Your Daily Climate Change Briefing

UN General Assembly Affirms Legal Climate Obligations as IPCC Retires Worst-Case Scenario

• The United Nations General Assembly adopted a landmark resolution on Thursday, May 22, 2026, affirming countries' legal obligations to combat climate change, marking a diplomatic victory for Pacific island nations led by Vanuatu. This resolution, which endorses the International Court of Justice's advisory opinion from July 2025, passed with 141 votes in favor, though eight countries including the USA and Russia voted against it.

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• A new study published on May 24, 2026, indicates that climate change is slowing Earth's spin at a rate "unprecedented" in 3.6 million years. This subtle but critical shift, caused by melting polar ice sheets and glaciers redistributing water towards the equator, has implications for the ultra-precise timing required for GPS navigation and spacecraft operations.

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• The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has deemed its most extreme carbon emissions scenario, RCP 8.5, implausible and has retired it, a scenario that previously underpinned thousands of climate research papers. Current policies now project a global temperature rise between 2 and 3 degrees Celsius by the end of the century, with a midpoint around 2.5 to 2.7 degrees, rather than the nearly 5 degrees previously feared, though a potentially strong El Niño in 2026 could still push global temperatures above 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

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