Victorian prisoner was granted the same right.

The welfare of children

There may be legitimate concerns about the welfare of children born to incarcerated parents. This may justify restricting access to assisted reproductive technology for prisoners, which could result in pregnancy while serving time.

The state, however, has not acted consistently on these concerns. Women have been incarcerated while pregnant, and children have been born and raised in custody.

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Read more: Babies and toddlers are living with their mums in prison. We need to look after them better

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But these concerns don’t apply to Smith’s case. Egg freezing does not result in pregnancy. It doesn’t result in a child being born or raised in custody. It’s a procedure that preserves the opportunity to have a baby after release.

Whatever concerns one might have about prisoners reproducing while incarcerated, none of them apply to egg freezing.

Sex discrimination

The consequences of denying access to egg freezing don’t end on release. Once someone has served their time, they’re entitled to reintegrate into society with most of their freedoms and rights restored. Whatever limits incarceration places on reproductive freedoms, those limits are presumably intended to end upon release.

However, for some, this will not be the case.

Women’s fertility declines with age. By age 30, women have around a 20% chance of falling pregnant each month. This chance drops to less than 5% by the age of 40. A woman incarcerated during her reproductive years may lose the ability to conceive before she is released.

While age also affects men’s fertility, it doesn’t typically lead to infertility. A male prisoner denied access to assisted reproductive technology will probably still be able to father children after his release.

The same denial to female prisoners is much more likely to permanently prevent them from having a biological child. A rule that produces categorically different consequences by sex warrants serious scrutiny.

The purposes of criminal punishment

While incarcerated, people lose fundamental liberties and rights, including freedom of movement, privacy and the ability to make many decisions about their daily lives.

Reproductive freedoms could be argued to fall within this category. Denying access to assisted reproductive technology for incarcerated people might reasonably be understood as consistent with the restrictions of prison life.

But there is a crucial difference between restrictions that apply within prison and harms that persist beyond it.

Some might even endorse the negative effects on prisoners’ reproductive prospects as part of the punishment itself.

The problem with this view is that, in Australia, criminal incarceration serves recognised purposes: punishment, deterrence, rehabilitation and community protection. Retribution is not on that list.

Even if we think it is right that prisoners suffer for their crimes, not all punishments are equal. Those with permanent bodily consequences have been abandoned. We no longer brand, mutilate or forcibly sterilise prisoners.

No Australian court has prescribed the loss of a person’s reproductive capacity as a legitimate sentencing objective. Nor should they accept policies that make this the default outcome.

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Read more: What are prisons for? Answering that is the starting point for reform

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Molly Johnston has received research funding and/or in-kind research support from Monash IVF, Public Fertility Care, Fertility Society of Australia and New Zealand, and Ferring Pharmaceuticals.

Julian Koplin has received research funding from Ferring Pharmaceuticals.

Neera Bhatia receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Chinese food heritage is diverse and vast, and embodies the distinct geographical and historical traces of various cultural identities.

As migrants in Australia, Chinese food features prominently in our everyday lives. Jing grew up eating regional cuisine from northern China; Wilfred grew up eating Cantonese food; Catherine grew up in Singapore enjoying home cooked Chinese food with a Eurasian twist.

The ways in which we understand, approach, enjoy and cook Chinese food are different, and we set out to find the role of food in the lives of other migrants of Chinese ancestry.

Tracing food heritage

We talked to Chinese-Australians between the ages of 18 to 40 to learn about how their food heritages have guided them to navigate and adapt to Australian lives.

They spoke to us about incorporating non-traditional Chinese ingredients, new ways of cooking and sourcing cooking equipment.

In their Australian kitchens, they experimented with the recipes they learnt from their families and those they interpret as “Chinese” cuisine.

They were concerned about authenticity, health and taste to varying degrees in the Chinese dishes they cooked, and spoke about how food heritage helped intergenerational families connect.

Fei* is ethnically Chinese and was born in Indonesia. She has lived in Australia for the past 12 years. She told us:

Whenever I go back to Indonesia, my auntie would cook for us, so I would ask a lot of old recipes […] I love their response because they will always say, when you were a child, you liked to eat this food. They will give you some feedback, but they’ll say, there’s a new way of cooking this.

Fei’s cooking was co-developed with family members, even when they are living in different countries. The art of cooking becomes a way for her family connect, despite distance.

Sally* migrated to Australia about nine years ago from Yunan Province. She shared a poignant story of the health of the older members of her family:

Even my grandmother [who] had Alzheimer’s and she barely remember who am I, but when she had – before I hang up the phone call, she’s like, remember to eat vegetable.

For Sally’s grandmother, even in old age, food was an expression of care.

Food facilitates new understandings of intergenerational family members – even those who have passed away.

Lynn* is an undergraduate student who migrated to Australia as a baby. She describes herself as “ethnically Chinese, but culturally Singaporean”, and told us how she got to know her grandfather through her father’s cooking:

I actually have never tried my grandpa’s chilli crab. I didn’t know that he actually made chilli crab until I think it was like two years [after] he’d passed when my dad made this recipe. […] I’m not sure how similar it was to the original, but it was pretty good.

Lynn’s father’s cooking his father’s chilli crab recipe as a way of honouring him and keeping his memory alive.

New habits

Food heritage is the phrase for the traditional cuisines which define our cultural identities and includes ingredient sourcing, food preparation and food consumption.

Food heritage is not static. It changes as migrants adapt to life in Australia.

Australia’s rich multicultural food cultures create transcultural food experiences for our Chinese-Australians.

Sally spoke to us about her and her mother melding Italian and Chinese ingredients:

If I cook dishes that require Yunnan’s ham, I use Italian prosciutto ham to replace it. It tastes really similar to Yunnan’s ham. My mum does that as well. She likes to get Italian Deli ham, smoked cured bacon, and then she’ll think it tastes like the actual thing from Yunnan.

Rong* came to Australia about 10 years ago from Shandong Province. She told us how she cooks for her daughter who loves noodles:

I need to bring something healthier to her table, and then I was like, okay, I’m not going to use the noodles, the Chinese noodles. I’m going to use pasta noodles, which is low GI, healthier. So, I just tried to figure different kind of ways of the noodles, not only Chinese noodles, but also Italian noodles, Vietnamese noodles, like pho. So all those kinds of things, and she loved them.

Rong also told us that she had to change the way she cooks because her apartment has an induction stove rather than a gas stove.

Although gas and induction stove tops are both common in China, certain dishes such as stir-fry are perceived to taste better in a hot wok on a gas stove.

“Soggy food”, according to many of our participants, is the result of induction stoves and flat pans rather than woks. Rong even told us that now, when she returns to China, she does not know how to cook in a Chinese kitchen with a gas stove.

Adapting to Australia

Food culture, is central to migrant adaptation, acculturation and wellbeing.

By better understanding the evolving nature of food heritage practices in Australia, we can better understand how migrants navigate Australia creatively while these transcultural connections provide an anchor for settlement and belonging.

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*Names have been changed.

Catherine Gomes is a member of The Australian Sociological Association.

Jing Qi is affiliated with the RMIT Chinese-Australian Studies Forum, and the Chinese Community Council of Australia Victoria Chapter.

Wilfred Yang Wang is affiliated with Centre for Holistic Health, a not-for-profit organisation that supports the social and mental wellbeing of the Chinese communities in Melbourne, Australia.

More people are relying on social media – such as TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and Reddit – to learn about mental health conditions and to interact with people who have shared experiences.

These aren’t only long-familiar disorders such as depression, anxiety and schizophrenia. They also include conditions often placed under the “neurodivergent” umbrella such as autism, ADHD (attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder), Tourette syndrome and dyslexia.

For instance, on TikTok the hashtag #adhd has had more than 50 billion views.

We wanted to explore how social media platforms shape how we understand mental health. So we analysed more than 14 million posts and comments about mental health on Reddit.

We show a shift in conversations toward ADHD and autism, and away from anxiety and depression.

Our findings have important implications for how people make sense of, and seek help for, mental health problems.

A complex relationship

Social media coverage of mental health has made it more visible, with some positive effects. It has probably reduced the stigma of mental illness and increased the use of mental health services.

However, it also has downsides. It can induce or exacerbate eating disorders, can contribute to the spread of symptoms (such as tic-like behaviours), and has been attributed to the rise of questionable self-diagnoses.

Misinformation is common in social media discussions of mental health. One study found a majority of the most popular TikTok videos on ADHD were misleading. Inaccurate information about many other mental health conditions on social media is common.

Discussions change and evolve

Mental health content has not merely risen in volume. Some conditions have increasingly attracted the spotlight, others have receded from view, and the relationships among them have shifted.

In our Reddit study published last year, we found that as the largest ADHD- and autism- related communities (subreddits) became increasingly more prominent from 2012 to 2022, their content gradually became more similar, and their users increasingly overlapped.

Discussions in both communities increasingly emphasised the experiences of adults, challenges in accessing diagnostic assessments, and struggles with personal relationships.

This growing convergence of these two conditions on Reddit illustrates how social media can reshape representations of mental health.

Our latest study takes this further

In our new study, we analysed more than 14 million posts and comments from several of the largest mental health communities on Reddit.

The 14 communities we studied included those related to mood, anxiety, trauma, personality, dissociation and psychosis, as well as those focused on conditions often placed under the “neurodivergent” umbrella, such as autism, ADHD, Tourette syndrome and dyslexia.

We investigated how the people belonging to these communities and the language they used changed from 2015 to 2022.

We explored which communities became more or less closely associated over time – sharing more or fewer members and containing posts and comments with similar or different linguistic content. We also looked at whether these changes reflected shifts in the amount of attention the 14 conditions received.

Although our analysis only covered a seven-year period, it revealed a striking pattern of changes. The two diagrams show how the 14 communities were interrelated at the beginning and end of the period.

The size of the circles represents the relative size of the communities. The width of the links between them indicates how closely they were associated.

In 2015, depression and anxiety were prominent mental health communities on Reddit. They were among the most active and their members and content overlapped with those of many other communities. In this sense, they were “central” to the network.

However, in 2022, ADHD and autism communities had become most popular and prominent, displacing depression and anxiety. ADHD, autism and other neurodivergent conditions became more closely associated with other communities, and consequently more central to the network.

These analyses suggest that on Reddit the mental health landscape has been re-configured. Mood and anxiety disorders once dominated discussions. But discussions of mental health have increasingly pivoted to discussing conditions related to being neurodivergent.

Reddit users do not represent the general population; they tend to be younger, male, more educated, and have a higher income. Nevertheless, our study offers important insights into changes in mental health discussions on one social media platform over time.

Why does it matter?

The rising prominence and centrality of ADHD and autism makes them increasingly popular explanations for mental health problems. This might promote accurate self-diagnosis by people who once would not have recognised the nature of their difficulties.

However, it could also lead people to misinterpret and mislabel their experiences as ADHD and autism when there’s another explanation.

The rising prominence of these conditions on social media may also lead people to interpret mood or anxiety symptoms as signs of ADHD or autism.

Misinterpretations can lead people to pursue inappropriate diagnoses or unhelpful treatment, delaying access to the help they need. This in turn places increasing pressure on mental health services, and can lead to other conditions being overlooked.

Jemima Kang receives funding from an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship, an Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering Elevate Scholarship, and a University of Melbourne Helen Macpherson Smith Scholarship.

Nick Haslam receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Mike Conway does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

When the University of Queensland Press cancelled the publication of Wiradjuri poet Jazz Money’s book Bila: A River Cycle because of a blog post by its illustrator, 60 UQP contributors signed a letter of protest. Some declared they would no longer publish with UQP. Fourteen staff members issued a statement decrying “the precedent the University of Queensland has set”.

Had HarperCollins, a publisher owned and controlled by the Murdoch family, nixed an Indigenous children’s book, the decision would perhaps not have been experienced as such a betrayal. UQP, however, boasts on its website of “publishing literary works, poetry and Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander stories”: scarcely an orientation one usually associates with politicised book pulping.

The Bila episode follows a recent pattern in which supposedly progressive institutions and organisations respond to any connection to the Gaza genocide as aggressively as their right-wing counterparts, or even more so.

Conservative politicians and the right-wing press systematically demonise the Palestinian cause and its supporters. According to a study by Ette media, the Australian published, between October 7 2023 and April 9 2026, an astonishing 412 articles wholly or in part about Palestinian writer Randah Abdel-Fattah. Yet some of the most punitive campaigns have played out not in the corporate sector but at the ABC and within the university sector.

In How to Sell a Genocide: The Media’s Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza, Adam Johnson explores a similar phenomenon in the United States. His book does not focus, he says, on “the conservative or MAGA media’s dehumanization of Palestinians”. This is partly because right-wing outlets such as Fox News, the Wall Street Journal and The Daily Wire don’t disguise their anti-Palestinian stance, but also because the timing of the war in Gaza made the reporting and commentary by supposed progressives particularly important.

“There was,” Johnson reminds us, “a Democratic president in office when the genocide began in earnest, and support from Democrats in Congress and in the think-tank and media world was dispositive in continuing said genocide.”

His critique of what he calls the “Center-Left media” is based on careful documentation of some 12,000 articles and 5,000 television clips. He brings, as they say, the receipts.

For instance, Johnson notes that CNN – a pillar of US liberalism – mentioned the child deaths in the first 100 days of the Ukraine war far more (4,223 times) than child deaths in the corresponding period in Gaza (3,632 times). On MSNBC, child victims of the Ukraine war featured 1,775 times, compared with 1,522 times for Gaza.

Yet, in the first 100 days of the Ukraine conflict, 262 children died. In Gaza, the toll of dead kids exceeded 10,000.

The systematic obliteration of civilian infrastructure in Gaza meant that, even in the initial period Johnson studied, 80% of the population was displaced. In Ukraine, the equivalent figure was only 33%. Yet Johnson finds the US television networks referred to refugees, displaced people and similar terms eight times more often for Ukrainians than for Palestinians (1,663 versus 211).

Lexical scruples

The International Association of Genocide Scholars describes the Israeli war on Gaza as meeting the legal definition of genocide. The association’s position came after a vote, so we know it reflects the judgement of 86% of its members.

Almost all the major human rights organisations and NGOs agree, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem, the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention, Genocide Watch, the European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights, the Middle East Studies Association, Oxfam and Physicians for Human Rights Israel.

Yet most liberal news outlets still do not use the word “genocide” in relation to Gaza.

Johnson shows how such lexical scruples do not apply elsewhere. “Even though the destruction of Gaza, by all objective metrics, has been magnitudes more brutal and deadly than that of Russia’s invasion and occupation of Ukraine,” he observes, “the totalising moral labels of ‘war crime’ and ‘genocide’ were used on CNN and MSNBC 17.2 times more often in the context of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine than Israel’s action in Gaza.”

His review of the first 30 days of the two conflicts found that, on CNN and MSNBC, Ukrainians were described on air as victims of genocide or war crimes 1,790 times: 1,515 for war crimes and 275 for genocide. When the victims were Palestinian, the terms were used 104 times: 92 for war crimes and 12 for genocide.

“Ostensibly non-opinionated reporters and ‘analysts’ on both MSNBC and CNN,” writes Johnson, “often asserted, as a matter of fact, that Russia was committing war crimes against Ukrainians, without this being seen as violating their neutrality.”

Higher standards

Israel’s defenders insist the country should not be held to a higher standard than other nations. Johnson’s research shows the opposite is true: judgements regularly made in other contexts become controversial only when applied to Israel.

After an attack on the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City killed about 200 Palestinians on October 17 2023, Israeli spokespeople denounced early media accounts that blamed an IDF air strike, releasing a recording purportedly capturing a dialogue between Palestinian militants accepting responsibility for the blast.

Channel 4 quickly debunked the audio as a clumsy fake; the investigative group Forensic Architecture determined that most of Israel’s claims about the hospital attack were demonstrably false.

In the months that followed, the IDF engaged in what UN experts later described as “medicide”: namely, the targeted destruction of Gaza’s healthcare system and the killing of more than 1,500 healthcare workers. In one particularly ghastly incident, the IDF fired on five clearly marked ambulances and a fire truck after they came to the aid of Palestinians wounded in an earlier attack.

A subsequent investigation by Forensic Architecture and Earshot alleged the soldiers fired more than 900 bullets at the convoy, before shooting the survivors at close range. The IDF then deployed bulldozers to crush and cover the vehicles, and bury the dead in an unmarked mass grave.

That was one year and five months after Israeli president Isaac Herzog rejected allegations of Israeli responsibility for the Al-Ahli hospital attack as a “blood libel”.

The pushback by the Israelis led to US news outlets formulating new policies. CNN and the New York Times began instructing employees that attacks could only be attributed to Israel after confirmation from the IDF and GPS coordinate location. Johnson quotes a source at CNN:

Whether it’s in the newsroom or in the field, we couldn’t credit anything to Israel unless we were held to this impossibly high bar of having to call it an “explosion”, until we geolocated the site of the explosion, sent the coordinates to the Israelis and asked them for comment.

Asked about whether the policy was applied in other conflicts, such as the Ukraine war, Johnson’s source answers: “Never, never, never, never, never.”

Terms and conditions

Previously, the World Health Organization, Human Rights Watch and the US State Department had all used data from the Gaza Health Ministry because of its proven reliability. After the Al-Ahli hospital attack, US news outlets began appending the description “Hamas-controlled” or “Hamas-run” to descriptions of the health ministry. Johnson says:

in our 100-day survey period, CNN used the “Hamas-run” label and related terms 277 times and MSNBC used it 146 times, despite neither using it once between October 7, 2023 and October 17, 2023.

The practice spread, including to Australia. By October 28 2023, the Sydney Morning Herald was also attributing casualty figures to the “Hamas-controlled Health Ministry”.

While no one has yet studied the liberal media in Australia with the rigour applied by Johnson in the US, the available evidence suggests it followed the patterns he describes. As I noted in a piece for Deep Cut News, the Age published a bold editorial declaring:

There is a genocide happening today […] Our government should urgently, repeatedly and loudly call for international intervention, and lead in imposing sanctions. We should send bountiful aid to the victims, and halt economic and diplomatic relations […] unless and until the savagery is stopped. All of us, as Australians, should shun travel […] for tourism or business.

And our government should, as it did with the Syrian refugee crisis a few years ago, rapidly engineer an intake of […] refugees.

That wasn’t about Gaza. It appeared in 2017, in relation to the persecution of the Rohingya people in Mynamar.

Some commentators point to the absence of a final judgement by the International Court of Justice in relation to Gaza. But in 2017 the International Court of Justice had not ruled that the killings of the Rohingya were genocidal. It still hasn’t. The glacial pace at which the court moves means genocide allegations brought by Gambia against Myanmar remain unresolved.

Nevertheless, in 2017, the Age saw no problem with using the word “genocide” after studying reports from Medecins Sans Frontieres about “a deliberate, systematic campaign causing death and human suffering”.

Today, Medecins Sans Frontiers describes Israel’s operations in Gaza as genocidal. The Age does not. It has not published an editorial akin to that it issued in respect of Mynamar; it has not called for the government to impose sanctions, nor urged Australians to boycott Israel.

An acquiescent press

How to explain the special treatment of Israel by the liberal press?

The Gaza war focused attention on lobbyists and their influence on politics and the media. In the US, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee devoted the staggering sum of US$100 million in 2024 to unseating candidates it deemed insufficiently supportive of Israel.

In his book Dateline Jerusalem, veteran journalist John Lyons describes a similar process in Australia. Well before the Gaza war, he witnessed the brutal discrimination dished out by Israeli soldiers to 12-year-old Palestinians in the West Bank, but recognised that, if he reported it, “I would be the target of a backlash which would be tough, nasty and prolonged”.

So it proved. His 2014 story Stone Cold Justice won a Walkley, but he was “attacked professionally, personally and relentlessly by the pro-Israel lobby and its supporters”.

Famously, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky list “flak” from corporate lobbyists as one of the filters that produces an acquiescent press. Dissenting journalists face a barrage of time-consuming complaints so exhausting it induces preemptive self-censorship. Flak from pro-Israel groups aims, as Lyons puts it, “to make journalists decide that, even if they have a legitimate story that may criticise Israel, it’s simply not worth running it as it will cause ‘more trouble than it’s worth’”.

Along with the stick comes various carrots. In Australia, pro-Israel groups regularly provide journalists, editors and other media workers (as well as politicians) with all-expenses-paid “study trips” to the Middle East. Recipients of this largesse include a roll call of conservative media talent, but also include prominent journalists from the liberal press.

To contextualise that record, consider the response when hundreds of media workers (including me) signed an open letter on the Gaza conflict in 2023, calling on outlets to, among other issues, reject “both sideism”, centre the human casualties, show equal scepticism to IDF and Hamas reports, report credible allegations of “war crimes, genocide, ethnic cleansing and apartheid”, and cover the anti-war movement.

In reply, Nine issued a memo written by Tory Maguire, then executive editor of the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age, and signed by then Age editor Patrick Elligett, SMH editor Bevan Shields and national editor David King. The memo cautioned journalists that “personal agendas” should not influence reporting.

The principle, Maguire wrote, meant that “any newsroom staff who signed this latest industry letter will be unable to participate in any reporting or production relating to the war”.

Guardian staff received a similar message from the editors of its Australian, US and UK organisations: Lenore Taylor, Betsy Reed and Kath Viner. The memo explained that staff “should not sign public petitions or open letters about matters that have, or could be perceived to have, a bearing on [the publication’s] ability to report the news in a fair and fact-based way”.

Maguire, Shields and King had previously travelled to Israel on “study trips”; so had Taylor. A petition calling for fair cover for Palestinians created a perception of “bias” – but accepting free travel and accommodation from Israel or pro-Israel groups did not.

Double standards

Such double standards foster allegations of a media “captured” by pro-Israel lobbyists, a claim that can degenerate into antisemitic conspiracism. Johnson’s book rests on a much better analysis, one that centres US rather than Israeli power.

Three decades ago, secretary of state Alexander Haig provided a simple explanation of why Tel Aviv mattered so much to Washington. “Israel,” he said, “is the largest American aircraft carrier in the world that cannot be sunk, does not carry even one American solider, and is located in a critical region for American national security.”

Since the 1970s, the US has looked to Israel to protect American interests in the oil-rich Middle East. To equip Israel for that function, the US provides more cumulative foreign aid to Israel than any other nation: since 1948, more than US$300 billion (adjusted for inflation) in total.

Most US support, particularly in recent years, pertains to defence. The majority of Israel’s air force and all of its combat aircraft are made in the US. The analyst William D. Hartung estimates that, since the Hamas attack on October 7 2023, the US government has provided Israel with US$21.7 billion of military aid.

If we recognise America’s strategic reliance on Israel, we are better positioned to understand the liberal response to Gaza, which also needs to be seen in the context of Trumpism. During the first Trump administration, many progressive institutions ostentatiously signalled their opposition to a presidency they considered illegitimate and anomalous.

Johnson notes that, when the killing of George Floyd in 2020 spurred a revival of the Black Lives Matter movement, “media outlets, cultural nonprofits, and colleges issued lofty – if vague – statements of support for racial justice”. These were low-stakes anti-Trump gestures that aligned mainstream liberals with what they saw as the imminent restoration of progressive normality.

Support for Ukraine was equally easy. Unlike Palestinians, Ukrainians were, after all, understood by the Western media as civilised. In the London Telegraph, pundit Daniel Hannon spelled out why Ukrainian suffering resonated in the West: “They seem so like us. That is what makes it so shocking.” In 2022, CBS News foreign correspondent Charlie D’Agata explained (in remarks for which he subsequently apologised) that Ukraine was not “a place, with all due respect, like Iraq or Afghanistan, that has seen conflict raging for decades”; it was “relatively civilized, relatively European”.

Johnson shows that, in the period he surveyed, the New York Times, the Associated Press, the Washington Post, CNN, Politico, USA Today and Axios collectively used the term “savage” 16 times for the killing of Israelis, but never for the killing of Palestinians.

Likewise, “slaughter” appeared 120 times in relation to the killing of Israelis, but only once for Palestinians. “Massacre” was used 344 times in relation to Palestinians killing Israelis, but never for Israelis killing Palestinians. “Barbaric” was used 14 times to describe the killing of Israelis, but zero times in relation to the deaths of Palestinians.

The cable coverage displayed a similar pattern. Johnson records that on MSNBC, presenters and guests used “massacre” 177 times, “barbaric” 46 times, “savage” 23 times and “slaughter” 102 times in relation to Israeli deaths. They never called the killing of Palestinians “barbaric” or “savage”. In relation to Palestinians, they only used “massacre” eight times and “slaughter” four times.

References to “savagery” and “barbarism” echo the logic of settler colonialism, identifying the uncivilised natives as a problem to be solved.

The sphere of deviancy

By denouncing Putin’s invasion, liberal politicians and institutions were opposing a traditional US adversary. They were siding with the incoming Biden administration and most Western nations. And they were distancing themselves from an increasingly unpopular Trump, widely seen as sympathetic to Russia.

After October 7 2023, the calculus changed. Unlike a stance on Ukraine, opposition to Israel’s war was not cost-free. Hostility to the longstanding foreign policy consensus required a modicum of courage. In the terms established by Daniel Hallin’s famous study of the US media and Vietnam, The “Uncensored War” (1986), those who opposed Israel’s war stepped outside the “sphere of consensus” and the “sphere of legitimate controversy” to inhabit the “sphere of deviancy”.

This is a space occupied, in Hallin’s words, by “those political actors and views which journalists and the political mainstream of the society reject as unworthy of being heard”.

Not surprisingly, as Johnson explains, institutions that had previously backed Black Lives Matter, the people of Ukraine and other popular causes “found both their tongues and hands tied on the subject of social justice as the death toll in Gaza skyrocketed”.

In 2022, Harvard president Lawrence Bacow proclaimed his institution’s solidarity with Ukraine with a rousing speech. “Now is the time for all voices to be raised,” he declared:

The deplorable actions of Vladimir Putin put at risk the lives of millions of people and undermine the concept of sovereignty. Institutions devoted to the perpetuation of democratic ideals and to the articulation of human rights have a responsibility to condemn such wanton aggression […]

Today the Ukrainian flag flies over Harvard Yard. Harvard University stands with the people of Ukraine.

By 2024, Harvard had changed its mind. The time for raising voices had, apparently, come to an end. In the face of student protests, Harvard announced it would “no longer take positions on matters outside of the university”.

Johnson notes that 50% of the top US colleges – including Johns Hopkins, Northwestern, Yale, Cornell, Columbia, University of Michigan, Stanford, University of Pennsylvania, University of Virginia, Dartmouth and UCLA – issued statements of support either for Ukraine and/or for Israel in February 2022 and October 2023.

Then, as the Gaza crisis intensified, they suddenly explained they couldn’t take stands on political issues.

Third partying

The media, however, had to say something. In 2016, progressive outlets in the US had portrayed Trump as something akin to a fascist. In 2020, they had campaigned, more-or-less openly, for the Democrats. Even sober publications such as the New York Times made clear their preference for Joe Biden: a sensible centrist who would restore decency and democracy. Not surprisingly, in 2023, the Gaza genocide – and Biden’s complicity with the killing – created a tremendous ideological crisis for the liberal media.

Johnson notes that Biden could have stopped the war at any time, citing multiple Israeli sources to that effect. In November 2023, for instance, retired Israeli major general Yitzhak Brick acknowledged that the Gaza operation depended utterly on the US:

All of our missiles, the ammunition, the precision-guided bombs, all the airplanes and bombs, it’s all from the US. The minute they turn off the tap, you can’t keep fighting. You have no capability […] Everyone understands that we can’t fight this war without the United States. Period.

Michael Herzog, the former Israeli ambassador to the US, explained:

God did the State of Israel a favor that Biden was the president during this period, because it could have been much worse. We fought for over a year, and the administration never came to us and said, ‘ceasefire now’. It never did. And that’s not to be taken for granted.

Biden’s agency was rarely acknowledged by the mainstream media. Johnson describes the emergence of several distinctive styles of reporting that allowed “the average media consumer – and media worker – to cope with the undeniable and untenable war crimes being carried out by their leaders before their eyes”. A common trope involved what he dubs “Third Partying”. This entailed journalists framing the US “as a neutral party – even a humanitarian force – always looking (but, mysteriously, always failing) to end the conflict”.

Liberals depicted Biden as helpless. As the New York Times put it, the most powerful man in the world was supposedly constrained by the “limits of US influence in the Mideast”. They wrote stories about what Johnson calls “Fuming/Deeply Concerned Biden”, in which the president featured as “secretly upset, outraged, having stern words for Netanyahu, or privately sad or anguished about civilian casualties”.

We might think about these tropes in relation to journalism professor Jay Rosen’s work on the professional socialisation of political journalists into what he describes as the “savvy style”. Rosen explains:

In politics, our journalists believe, it is better to be savvy than it is to be honest or correct on the facts. It’s better to be savvy than it is to be just, good, fair, decent, strictly lawful, civilized, sincere, thoughtful or humane. Savviness is what journalists admire in others. Savvy is what they themselves dearly wish to be. (And to be unsavvy is far worse than being wrong.)

Savviness is that quality of being shrewd, practical, hyper-informed, perceptive, ironic, “with it”, and unsentimental in all things political. And what is the truest mark of savviness? Winning, of course! Or knowing who the winners are.

In relation to Gaza, savvy commentators recognised (though not necessary openly) the US reliance on Israel to maintain hegemony in the Middle East. Savviness meant understanding the political consequences of that relationship: namely, that US politicians would back Israel under almost every circumstance.

The Australian situation

Though the Australian situation is different, certain parallels can be identified.

The Albanese government came to power in 2022 with considerable support from a liberal media impressed by Labor’s aura of competence, particularly in contrast to the shambolic Morrison administration.

As a backbencher, Anthony Albanese had spoken at rallies to denounce the IDF for meeting “children throwing rocks with helicopters, with tanks and with missiles”. But as prime minister, he and his foreign minister Penny Wong sought, above all else, to strengthen the US alliance as a counter to an increasingly confident China. In relation to Gaza, Australia determinedly followed the US lead.

The tropes identified by Johnson appeared, in slightly modified form, in the Australian liberal press. For instance, after Greens leader Adam Bandt’s defeat in the seat of Melbourne during the federal election in May 2025, Nine’s David Crowe explained that Bandt had lost in part because he had:

seized on the war in Gaza to accuse Albanese of knowingly aiding Israel in a genocide. There was no such support for genocide; the Australian government wants a ceasefire and a two-state solution. Most importantly, most Australians knew their government did not have the power to stop the war. The Greens leader was eyeless in Gaza, blind to the danger for him and his party.

Crowe was right to say that an Australian prime minister lacked the power of a US president to stop the war. But Bandt had never suggested otherwise. Instead, the Greens – like many others – had insisted that abstract calls for a ceasefire and a two-state solution (an outcome that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly vowed to oppose) meant nothing unless accompanied by what Bandt called pressure from “real, concrete steps”, such as an end to military trade, the imposition of sanctions and the expulsion of the Israeli ambassador.

Symptomatically, in his condemnation of Bandt, Crowe does not reject his description of the war as genocidal. Instead, he presents Bandt’s response as an electoral misfire by the Greens. “Young voters may be drawn to its exaggerated rhetoric and confected conflict,” he concludes, “but voters trend to drop the party as they age.”

We might again recall Jay Rosen. “Prohibited from joining in political struggles,” he writes,

dedicated to observing what is, regardless of whether it ought to be, the savvy believe that these disciplines afford them a special view of the arena, cured of excess sentiment, useless passion, ideological certitude and other defects of vision that players in the system routinely exhibit. The savvy don’t say: I have a better argument than you. They say: I am closer to reality than you.

Throughout the liberal media in Australia, the question of Gaza often manifested as a tension between employees and management. In November 2023, for instance, the Australian Financial Review reported on a meeting by the staff of Schwartz Media, publisher of the Saturday Paper, at which editor-in-chief Erik Jensen addressed concerns about the paper’s response to the Gaza crisis.

As far back as 2021, Alex McKinnon, the one-time morning editor of the Saturday Paper, identified what he called “an unofficial but widely known editorial policy of avoiding coverage of Israel and Palestine, especially any coverage that could be perceived as being critical of the Israeli government’s ongoing human rights abuses of Palestinians”. Many staff members, said McKinnon, “expressed discomfort with it, but all seemed resigned to it”.

In response to McKinnon, Jensen rejected claims of a pro-Israel bias. He said the same in the 2023 staff meeting. Yet, as the staff reportedly argued, the Saturday Paper had previously distinguished itself with overt stances on other progressive causes, such as refugee rights and climate; it campaigned, through the dogged reporting of Rick Morton, for justice over the Robodebt scandal.

On May 21 2022, the Saturday Paper called for the defeat of Scott Morrison in the federal election, saying Morrison “will be remembered, if he is remembered at all, as the country’s great torturer”. On April 8 2023, the paper attacked Peter Dutton’s stance on the Indigenous Voice to Parliament, saying his “cynicism is boundless” and calling him an “ugly person who makes true the old joke about politics and show business”. The editorial accused him of dividing the country with his “ghoul politics”.

Elections and Indigenous reconciliation are important issues. But so is genocide. Had the Saturday Paper applied the same editorial focus to Gaza, it might have published something like this:

How will history regard the government of Albanese, Chalmers, Marles and Wong? It will record that after two and half years of genocide by Israel, Australia’s leadership invited Israel’s president for a state visit. Australia refused to condemn the raft of war crimes committed by Israel and supported by the United States, first in Gaza and then in Iran and southern Lebanon. […]

Australia has said nothing while Israel has continued to assassinate journalists, medics, aid workers, diplomats, foreign and spiritual leaders across the Middle East. Worse, it has done nothing even to dissuade Israel – no sanctions, no calls for justice or statements of support for the ICC arrest warrants, not even stopping our arms trade to Israel.

This passage was written by Nick Feik, the former editor of Schwartz Media’s magazine the Monthly, but it didn’t run in the Monthly or in the Saturday Paper. It appeared on Feik’s personal Substack.

Alternative platforms

That’s symptomatic of a growing trend in which writers horrified at the genocide are, either by choice or necessity, publishing on alternative platforms rather than the established liberal outlets. Robert Manne has long been acknowledged one of the most important public intellectuals in Australia. Remarkably, if you want to read his thoughtful comments on Gaza, Bondi and antisemitism, you must turn, not to any of the mainstream papers, but to his Substack.

Rick Morton, who spearheaded the Saturday Paper’s coverage of Robodebt, posted his thoughts on Gaza and the Bondi massacre on Ghost, a Substack alternative, in January 2026. He quit his job at the Saturday Paper shortly afterwards.

Alex McKinnon established a Substack to report “what others won’t about Australia’s silence on Palestine”; he later launched Deep Cut News with Antoun Issa, who resigned from the Guardian in 2024 “due to objections over the outlet’s coverage of the Gaza genocide”.

Antoinette Lattouf – who won a high-profile legal case against the ABC after it sacked her for sharing a post from Human Rights Watch about Gaza – now works with Jan Fran making podcasts and YouTube shows for their own Ette Media.

Scott Mitchell and Osman Faruqi, who both worked for Schwartz’s 7am podcast (as well as various other outlets), collaborate on the news platform Lamestream.

The proliferation of new outlets and the rejuvenation of older ones, such as Overland, has led to important interventions. The Klaxon, a project of investigative journalist Anthony Klan, doggedly pursued the ties between John Roth, the husband of antisemitism envoy Jillian Segal, and the far-right Advance project. Deep Cut News published the letter in which a pro-Israel academic group lobbied to exclude Abdel-Fattah from the Bendigo Writers Festival. Lamestream broke the story about UQP’s cancellation of Jazz Money’s book.

Yet good journalism does not, in itself, guarantee the survival of the outlets who conduct it. The mass street movement in support of Gaza created a new audience for alternative publications. But with the establishment of a ceasefire (though not a genuine peace) the protests have declined, creating a difficult environment for media projects challenging the liberal consensus.

Legal ramifications

In the US context, Johnson doubts that the progressive outlets that supported the genocide will pay much of a short-term price. On the contrary, he identifies a process of rationalisation and justification already underway. Insofar as liberals apportion blame, they attribute it to Netanyahu and what they see as an unfortunate overreaction by the IDF to the barbarities of Hamas. He concludes:

Mostly, I think the genocide in Gaza will be put into a memory hole, forgotten, dismissed as a lefty ‘obsession’, or hung up, the disproportionate focus of which, it will be heavily implied, is evidence of latent antisemitism. And that will be that.

Nevertheless, the consequences of so much killing cannot be evaded entirely. The precedent set by the genocide will reverberate for generations, in the media and elsewhere. As Johnson notes,

we will likely see versions of Gaza play out in the coming decades across various peripheries […] And the model of deflection, dehumanization, and liberal excuse-making perfected during the Gaza genocide will be the template – the weapons, technological and rhetorical, having been sharpened over late 2023 into 2025.

The Gazafication of south Lebanon provides one immediate and obvious example, but there are others. The indifference to legal norms shown by Donald Trump when he greenlit the US and Israeli war on Iran reflected the experience of Gaza, where nothing said by the International Court or the United Nations or similar bodies made any difference at all.

Discussing Trump’s kidnapping of Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro, legal scholars Oona A. Hathaway and Scott J. Shapiro warn:

It is not just the existing international legal system that is in jeopardy now. At risk is the survival of any rules at all – and with them any constraints on the exercise of state power.

In that context, as historian Pankaj Mishra concludes, the

critique of the fourth estate, the so-called pillar of democracy, not only becomes more pertinent. It resonates as a broader analysis of the decay of democratic institutions in the West.

How to Sell a Genocide is part of that critique. But much more remains to be done.

Jeff Sparrow has signed statements of solidarity with Palestine and participated in campus campaigns against the genocide in Gaza.

Global society makes billions of images and uploads hundreds of thousands of hours of video on the internet every day.

The problem is, some of this content is misleading or downright wrong. And when it’s in visual form, it can be particularly convincing.

Take the Met Gala that happened earlier this month in New York. While photographers snapped photos of Rhianna, Beyoncé and Nicole Kidman as they strutted their stuff, others saw “photos” of celebrities, such as Rosalía, Lady Gaga and Jacob Elordi, who were actually elsewhere (the images in the below Instagram carousel are AI generated).

While this type of AI slop might seem harmless and can be easily verified, other “media fakery” is becoming far more problematic and demands more robust techniques to verify.

Traditional verification techniques are falling short as AI becomes increasingly convincing and the line between authentic and synthetic blurs. This is true across all content, from still images to moving ones and audio deepfakes.

The volume of content and the speed at which it travels doesn’t help. It also doesn’t help that fact-checking can take hours or days while fakes can be created in seconds.

First, equip yourself

Guides on detecting AI-generated content suggest multiple strategies and acknowledge there are no perfect solutions. But there are helpful things you can do.

Familiarise yourself with examples of fakes and study how they were fact-checked. This helps you understand what is possible and learn how fact-checkers sort real from fake.

Look deeply. Zoom in. Pause the content or watch it frame-by-frame. Inspect the small details. Look out for inconsistencies, textures that are flat when they shouldn’t be, or patterns that are too perfect or are inexplicably off. Does the location shown match with where the scene is purported to be? Do shadows fall naturally and do lines follow the rules of perspective?

Look widely. Are you familiar with the source? What else does it publish and how long has it been around? What do other trusted sources say? How does this depiction compare to others that are available? Or if there aren’t others available, should that give you pause?

Then, apply your learnings

Let’s take an example and work through it together.

This Facebook reel, posted by an account called “Real Talk Hub”, purports to show migrants being stopped and returned by Australian police at an airport.

Before getting too granular, let’s take stock of the opening image.

The video uses scale to show what appears to be a long stream of passengers. Some are moving toward and some are moving away from a plane. It is difficult to identify specifics in the video. The superimposed text blocks almost all of the horizon line. Shallow depth of field makes aspects in the distance blurry and hard to discern.

Many of the passengers have darker skin and are visually coded as “other”. They interact with a light-skinned police officer who takes notes on a clipboard.

The vertical video is framed carefully to not reveal identifiers like the name of the airline that seems to start with the letter “P”. This makes it difficult to search the airline’s name and whether credible sources corroborate the story that’s told.

Even though the people and scenes look realistic at first glance, the video’s integrity unravels when we slow down and look closer. People in the passenger line morph and transform.

The officer is able to single-handedly remove the paper from the clipboard and it appears to inexplicably leave white strips behind. The police vests look different to images you can find in verified media photos of the Australian Federal Police.

Taken together, all these clues suggest the video is AI-generated.

Think like a fact-checker

Many AI-generated videos can trick you and create a very compelling narrative. So, fact-checkers have developed triangulated methodologies that examine elements beyond just what you see in the video.

One way to do this is to systematically check contextual factors – the other things surrounding the content. Our team’s research has found professional fact-checkers usually pay attention to the type of social media accounts or websites distributing suspicious media.

For this AAP verification on a video about banning dogs on the beach, it was crucial to inspect the user’s activity and posting patterns.

In addition to visual anomalies, the fact-checkers also found an invisible watermark that helped them determine the content was AI-generated.

Other things to check are how long a social media account has been operating, how often the social media account posts, and whether the account is transparent about its use of AI.

These aren’t fool-proof indicators of authenticity, though. The migrant example above comes from an account that is about five years old. It also comes from a “verified” account, which might make it feel more credible. But both Facebook and X now let users pay for this verification.

Overall, when it comes to suspect images or video, don’t just look deeply. Also look widely.

AI-generated content can increasingly fool our eyes, so you also have to look beyond what’s in the video. Taking a mixed-methods approach that considers visual and contextual clues can help. By training your ability to think like a fact-checker, you can stay safer online.

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Read more: We teach young people to write. In the age of AI, we must teach them how to see

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Silvia Montaña-Niño is also associate investigator of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making & Society and the Fact Check Research Team at this centre.

T.J. Thomson receives funding from the Australian Research Council. He is an affiliate with the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision Making & Society.

When major new climate change scenarios are released, there’s always strong interest. These scenarios lay out what our future climate will look like, depending on how fast we act to cut emissions.

But what was surprising about the seven new scenarios announced last week was that United States President Donald Trump took an interest.

Why? Because a high-emissions scenario – known as RCP8.5 and its successor SSP5-8.5 – had been removed. Under these worst-case scenarios, nations would make no effort to cut emissions and expand fossil fuel use. By 2100, carbon dioxide levels would almost triple, to 1,135 parts per million and the world would be around 4.5°C hotter than the pre-industrial period.

The climate scientists responsible for laying out the range of possible futures removed the RCP8.5 scenarios for a very good reason. Although often slow and incomplete, our efforts to tackle climate change have made a tangible difference. We have averted the worst climate future once thought possible.

The job is far from done. Emissions are at record highs and global warming is speeding up.

But the removal of this high-emissions scenario isn’t, as Trump and other climate sceptics have claimed, a sign of failed modelling, or that climate change was a hoax. It’s a sign the expansion of solar, wind, electric vehicles and batteries have slowed emissions growth.

How are these scenarios made?

Many climate impacts are becoming evident after about 1.4°C of warming – the level we’re roughly at now.

Because this period of extremely rapid climate change is due to human activities, it means we also have the opportunity to shape the future.

What will this look like? Will the world keep heating up, or will rapid action cut emissions and bring warming to a halt? The answer will make a big difference to the future humanity faces.

Predicting anything is difficult. But a group of scientists has created scenarios representing a range of possible climate futures.

Because the future is not set, scientists lay out a range of possible pathways for our future greenhouse gas emissions. They base them on what’s happened so far and what might happen in politics and technology over coming decades.

Then they select the emissions pathways deemed most plausible and then sample a range of different futures which are more or less optimistic about our fossil fuel use.

Scientific groups around the world then model these scenarios in depth using different climate models to ensure there’s a large amount of data available at global, regional and local levels.

These scenarios aren’t ranked by how likely they are. All are considered to be plausible futures. The huge range of temperature outcomes – approaching 2°C between the most and least optimistic scenarios by 2100 – points to how much of the future is in our hands.

Why the fuss about RCP8.5?

The two previous releases included two closely related scenarios – RCP8.5 and SSP5-8.5 respectively.

Here, “8.5” refers to radiative forcing – the level of extra heat (in watts) trapped per square metre by 2100.

In these worst-case scenarios, the world sharply boosts fossil fuel use. Unsurprisingly, this leads to very high amounts of global warming. Scientists have long argued over whether this was plausible in the first place.

None of the new scenarios are as pessimistic as RCP8.5/SSP5-8.5. The worst possible scenario now envisions high emissions leading to warming of around 3.5°C by 2100. That would still be very, very bad.

Sceptics acting in bad faith

Climate sceptics leapt on the removal of RCP8.5 as a sign the projections were wrong. These attacks were not made in good faith, but to cast doubt on climate science.

A clear eyed assessment is that RCP8.5 was removed because climate action is starting to work.

But while the worst outcome has been averted, we have also missed the window for the best future climate.

The new scenarios have no pathway as optimistic as the lowest emissions scenario from the last round of major climate projections. That scenario – SSP1-1.9 – envisaged strong climate action and rapid cuts to emissions, leading to global warming peaking at around 1.5°C.

Because global emissions haven’t yet begun to fall, the most optimistic new pathway would lead to warming peaking at about 1.9°C.

While we will definitely now pass 1.5°C, the hope is to only temporarily overshoot that level of warming while working to draw carbon dioxide back out of the atmosphere to get back to 1.5°C.

Our current emissions trajectory is somewhere in the middle – below the high emissions path but well above the most optimistic scenario. Based on current policies and countries’ actions, we’re looking at around 2.6°C warming by 2100.

You might wonder why we need to keep redoing these climate scenarios.

One reason: facts change on the ground. Solar keeps rolling out far faster than expected, but fracking has opened up large new fossil fuel deposits. Political shifts make climate action more or less likely.

Another is because our climate models are continually improving. The better the models get, the more accurate and detailed our projections of sea level rise and other climate impacts can be.

Yes, this is progress

Taking RCP8.5 off the table is a sign of progress – we’ve avoided the worst-case scenario. But we have also missed the best case future.

The next five years could play out in many different ways, leading to better or worse future climates. We must understand and prepare for what we’re facing – and double down on our efforts to create the best future possible.

Andrew King receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the National Environmental Science Program.