Cecilia Keating

@ceciliakeating.carbonbrief.org

🌱 science section editor @carbonbrief.org 🌱

@sammyroth.bsky.socialReposted by @ceciliakeating.carbonbrief.org

Want to understand why journalists and politicians get so excited about AI doomsday predictions but mostly ignore climate change?

It's called *information pollution.* Thank you to @amywestervelt.bsky.social for coining this important new term and writing a book about it, and explaining it to me!

@ceciliakeating.carbonbrief.org

Experts told me the extent of this year's fires in Indonesia will depend in part on how long the El Niño lasts Fires tend to spike in the country during El Niño years - when drought dries out the landscape. Scientists expect it the current El Niño event to be one of the most intense on record.

Bar chart showing annual fire emissions in Indonesia from 1980 to 2026. Emissions vary sharply between years, with major peaks during El Niño years, highlighted by pale red vertical bands. The largest spike occurs in 1997 at just over 800MtC, with other notable peaks around 1991, 1994, 2006 and 2015. The 2026 bar, marked as year-to-date, is around 75MtC. Source: Global Fire Emissions Database.
@ceciliakeating.carbonbrief.org

NEW for @carbonbrief.org

As El Niño intensifies, the forest fires ripping through Indonesia are on track to reach levels not seen since 2015.

The country's 2015 fire season has been linked to 100,000 premature deaths and produced emissions on a par with the EU's fossil-fuel emissions that year.

Line chart showing cumulative daily fire emissions in Indonesia. The 2026 trajectory, highlighted in red, rises sharply to around 75MtC and is closely tracking the early path of 2015, shown in dark blue. In 2015, emissions later surged to about 330MtC, far above the 2000–26 average of roughly 85MtC. Other years are shown in light grey. Source: Global Fire Emissions Database.
@ccivanovich.bsky.socialReposted by @ceciliakeating.carbonbrief.org

I had the exciting opportunity to write a guest post for @carbonbrief.org about our new paper on the expansion of extreme heat seasons around the world.

Take a read for a digestible summary of our approach and key results!