Tag: Climate Compass

11 climate secrets environmental experts aren’t supposed to share, according to former insiders

By Jeff Blaumberg / Climate Compass / February 2, 2026

Carbon Offsets Are a Convenient Fiction

Let’s be real here. Carbon offsets have essentially failed after 25 years of operation, according to research from Oxford and Pennsylvania universities.

The problem is systemic. Only 6% of the total carbon offsets produced by 18 forest protection projects across five tropical countries are actually valid, based on analysis by forest economics researchers.

The reality is far messier. A nine-month investigation into Verra, the leading certifier of voluntary carbon offsets, found that up to 90 percent of its rainforest offsets were worthless.

Previous research has shown how offset programs routinely overestimate their climate impact, in many cases by as much as a factor of ten or more.

Methane Emissions Are Wildly Underreported

Global estimates of total energy-related methane emissions are about 80% higher than the total reported by countries to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. That’s not a small discrepancy.

Satellite technology is finally exposing what industry insiders have long suspected. Satellites were able to detect a sharp increase in very large methane leaks in oil and gas facilities in 2024.

Climate Models Can’t Actually Predict Regional Climate Changes

Climate models correctly simulate global temperature trends, but often underestimate the strength of regional climate fluctuations, especially over the course of decades to centuries. This is a sobering admission from climate scientists themselves.

Even the modelmakers acknowledge that many next-generation climate models have a glaring problem: predicting a future that gets too hot too fast. Researchers are still unable to accurately model cloud systems, which is a fundamental piece of understanding how our climate will actually behave.

Top Climate Scientists Are Skeptical About Meeting
Paris Agreement Goals

A survey of 211 IPCC authors found that most are skeptical that warming will be limited to the Paris targets of well below 2 degrees Celsius. Think about that for a moment.

The very experts writing the reports that guide international climate policy don’t believe the goals are achievable. 5-degree threshold that was supposed to be our safety line.

5 degree Celsius warming threshold, a target scientists say is necessary for keeping some of the worst climate impacts at bay.

Most Plastic Recycling Never Actually Happens

On average, only about 5 to 6 percent of plastic in the United States is recycled. That bears repeating.

All those bottles you carefully sorted? Nearly all of them ended up somewhere other than being recycled into new products.

The oil industry knew all along that recycling the world’s plastic was nearly impossible, but spent decades promoting it through advertising, according to NPR investigations and California state allegations. Recycling increases the toxicity of plastic, as there are hundreds of additional toxic chemicals, including pesticides and pharmaceuticals, in recycled plastic.

Forest Carbon Sinks Are Beginning to Fail

Global land carbon sinks are showing signs of stress as the planet continues to warm, according to recent climate science insights. Forests absorbed far less carbon than usual in 2023 and 2024, a worrying sign for their ability to curb climate change.

The feedback loop nobody wants to talk about has already started. Biodiversity loss and climate change reinforce each other in a destabilizing loop.

When forests can’t absorb carbon as effectively, warming accelerates, which further damages forests, which reduces carbon absorption even more.

The 2023 Temperature Spike Surprised Everyone

Evidence on the drivers behind recent global temperature jumps suggests a possible acceleration of global warming, according to the 2025 climate science report. The director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies wrote that the 2023 temperature anomaly has come out of the blue, revealing an unprecedented knowledge gap.

Consecutive record-breaking monthly temperatures continued well into 2024 for both surface air and sea surface. There’s something happening that our models didn’t predict, and frankly, that’s terrifying.

Aerosol Cleanup Has Been Accelerating Warming

Aerosol emissions and atmospheric loadings have been declining globally, especially in the past two decades, and this is influencing observed climate change via pathways distinct from greenhouse gases. Here’s what they don’t advertise: cleaning up air pollution has a hidden cost.

As countries reduced pollution to improve air quality, we inadvertently removed part of the planet’s sunshade. This isn’t to say air pollution was good – it killed millions through respiratory diseases – but the climate consequences of removing it were rarely discussed publicly.

Groundwater Is Disappearing Faster Than Expected

Climate change is accelerating groundwater depletion, increasing risks to agriculture and urban settlements. Rising temperatures are lowering groundwater levels, vital in many regions for agriculture.

This is the silent crisis lurking beneath the more visible climate disasters.

Roughly about two billion people depend on groundwater for their primary water source.

The combination of increased pumping for agriculture and reduced recharge from changing precipitation patterns creates a perfect storm.

Climate-Driven Disease Is Already Spreading

Climate change is fueling the spread of mosquito-borne diseases such as dengue fever, as higher temperatures expand the insect’s habitat and create better conditions for mosquitoes.

This isn’t some distant future scenario.

It’s happening right now. The findings are a stark reminder that no one is immune to the impacts of climate change – its consequences are global, interconnected, and already at our doorstep.

Many Climate Solutions Have Hidden Environmental Costs

Despite efforts to implement safeguards, carbon offset projects continue to face documented cases of weak accountability, risking the perpetuation of neocolonial patterns of appropriation. The uncomfortable truth is that many climate solutions benefit wealthy countries and corporations while extracting resources and labor from vulnerable communities.

The push for critical minerals to build renewable energy infrastructure creates similar problems. Mining lithium, cobalt, and rare earth elements devastates local ecosystems and communities, often in countries with weak environmental regulations.

What becomes clear from these revelations is that the climate crisis is far more complex than public messaging suggests. The gap between what experts know privately and what gets communicated publicly has grown dangerously wide.

We’ve built our response on systems that don’t work as advertised, predictions that keep proving inadequate, and solutions that sometimes create new problems. That doesn’t mean we should give up – quite the opposite.

It means we need radical honesty about what’s actually happening and what needs to change if we’re serious about addressing this crisis before it’s too late.

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