Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all.
While CDR Twitter argued about Microsoft’s procurement pause and Verra methodology fights, climate scientists were having a louder week. The physical signal got worse, the political ceiling got higher, and the people who study this for a living are not whispering. Here is what they said.
“The new ‘Indicators of Global Climate Change 2025’ preprint (Forster et al.) shows a tripling of Earth’s Energy Imbalance relative to 1976-1995, using a IPCC AR6 methodology!”
- Leon Simons (@leonsimons.com on Bluesky), reacting to the Indicators of Global Climate Change 2025 preprint. The planet is accumulating heat roughly three times faster than the late 20th century baseline. Every integrated assessment model that produced the carbon budgets your CDR pathway is built on assumed a slower number.
“🚨BREAKING🚨 The most recent RELATIVE Oceanic Niño Index (RONI) forecast shows we could be facing the strongest El Niño in observed history!! This could lead to dystopian global climate change impacts over the next 1.5 years. No one is prepared.”
- Leon Simons again, on the same week’s RONI update. If the forecast holds, the next 18 months compress the timeline that CDR buyers, project developers, and verifiers casually assume they have. Procurement cycles run in years. Heatwaves don’t wait.
“[The Santa Marta synthesis report] has 12 ‘action insights’ and recommends that nations ‘halt all new expansion’.”
- Daisy Dunne (@daisydunne.carbonbrief.org on Bluesky), reporting on the 24-scientist synthesis compiled for Colombia’s fossil-phaseout summit. This is the framing CDR sits inside, not above. Removal is for residual emissions from genuinely hard-to-abate sectors. It is not a permission slip to keep drilling.
“More than 50 countries—including LNG producers like Nigeria—will gather to figure out how to transition the world AWAY from oil, gas and coal—the primary driver of climate change.”
- Julia Simon (@juliaradio.bsky.social on Bluesky), previewing the first intergovernmental conference on phasing out fossil fuels. Producer-country participation matters. The political ceiling for CDR demand gets set in Santa Marta, not at corporate buyer summits in Redmond or New York.
“This is an interesting question. One possible answer is: climate change destroyed them.”
- Andrew Dessler (@andrewdessler.com on Bluesky), riffing darkly on the Fermi Paradox the same week Forster’s preprint dropped. Climate scientists are not in a measured mood, and the overshoot-and-drawdown logic that makes durable CDR non-optional only works if peak warming is bounded by aggressive emission cuts now.
The chorus is consistent. The heat budget tripled. The next El Niño could break records. Fifty governments are meeting on phaseout. The scientists synthesizing all of it are recommending nations halt new fossil expansion. If you work in CDR, your procurement debates are real but parochial. The frame your buyers and regulators will use over the next 18 months is being written in Santa Marta and in papers like Forster et al. Position your project as part of a phaseout. Not a parallel track, and definitely not a substitute.