The race to give nuclear fusion a role in the climate emergency

Power from fusion has proved too hard to generate at scale. Can recent breakthroughs and massive investment change that?

By Arthur Turrell

hysicist Vaughn Draggoo inspects the target chamber during its construction at the National Ignition Facility in Livermore, California, October 2001. Photograph: Joe McNally/Getty Images

 

On 8 August 2021, a laser-initiated experiment at the United States National Ignition Facility (NIF), based at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, made a significant breakthrough in reproducing the power source of the stars, smashing its own 2018 record for energy released from nuclear fusion reactions 23 times over. This advance saw 70% of the laser energy put in released as nuclear energy. A pulse of light, focused to tiny spots within a 10-metre diameter vacuum chamber, triggered the collapse of a capsule of fuel from roughly the size of the pupil in your eye to the diameter of a human hair. This implosion created the extreme conditions of temperature and pressure needed for atoms of hydrogen to combine into new atoms and release, kilogram for kilogram, 10m times the energy that would result from burning coal.

The result is tantalisingly close to a demonstration of “net energy gain”, the long sought-after goal of fusion scientists in which an amount greater than 100% of the energy put into a fusion experiment comes out as nuclear energy. The aim of these experiments is – for now – to show proof of principle only: that energy can be generated. The team behind the success are very close to achieving this: they have managed a more than 1,000-fold improvement in energy release between 2011 and today. Prof Jeremy Chittenden, co-director of the Centre for Inertial Fusion Studies at Imperial College London, said last month that “The pace of improvement in energy output has been rapid, suggesting we may soon reach more energy milestones, such as exceeding the energy input from the lasers used to kickstart the process.”

If you’re not familiar with nuclear fusion, it’s different from its cousin, nuclear fission, which powers today’s nuclear plants by taking big, unstable atoms and splitting them. Fusion takes small atoms and combines them to forge larger atoms. It is the universe’s ubiquitous power source: it’s what causes the sun and stars to shine, and it’s the reaction that created most of the atoms we are made of.

Scientists have long been excited about fusion because it doesn’t produce carbon dioxide or long-lived radioactive waste, since the fuel it requires – two types of hydrogen known as deuterium and tritium – is plentiful enough to last for at least thousands of years, and because there is zero chance of meltdown. Unlike renewables such as wind and solar power, plants based on fusion would also take up little space compared with the power they would be able to generate.

The Tokamak of the Joint European Torus (Jet) at the Culham Science Centre – which will soon to attempt to produce the largest amount of fusion energy so far. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

However, because the NIF’s breakthrough is about demonstrating the principle only, the total amount of energy generated is not very impressive; it’s only just enough to boil a kettle. Nor does the gain measurement account for the energy used to run the facility, just what’s in the laser pulse. Despite this, it is nevertheless a landmark moment in the decades-long quest to produce fusion energy and use it to power the planet – which is, perhaps, the greatest scientific and technological challenge humanity has ever undertaken.

Although the experiment may have happened in a vacuum, NIF’s advance has not, and the pace of progress in fusion may surprise some long-time sceptics. Even Dr Mark Herrmann, head of the NIF’s fusion programme, says the latest development was “a surprise to everyone”. Many recent advances have been made with a different type of fusion device, the tokamak: a doughnut-shaped machine that uses a tube of magnetic fields to confine its fuel for as long as possible. China’s Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (East) set another world record in May by keeping fuel stable for 100 seconds at a temperature of 120m degrees celsius – eight times hotter than the sun’s core. The world’s largest ever magnetic fusion machine, Iter, is under construction in the south of France and many experts think it will have the scale needed to reach net energy gain. The UK-based Joint European Torus (Jet), which holds the current magnetic fusion record for power of 67%, is about to attempt to produce the largest total amount of energy of any fusion machine in history. Alternative designs are also being explored: the UK government has announced plans for an advanced tokamak with an innovative spherical geometry, and “stellarators”, a type of fusion device that had been consigned to the history books, are enjoying a revival having been enabled by new technologies such as superconducting magnets.

For now, publicly funded labs are producing results a long way ahead of the private firms – but this could change

This is a lot of progress, but it’s not even the biggest change: that would be the emergence of private sector fusion firms. The recently formed Fusion Industry Association estimates that more than $2bn of investment has flooded into fusion startups. The construction of experimental reactors by these firms is proceeding at a phenomenal rate: Commonwealth Fusion Systems, which has its origins in MIT research, has begun building a demonstration reactor in Massachusetts; TAE Technologies has just raised $280m to build its next device; and Canadian-based General Fusion has opted to house its new $400m plant in the UK. This will be constructed in Oxfordshire, an emerging hotspot for the industry that is home to private ventures First Light Fusion and Tokamak Energy as well as the publicly funded Jet and Mast (Mega Amp Spherical Tokamak) Upgrade devices run by the UK Atomic Energy Authority.

Some of the investors in these firms have deep pockets: Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, Lockheed Martin, Goldman Sachs, Legal & General, and Chevron have all financed enterprises pursuing this new nuclear power source. For now, publicly funded labs are producing results a long way ahead of the private firms – but this could change.

With such progress, interest, and investment – and net energy gain perhaps just one or two more improvements away – perhaps it’s time to retire the old joke, so cliched it has been banned by editors at the Economist, that “fusion is 30 years away… and always will be”.

Junior UK science minister Amanda Solloway and Nick Hawker, CEO of First LIght Fusion, inspecting the company’s £1.1m “Big Gun” device, which the Oxfordshire firm hopes will help them achieve fusion and deliver clean energy. Photograph: Matt Alexander/PA

But it does depend on what we mean by “fusion” in that context; the scientists and their backers are now focusing on the bigger objective of fusion as a viable power source like fission, solar or wind. This requires far more than just “breakeven” in energy: a functioning fusion power plant would probably need at least 30 times the energy out for energy put in. However, scaling up the gain in energy is but one difficulty in making fusion a viable power source. A commercial reactor will have to solve several tricky engineering problems such as extracting the heat energy and finding materials that will withstand the relentless bombardment the reactor chamber will receive over its lifetime. Fusion reactors must also be self-sufficient in tritium, one of the two types of hydrogen that are fed in as fuel. For this, it is necessary to surround the reactor chamber with lithium because its atoms are converted to tritium when struck by the most energetic products of fusion – and this process has yet to be demonstrated at scale.

Those pursuing fusion have long known of the obstacles, but – with limited resources – achieving the immediate goal of gain has been a bigger priority. That’s beginning to change as fusion scientists and engineers look beyond scientific proof of principle. Around the world, several recently opened facilities are dedicated to solving these problems and, although they’re not trivial, everyone in fusion is confident that the obstacles can be overcome: progress depends on investment and will.

To find examples of how these two factors can be transformative, look no further than the pandemic. A sudden shot of both investment and motivation transformed the use of mRNA to fight disease from a wild idea to an accepted technology in the form of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. Katalin Karikó, whose foundational work on mRNA has been key to the success of the technology, had the will to persevere for many years with little recognition and even less funding. Her dedication, and that of her colleagues, combined with a massive investment in development, testing and deployment is what enabled the vaccines to be ready in record time. The world wanted this, and we made it happen.

Global heating has made the need to turn carbon-free fusion energy into a usable power source ever more urgent. The world’s response thus far has been lackadaisical: it’s 2021 and more than 80% of global primary energy consumption still comes from coal, oil and gas. Fossil fuel consumption actually increased between 2009 and 2019 (though it fell in 2020 as most of the world locked down to help prevent the spread of Covid-19). While progress to date has been slow, most nations have pledged to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. Dr Ajay Gambhir, a senior policy research fellow at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change, Imperial College London, says most electricity generation needs to come from near-zero carbon sources as soon as 2030 in order to achieve this. Dr Michael Bluck, also of the Grantham Institute, expresses serious doubts that commercial fusion energy will be ready in time, saying that it is “very difficult to see this [conventional tokamaks] happening until after 2050” and that laser fusion has “another 50 years to go, if at all”.

Construction of the magnetic Tokamak of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (Iter) in south-eastern France. The project is a collaboration between 35 countries. Photograph: Clement Mahoudeau/AFP/Getty Images

Those working in fusion do recognise that time is of the essence, and it’s part of what is motivating the recent acceleration. The startups’ vision necessarily sees fusion power being deployed at an unprecedented rate. “If we want to contribute to net zero by 2050 we need to be building plants, multiple, in the 2040s,” Nick Hawker, CEO of First Light Fusion, tells me. And who says the fusion firms couldn’t do it with the right tailwind? We would never have believed that a vaccine, let alone the first mRNA vaccine, could be developed and approved within a year instead of over decades.

The scale of the climate challenge is so immense that we need to throw the kitchen sink at it. That means renewables, fission, energy storage, carbon capture, and any other lifeline humanity can grab. If the world doesn’t have the will to at least try to deploy fusion energy too, it would be a missed opportunity. Fusion could afford people in developing countries the same energy consumption opportunities as people in developed nations enjoy today – rather than the global cutbacks that may be necessary otherwise. And we are likely to need fusion well beyond 2050, too: as a source of large-scale power to extract the carbon dioxide we’ve already put into the atmosphere, and because it’s the only feasible way we can explore space beyond Earth’s immediate vicinity.

Whether commercial fusion energy is ready in time to help with global warming or not depends on us as a society and how badly we want – no, need – star power on our side.

A nation again: Independence can bring peace to a troubled island

 

By Gerry Singh

 

Independence for Scotland and England can bring peace to a troubled island

 

I RECENTLY drove south on the M74 heading to the Lake District, that beautiful part of Cumbria, to do some walking in the hills and stroll by the lakeshore of Ullswater.

I imagined approaching the border sign that said “Welcome to England where all the power lies” and suddenly felt ­diminished. After a week of excellent walking I drove back north and imagined a sign that said “Welcome to Scotland where your vote doesn’t count” and felt a sinking feeling of inferiority.

Then I thought: what must it be like to wake up in a country where self-determination was as ­natural as rainfall or sunlight, whether you are English or ­Scottish? It was then that my heart soared. Not just for myself. But for all of the people of these islands who surely have the right to take whatever path up the hill they choose, and not have to feel separate.

Here are some words I don’t like: Nationalism, ­Unionism, Separatist and Imperialism.

It seems to me that a binary choice between holding the British state together at all costs and shouting for independence from the rooftops is a false dichotomy.

Scotland and England will always be one land mass and it is becoming increasingly obvious that self-determination is the desire of both countries. If the people want that then they should not be frustrated by politicians clinging to a historical idea whose time is simply running out. History shows that all empires fail in the end and that new beginnings like green shoots will emerge just as the sun shines brighter ­after the rain.

In this year, 2021AD, we are the luckiest people to live on an island where we can make history in a peaceful and mature way and allow a transition to ­occur that is in the best interests of all without conflict, violence, bloodshed or bitterness, which so many other peoples around the world have had to suffer in their efforts towards self-determination.

Scotland and England are mature democracies with an abundance of wealth in resources, people and invention. We are rich beyond the dreams of many poorer countries and it must be our humane duty to attempt to distribute that wealth a little more fairly.

I can imagine an English parliament for England, a Scottish parliament for Scotland and a Welsh parliament for Wales without one dominating the others.

This does not have to be seen as a loss of identity but rather a reinforcement of identity. If you feel ­British rather than Scottish that does not have to change. Just as Sweden, Norway and Denmark are independent countries under the overarching name of Scandinavia. It is what you feel, not what is imposed upon you, that is real. You cannot force a British identity on people who do not feel it. Flag-waving only antagonises and causes division and its overtones are sinister. We have to seek to be more enlightened than that.

I believe at this point in our shared history that an independent England is just as important a part of a new dispensation as an independent Scotland. We cannot afford to let the uglier aspects of nationalism that Brexit has unleashed flourish because of a ­perceived enemy as the SNP are currently portrayed in the media. As Bob Dylan wrote, “the darkest night is just before the dawn”. I think that the present Tory government are in danger of taking us all into a very dark place no matter where you live in Britain.

The truth is that Scotland is and always will be an independent country. All we are looking for is to have that ratified and written into a ­constitution that legalises the concept of self-determination and self-government. The same rule should apply to England and Wales. Ireland is a more complex problem for obvious historical reasons – partition having created a particular ­difficulty to overcome.

If Scotland had the power to ­completely govern itself, just think what a legacy of enhanced self-esteem we would be ­handing over to our children and grandchildren. Self-esteem and self-worth are not side issues, or subordinate to ­economic ­considerations, but are ­absolutely ­integral in establishing a culture of agency and self-belief that does not depend on being in opposition to a larger neighbour that for too long has reflected back at us a ­stereotype of ourselves as dependent and in need of subsidies. We could finally ditch the term “Auld Enemy” and start to view our neighbour as a friend.

 

IF the British state as it is currently behaving under the present government was a marriage, it would represent one of coercive control where psychological bullying and put-downs are the most obvious example of this abusive relationship, followed by love-bombing to win us back. These are classic features of domestic abuse when one partner seeks to control and disempower the other. Just as domestic abuse is now widely accepted as a crime and can be more subtle than raising a fist, nations can also be guilty of engaging in similar practices.

As a people we have to unlock the mind-forged manacles that keep us ­captive in an unhealthy relationship for fear of ­reprisal that came at us under the guise of Project Fear.

Scotland running its own affairs has never been about narrow ­nationalism. I am mixed race and I was born in ­Glasgow. My father, who I lost before I was two years old, was Indian. My ­mother was white Scottish with Irish ancestry. ­Unable to care for me when my father deserted us, she put me into a children’s home the day after my second birthday. She never came back.

Why do I mention such personal ­trauma in an essay about Scottish ­independence? Maybe it is because I ­believe nations can suffer similar traumas that keep them from acting confidently in their own ­interests. The Highland Clearances are an obvious wound to the psyche, as was forced migration. The decimation of heavy industry in the Thatcher era was another. The inequalities that have been deliberately orchestrated have made food banks a normal fact of life – a situation that should be completely unacceptable in any civilised country as rich as we are. It doesn’t have to be this way.

India gained its independence after 200 years of colonial rule that robbed that country blind. My lost father was a victim of the partition of India that cost the lives of a million people and left tens of ­millions displaced. India is now an ­economic powerhouse. They had grown used to accepting imperial rule and all the propaganda that came with it that classed the Indian as somehow less able than a British person. It was not true then and it is not true now.

Crowds at New Delhi watching a motorcade on Indian Independence Day

As someone who was orphaned at an early age and suffered my share of racial abuse I have a country that has looked after me in adulthood. With one hand tied behind its back, Scotland gave me an excellent education, despite failing at school because of adverse childhood ­experiences. I went to university and taught some of the most disadvantaged children in a poor catchment area. It shocked me to see how pervasive poverty was and still is. With full powers I truly believe that Scotland can do better than this.

READ MORE: Sikhs worldwide to take part in referendum on Punjab independence

The British state is now ­dominated by two parties slavishly beholden to ­unrestrained market forces and ­privatisation. I do not believe that the ­majority of people in these islands signed up for that.

What Scotland wants is social ­democratic accountability and ­proportional representation. We already have the latter in the bag.

I want to live in a country where the people are sovereign and where the economy and land use will one day reflect the needs of all of its people so that the scourge of generations of poverty may at last have a chance of being eradicated. I am not looking for or expecting to see some utopian society suddenly ­emerging, but what I think we all have a right to ­expect is that politics serves the many and not the few.

I think that without self-government Scotland and England will together be ­diminished and it is the poorest in ­society who will pay the price. I think that we all have to rise above our own perceived ­economic interests, especially if we ­happen to be doing OK. The reality is that if we do not then it is future generations who will suffer as the obscene levels of wealth being amassed by a few individuals further erode civilised values.

Think not of yourself, but look to your grandchildren and imagine what future they might have on a planet slowly sinking into a climate emergency, while the super-rich continue sunning themselves on their $20 million yachts. The status quo is not an option. Nothing worth ­having comes easy. Not in my wildest dreams did I ever expect to go to ­university, but I did. Sacrifices had to be made. I washed pots and pans in a very hot hotel kitchen for two years while studying to get the grades necessary.

Of course there will be hurdles to overcome in reaching any worthwhile goal. One of the first hurdles may well be changing your mind. We all cling on to the beliefs that have served us well up to now and there is no doubting the ­reality of tribal loyalties in terms of for and against any big issue of the day.

Maybe for the first time in your life you are thinking of voting in a way that you could not have imagined a few years ago. Changing your mind requires an act of courage, and to visualise something good in what had previously been considered to be misguided can be an uplifting ­experience.

 

Instead of a mythical Union ­symbolised by a flag that is trumpeted by Brexiteers, who paradoxically despise the ­European Union, we could have a real union of ­people living together as friends and ­family just as we have always done. The difference being that the political path of Scotland and England will be determined by the people and not by elites making policy in their own interests with little concern for the population.

ONE of the greatest leaps of imagination to arise out of the suffering of the Second World War was the creation of the National Health Service. Much of the medical profession was against it at the time. Now that same profession is trying to save it. How vital that institution has been during this pandemic. Yet there are dark forces, if the political status quo remains, who are working tirelessly to dismantle and destroy it in order to open it up to further privatisation to amass more profits for the already wealthy at the expense of the rest of us. If that happens it will be a tragedy and a deliberate attack on civilised values and would render the term “British values” redundant because there will be no such thing.

The NHS saved my life. I had a heart attack in my mid-40s and thought that my number was up. Complete strangers ­dedicated to saving my life did just that. There was no charge. It was free at the point of delivery.

As an orphan boy I am here today ­because of humane public services like free education and health care. Isn’t that something worth changing your mind for?

A vote for independence and we will all be free at the point of delivery. Not only that, but your grandchildren will be proud of you for “screwing your courage to the sticking place”.

Nobody can predict the future. All we have to go on is our experience of the past and ask ourselves: How can I help create a better world for future generations? And in attempting to create that better world, wouldn’t you rather have the ­power in your own hands?

When Scotland does become self-governing, I hope to be around to once again drive down the M74 over an ­invisible border and follow that thread of tarmac back into the Cumbrian hills in that beautiful part of England. Nothing will have changed. Yet everything will have. I will imagine a sign saying “Welcome to England, Old Friend”, and when I gaze out from the hilltops, having persevered through wind and rain, the view of the lake will stun me with its grace and ­beauty. Standing there on the highest peak I will imagine returning north and a new sign will greet me with the words “Welcome to Scotland, Welcome Home”.

Culture shock: how loss of animals’ shared knowledge threatens their survival

 

From whales to monkeys, elephants and even fruit flies, researchers say they are starting to understand animal culture just ‘as it disappears before our eyes’

Mating North Atlantic right whales in the Bay of Fundy, New Brunswick, Canada. Whales are among the many animals known to be highly cultural. Photograph: All Canada Photos/Alamy

At the peak of the whaling industry, in the late 1800s, North Atlantic right whales were slaughtered in their thousands. With each carcass hauled on to the deck, whalers were taking more than just bones and flesh out of the ocean. The slaughtered whales had unique memories of feeding grounds, hunting techniques and communication styles; knowledge acquired over centuries, passed down through the generations, and shared between peers. The critically endangered whale clings on, but much of the species’ cultural knowledge is now extinct.

Whales are among the many animals known to be highly cultural, says Prof Hal Whitehead, a marine biologist at Dalhousie University. “Culture is what individuals learn from each other, so that a bunch of individuals behave in a similar way,” he says.

If you remove individuals who have knowledge, through hunting for example, that can have a much wider knock-on effect

Philippa Brakes, Whale and Dolphin Conservation

North Atlantic right whales are no longer found in many of their ancestral feeding grounds. Whitehead suspects this may be because the cultural knowledge of these places was lost when populations were wiped out by whaling. This loss could spell trouble for the species if human activity degrades their remaining feeding grounds, making it hard for the whales to predict where good hunting is. “The more possible feeding grounds they have, the more likely they are to find somewhere they can get the food they need,” he says.

Animal culture is not limited to the ocean. Birds, bees, naked mole-rats, fish and even fruit flies are among those that have been found to learn socially and create cultures. As the list grows, researchers are starting to understand animal culture as critical to many conservation efforts.

The disappearance of North Atlantic right whales from many of their ancestral feeding grounds may be because the cultural knowledge of these places was wiped out by whaling. Photograph: Nick Hawkins/NPL/Alamy

Whitehead was an early voice calling for animal culture to be taken seriously in conservation. This is because cultural diversity gives a species a larger behavioural toolkit when facing new challenges, he argues. “We recognise this with humans, that the diversity of our cultures is a strength.”
Whitehead is a member of the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada, a body that decides which species are endangered. “The most difficult thing we do is to decide how to divide a population of a species up,” he says. With caribou, for example, plains caribou are doing better than mountain caribou. “Do we assess the mountain caribou differently from the others?” Whitehead asks.

Typically, this decision is made by assessing how genetically different the groups are. “One of the things I’ve been pushing is the idea that cultural information is also important.”

Young mountain caribou in Stone Mountain provincial park, British Columbia, Canada. Photograph: Pierre Longnus/Getty Images

Conservation efforts aim to maintain a species’ diversity, as diversity aids survival. Species diversity can be “what it does, how it looks, its physiology and so on”, says Whitehead. “A lot [of the diversity] is genetically determined but some of it is culturally determined.”
The behaviours a population displays can have a significant impact on the environment they live in. “If we lost all the mountain caribou, it might change the ecology of a bunch of mountain tops,” says Whitehead.

Whitehead’s research into whale culture provided a lightbulb moment for Philippa Brakes, a research fellow at Whale and Dolphin Conservation. Brakes, a PhD student at the University of Exeter, published a paper with colleagues in April, which argues that conservation efforts should consider how culture affects reproduction, dispersal and survivorship.
Understanding who holds cultural knowledge in a population can be key, says Brakes, who cites African elephant herds as an example. “The age of the matriarch in the herd has a significant [positive] influence on the fertility rate of the younger females,” she says. “The [matriarch] female’s experience of where water holes are, where good foraging is, and also which other social units are friendly has a demonstrable knock-on effect on the fertility rate of the younger females in her herd.
“If you remove individuals who have knowledge, through hunting for example, that can have a much wider knock-on effect than just minus one from your population.”

Elephants troop to a water hole at the Amboseli national reserve in Kenya. The experience of the matriarch in a herd boosts the fertility rate of the younger females. Photograph: Tony Karumba/AFP/Getty Images

However, when a population has lost its cultural knowledge, there may be circumstances where it can be reignited.

If a human was removed from their home, stripped of everything they had ever learned from others and then plonked back, they would not survive long without support. The same seems to be true for golden lion tamarins, a small monkey from Brazil.

Knowledge of medicinal plants at risk as languages die out

 

By the early 1970s, habitat destruction and the pet trade had reduced the golden lion tamarin population to as few as 200 individuals. Captive breeding, overseen by 43 institutions in eight countries, increased their numbers to the point that conservationists were able to reintroduce the tamarins into the wild from 1984. But initially, the reintroduced tamarins had a low survival rate, with problems with adaptation to the new environment causing the majority of losses. High casualties are typical of such efforts, says Brakes.

So the tamarin researchers developed an intensive post-release programme, including supplementary feeding and the provision of nest sites, giving the monkeys time to learn necessary survival skills for the jungle. This helping hand doubled survival rates, which was a good start. However, it was not until the next generation that the species began to thrive. “By giving them the opportunity to learn individually in the wild and share that knowledge, the next generation of tamarins had a survival rate of 70%, which is just amazing,” says Brakes. The intensive conservation efforts paid off, and in 2003 the golden lion tamarin was upgraded from critically endangered to endangered.

The survival rate of golden lion tamarins released into the wild improved as later generations benefited from survival skills learned by their elders. Photograph: Andreia Martins/AP

Although this research is promising, animal cultures are becoming extinct faster than they are being reignited, says Brakes.

“We are just starting to understand what culture is in other species and just starting to develop methods for measuring and analysing culture, as we are seeing it disappear before our eyes.”

World’s climate scientists to issue stark warning over global heating threat

 

IPCC’s landmark report will be most comprehensive assessment yet as governments prepare for pivotal UN talks in November

Emergency services try to extinguish a wildfire last week in northern Athens, Greece. Photograph: Eurokinissi/Rex/Shutterstock

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The fires, floods and extreme weather seen around the world in recent months are just a foretaste of what can be expected if global heating takes hold, scientists say, as the world’s leading authority on climate change prepares to warn of an imminent and dire risk to the global climate system.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will on Monday publish a landmark report, the most comprehensive assessment yet, less than three months before vital UN talks that will determine the future course of life on Earth.

Policymakers have already previewed the findings, finalised on Saturday night, which have been the subject of an intense two weeks of online discussion by experts around the world, and represent eight years of work by leading scientists.

Doug Parr, policy director at Greenpeace UK, said governments must take heed of the warnings. “Practical, funded and deliverable plans [by governments] to keep us below the supposedly safe limits [of heating] are almost non-existent. Urgent climate action was needed decades ago – now we’re almost out of time. The UK government has a huge responsibility as host of the UN climate talks to ensure world leaders sign up to policies that not just put the brakes on the climate crisis, but slam it into reverse.”

The IPCC, made up of hundreds of the world’s foremost climate scientists, publishes comprehensive assessments about every seven years, with this report the sixth since 1988. This one will be different, however: previous work has shown that the 2020s are a crucial decade, in which greenhouse gas emissions must be halved in order to limit heating to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, established by previous IPCC reports as the threshold of safety, and the lower of two goals in the 2015 Paris agreement.

Michael Mann, distinguished professor of atmospheric science at Pennsylvania State University, said this would be the last IPCC assessment that can make a real difference in policy terms, before we exceed 1.5C and the ambitions of the Paris agreement.

“Climate change is now causing amplified weather extremes of the sort we’ve been witnessing this summer – droughts, heatwaves, wildfires, floods, superstorms,” he said. “The impacts of climate change are no longer subtle. We see them playing out in real time in the form of these unprecedented extreme weather disasters.”

In recent months there have been fires in the US, heatwaves in northern latitudes, and devastating floods in China and Europe. Scientists warn that this may become the norm unless climate breakdown can be stopped.

Simon Lewis, professor of global change science at University College London, said: “The observations this summer show that some impacts [predicted in previous IPCC assessments of the climate] seem to be underestimated, but we can’t know if the devastation of summer 2021 is the new normal without a few more years’ data. But what we do know is if emissions continue to rise, then increasingly severe climate impacts will occur.”

He warned that the consequences would be severe. “What we need to keep in mind is that we all live in places that have built up over decades and centuries to cope well with a given climate. The really, really scary thing about the climate crisis is that every single achievement of every human society on Earth occurred under a climate that no longer exists,” he said. “The pressure is on for world leaders to agree both detailed and achievable plans to cut emissions now, and plans to adapt to climate impacts, when they meet in Glasgow in November.”

This year’s weather observations are not included in the IPCC report, which draws on science published in peer-review journals before this year, and since its last comprehensive report in 2013. Mann said: “This is also a limitation. The IPCC reports always seem to be playing catch-up with what we’re witnessing on the ground. Our own work suggests that the models upon which [most IPCC projections] are made still aren’t quite capturing some of the mechanisms that are important here.”

Extreme weather this year has also shown how vital it is that countries and communities around the world take steps to cope with the impacts, said Richard Betts, professor of climate impacts at Exeter University, and head of climate impacts research at the Met Office. “We now need to live with the consequences of what we have already done to the climate. We are hopelessly unprepared to deal with increasingly severe extreme weather events, even though these have been predicted by science for decades.”

Alongside this effort, we should be cutting emissions much faster, he added. “We need to take urgent action on reducing emissions if we want to stop this getting much worse,” said Betts. “The longer it takes to bring this increase [in the buildup of CO2 in the atmosphere], the greater the severity of climate change we will be stuck with.”

Alok Sharma, the UK minister who will preside over the UN’s Cop26 climate talks, to be held in Glasgow this November, said on Saturday: “This is going to be the starkest warning yet that human behaviour is alarmingly accelerating global warming and this is why Cop26 has to be the moment we get this right. We can’t afford to wait two years, five years, 10 years – this is the moment. [The consequences of failure would be] catastrophic – I don’t think there’s any other word for it.”

Rachel Kennerley, international climate campaigner at Friends of the Earth, said: “The world’s climate scientists are set to issue a stark warning that cannot be ignored. The international community must rapidly deliver the speed and scale of the action required to avoid catastrophic climate change. It’s time to end our reliance on dirty gas, coal and oil, and invest in green jobs and building the zero-carbon future we so urgently need.”

He is one of only 39 detainees left at Guantanamo. Once tortured, prisoner’s case is a test of larger political realities at play.

(CNN)Nearly two decades ago, in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks, a man named Mohammed al-Qahtani was captured on the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The Saudi national, US authorities alleged, was an al-Qaeda operative who was supposed to have been the “20th hijacker” but he failed to board United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed in rural Pennsylvania.

After his capture, al-Qahtani was imprisoned, tortured by the US government and — when charges against him were dropped in 2008 — left to languish behind bars with no end in sight.

Today, he sits in an isolated cell at Camp 6 in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where he is one of only 39 detainees left in a facility that once housed approximately 680 so-called enemy combatants, a Department of Defense spokesperson confirmed to CNN. His attorneys have waged a protracted legal battle for al-Qahtani’s repatriation to Saudi Arabia.

His quest for freedom is forcing the Biden administration to consider whether to release the 45-year-old man whose attorneys say is severely mentally ill battling schizophrenia, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of his torture or seek to hold him indefinitely without charging him with a crime.

Al-Qahtani’s case, experts say, stands as a litmus test for whether President Joe Biden is committed to his pledge to shutter the controversial facility — an enduring symbol of the George W. Bush administration’s global “war on terror” that persisted through the Barack Obama and Donald Trump presidencies. And, they say, the case has troubling implications for the humane treatment of other prisoners of war, including any US servicemembers who may be captured in future conflicts.

The challenge facing the Biden administration’s legal team is how to balance the merits of al-Qahtani’s case with the larger political realities at play, said Stephen I. Vladeck, a professor at the University of Texas School of Law who follows Guantanamo litigation. While there will be those who urge the President to side with the severely mentally ill detainee as part of the process of closing down Guantanamo, said Vladeck, others within the White House may advise Biden to consider the political drawbacks of any decision that may help set free a man who allegedly aspired to take part in the worst terrorist attack on US soil.

“As much as the administration may wish to show compassion toward al-Qahtani, any broader effort to effectuate his release and that of the other 38 men still in detention there would require political capital that the administration is either unable or unwilling to spend,” said Vladeck, who is a CNN legal analyst.

Efforts to keep al-Qahtani in custody, however, have their own potential downsides. Biden has staked his foreign policy agenda on improving relations with US allies and changing America’s image abroad. He has sold his decisions to end combat missions in Afghanistan and Iraq as moving the country forward from the perpetual “war on terror” footing it has operated on for nearly two decades. Keeping al-Qahtani in custody and Guantanamo open would not align with those stated goals, said Eric M. Freedman, a professor of constitutional law at Hofstra University who has long been critical of detentions at Guantanamo.

“The saga of this individual clearly exemplifies the layer upon layer of outrage that the entire Guantanamo venture has represented since its inception,” Freedman said. “If President Biden wants to adhere to his campaign promises to bring America back, freeing this man would be an excellent place to start.”

Mental illness, extremism and capture

The Pakistani army captured al-Qahtani in December 2001 as he traveled with other suspected al-Qaeda fighters from remote Tora Bora in eastern Afghanistan to cross into Pakistan.

Al-Qahtani’s long history of mental illness began at age eight when he was in a serious car accident and thrown from the vehicle, suffering a traumatic brain injury, according to Dr. Emily Keram, a court-appointed psychiatrist hired at the request of defense attorneys to evaluate their client. Keram, who reviewed al-Qahtani’s Saudi medical records, said the injury impaired his ability to read and concentrate, which worsened with two more car accidents in later years.

In the years that followed, al-Qahtani experienced “episodes of extreme behavioral dyscontrol,” according to Keram, who has interviewed al-Qahtani multiple times, including during two trips to Guantanamo Bay, since 2015. She also interviewed an older brother of al-Qahtani, one of 12 children in his family.

At some point in his early 20s, al-Qahtani was found by Riyadh police naked in a garbage dumpster, Keram noted in her report. A few years later, police in the holy city of Mecca arrested al-Qahtani after he hurled himself into oncoming traffic, Keram said.

That incident resulted in his involuntary commitment to the psychiatric unit of the city’s King Abdul Aziz Hospital for four days where doctors determined he was delusional and suicidal, according to Keram, who also said he suffered from schizophrenia prior to entering US custody.

Six months after leaving King Abdul Aziz Hospital, al-Qahtani started embracing a more extreme version of Islam and later attended an al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan, US authorities allege.

Al-Qahtani’s “psychological and cognitive deficits would be recognized by others, leading him to be vulnerable to manipulation and coercion,” Keram wrote in a June 2016 assessment of al-Qahtani.

At the camp, according to US military records, al-Qahtani met al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and swore his loyalty to him. Bin Laden personally selected him to take part in the 9/11 attacks, the records claim.

On August 4, 2001, al-Qahtani landed in Orlando, Florida, with a one-way ticket and $4,000 in cash, which made immigration officials suspicious. They questioned him for 90 minutes before sending him back to Dubai. While military records allege that he was in Orlando to meet al-Qaeda member Mohamed Atta, one of the September 11 hijackers, they also note that al-Qahtani later told interrogators he didn’t know the purpose of the meet up. By the end of that month, al-Qahtani had returned to Afghanistan.

Weeks later, in the wake of the September 11 attacks, the Bush administration embarked on a global manhunt to find the perpetrators that extended to the far reaches of Afghanistan’s remote eastern frontier.

In December, as al-Qahtani traveled with other suspected al-Qaeda fighters from remote Tora Bora in eastern Afghanistan to cross into Pakistan, he was captured by the Pakistani army at the border and transferred to US custody roughly two weeks later, military records show.

Washington moved al-Qahtani to Guantanamo Bay on February 13, 2002, one of the first wave of detainees that arrived at the new facility.

He became known as Detainee 063.

Military dogs, strangling and beatings

Mohammed al-Qahtani, known as Detainee 063, was tortured over a roughly 50-day period between November 2002 and January 2003 at Camp X-Ray in the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp.

For approximately 39 hours in May 2015, Keram met with al‐Qahtani in a bare interrogation room at Camp Echo, a former CIA black site in the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp.

She was there to evaluate the overall state of his mental health after more than 13 years of detention and whether he was receiving adequate medical and psychiatric care.

When their conversations turned to his torture at Guantanamo, al-Qahtani often wept as he relived the ordeal.

According to the government’s interrogation logs, which describe the torture in detail and were leaked to Time Magazine in 2005, al-Qahtani experienced some of the most severe “enhanced interrogation” techniques approved by former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld under his authorized “First Special Interrogation Plan.” Rumsfeld infamously scribbled a note in the margins of a memo suggesting even harsher techniques.

Over a roughly 50-day period between November 2002 and January 2003, al-Qahtani was subjected to a long list of brutal methods — including sleep deprivation, extreme temperature and noise exposure, sexual humiliation, beatings and strangling, according to Keram’s report. At times, in apparent protest at his treatment, al-Qahtani refused to eat or drink water.

Dehydrated, doctors would occasionally forcibly administer an IV, the logs show. In one instance, al-Qahtani bit an IV tube in two before he was restrained.

Al-Qahtani’s interrogators also threatened him with military dogs and tied a leash to his shackles, led him around the room and forced him to perform a series of dog tricks. At times, they would not allow him to use the bathroom, resulting in him urinating on himself repeatedly, according to military records.

Al-Qahtani told Keram that during his torture he experienced hallucinatory episodes. In one, he believed he was dead and seeing ghosts before an imaginary bird assured him that he was still alive. He told her that he wanted to end his life to stop the torture.

Al-Qahtani was subjected to torture methods including sleep deprivation, extreme temperature and noise exposure, sexual humiliation, beatings and strangling.

“The intensity I had to kill myself was not the intensity to die, it was the intensity to stop the psychological torture, the horrible pain of solitary confinement,” said al-Qahtani. “The symptoms of psychological torture were horrific. It was even worse than the effects of the physical torture.”

During the sessions, interrogators allowed medical personnel inside the room to check al-Qahtani’s vitals signs — sometimes three times a day. They were done to ensure he was “able to continue” with the interrogations, the records note.

He was hospitalized on two occasions for an abnormally slow heart rate, according to military records. In one instance, officials flew in a radiologist from a naval station in Puerto Rico to read al-Qahtani’s CT scan after his heart rate dropped to 35 beats per minute. When the doctor found “no anomalies” al-Qahtani was “hooded, shackled and restrained in a litter” and taken back to Camp X-Ray for interrogations the following day, the logs report.

On December 6, 2002 — roughly two weeks after the interrogations began — al-Qahtani told interrogators the story that he had met bin Laden in Afghanistan. “I am doing this to get out of here,” he said. He retracted the story the next day, saying that he had made the claim because he was under pressure.

In an October 2008 memo, a military official alleged that al-Qahtani’s admission of involvement in bin Laden’s “special mission to the US appear to be true and are corroborated in reporting from other sources.” The document does not detail what information the military had or how it was corroborated.

In the June 2016 evaluation, Keram concluded that al-Qahtani could not receive effective mental health treatment while he remains imprisoned at Guantanamo. She recommended his release to Saudi Arabia, where the government has said it would provide him psychiatric care.

“The profound physical and psychological torture Mr. al-Qahtani experienced during interrogations, coupled with his inability to control what was happening to him, led him to conclude that he had only two means of ending his suffering; suicide or compliance,” wrote Keram of the torture sessions. “Thus, Mr. al-Qahtani’s statements were coerced and not voluntary, reliable, or credible.”

Al-Qahtani’s condition has significantly deteriorated in the last year. He has tried to take his own life on three separate occasions in the last nine months during psychotic episodes driven by schizophrenic hallucinations, including by swallowing broken pieces of glass, his legal team says.

“The fact that somebody as sick as Mr. al-Qahtani poses some kind of security threat to the United States is unthinkable,” said Scott Roehm, Washington director for The Center for Victims of Torture, a nonprofit that has pressured the Biden administration to close Guantanamo.

CNN was unable to interview al-Qahtani for this article.

This past February, Keram supplied another court declaration, writing that al-Qahtani was at “high risk for suicide.”

Court ruling forces Biden White House to make decisions

Al-Qahtani was interrogated for 18 to 20 hours a day at Camp X-Ray.

To probe the last 16 years of court records in al-Qahtani’s legal quest for freedom — a cache of more than 400 filings between October 2005 and June 2021 — is to take a journey through some of the most sordid moments in the recent history of the United States.

The government dropped all charges against him in 2008, which Susan Crawford, a senior Bush administration official later admitted to The Washington Post was because he was tortured. Crawford served as the head of military commissions at Guantanamo Bay and was charged with deciding whether to bring detainees to trial. Any information gleaned during those sessions at Camp X-Ray, Crawford acknowledged, was inadmissible in court.

The admission was unprecedented.

Despite dropping the charges, the 2008 military memo argued for al-Qahtani’s continued detention, categorizing him as a “high-risk” to national security.

Al-Qahtani’s legal team has made numerous efforts to secure his release, particularly after 2008 when charges against him were dropped. All were unsuccessful.

In the face of those defeats, al-Qahtani’s lawyers decided in April 2017 to go down an untried legal route for Guantanamo detainees. As a prisoner of war, they argued, their client had the right under the Geneva Conventions to be granted a medical evaluation by an independent panel of three doctors, known as a mixed medical commission.

Al-Qahtani’s lawyers argued that an independent medical evaluation was guaranteed under a US Army rule known as Army Reg. 190-8, a domestic law which allows for the repatriation of sick and wounded prisoners of war.

The strategy, according to al-Qahtani’s lawyers, was to see if other doctors agreed with Keram’s view that al-Qahtani was so mentally ill that he poses no threat to the United States and should be repatriated to Saudi Arabia. Justice Department lawyers contended that the Army rule did not apply to Guantanamo detainees.

After years of disappointment, al-Qahtani and his legal team had its first significant victory. In March 2020, US District Court Judge Rosemary Collyer, in a 25-page opinion, ordered the US military to permit a mixed medical commission to examine al-Qahtani and determine his eligibility for repatriation to Saudi Arabia for psychiatric care.

The judge’s order shook the Pentagon, which has consistently fought to block civilian courts from deciding the fate of Guantanamo detainees. The Trump administration appealed the order, which the DC Court of Appeals dismissed in September.

A Pentagon spokesperson declined to comment for this article, citing al-Qahtani’s ongoing case.

On January 15, in the waning days of Trump’s presidential term, the Justice Department made another bid to have Collyer’s ruling tossed out, filing a “motion for reconsideration” in the US District Court for the District of Columbia, citing a last-minute rule change instituted by then-Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy declaring Guantanamo detainees exempt from Army Reg. 190-8. The new rule, the government said, made the judge’s ruling moot.

“In the final hours of the Trump administration, they tried to move the goal posts,” said Ramzi Kassem, a City University of New York law professor whose legal clinic represents al-Qahtani. “It’s the government, having lost under the law, then trying to change the law.”

In the back-and-forth of court filings, al-Qahtani’s attorneys have argued that the last-minute attempted rule change didn’t change the government’s obligation to adhere to the Geneva conventions.

The Biden administration has now inherited the case and has on five occasions asked the court for an extension as it determines how it will proceed. It has until September 8 to decide which course of action to take: Continue to fight Collyer’s order, grant a mixed medical commission access to al-Qahtani, or drop the matter and repatriate him to Saudi Arabia.

Wherever the White house falls, the potential moral, ethical and practical implications are significant.

Mohammed al-Qahtani has been held at Guantanamo Bay since February 2002 and since May 2008 without charge. Today, he is being held in a cell at Camp 6.

The White House declined comment on al-Qahtani’s case, citing the pending litigation.

If the Biden White House were to allow a mixed medical commission to examine al-Qahtani at Guantanamo, the first in the base’s history, he could set a precedent in which a number of other prisoners could request independent medical evaluations that could expose the conditions they have been subjected to for nearly two decades in some cases. If the government denies al-Qahtani a medical evaluation, however, and supports the Trump administration’s attempted unilateral carve out to exclude Guantanamo detainees from the Geneva Conventions, that could put US servicemembers captured as prisoners of war in peril. In a life-or-death scenario, those servicemembers could be denied the same type of treatment and medical evaluations al-Qahtani is now seeking, said Freedman.

Looming in the background is the fierce debate over whether Guantanamo detainees are entitled to “due process rights,” a constitutional guarantee to fair treatment in court that is a bedrock of the American judicial system. Previous administrations have argued that such rights do not apply to them. The Biden administration’s legal team is divided on the issue, according to a recent New York Times report. The administration has yet to take a public stance on the matter.

Recently, however, the Biden White House put its first stamp on Guantanamo policy on July 19, allowing the transfer of detainee, Abdul Latif Nasser, to Morocco. Because Nasser — who was never charged with a crime — had been cleared for repatriation in 2016, it’s unclear whether or not the move represents a significant shift in policy.

Meanwhile, as the battle over the future of Guantanamo Bay plays out in Washington, al-Qahtani spends his days in isolation in his cell. He avoids other detainees because of his schizophrenic outbreaks, Keram noted in an August 2020 court declaration.

In a recent phone conversation with his lawyer, Kassem, al-Qahtani said he survived on the hope of seeing his family again. The notes of that call, as documented by Kassem and cleared as unclassified by the government, reveal the desperation his client feels.

“There is no life for me here,” al-Qahtani told his attorney. “If I have a future, it is outside this place.”