Publish at November 18 2025 Updated November 21 2025
Yann Quicaille, one of Time magazine's most influential climate researchers of 2025 (1), has long known what many of us are feeling: increasingly long, frequent and intense heat waves. His problem wasn't to prove it - the figures speak for themselves - but to show who's responsible, find the sources and quantify them. So he put his team of researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich to work.
They examined data from 213 extreme heat waves between 2000 and 2023, all over the planet. By way of comparison, we are now 20 times more likely to experience a heat wave in the years 2000-2010 than in the period 1850-1900, and up to 200 times more likely in the years 2010-2020.
"In close conformity with estimates based on IPCC35 methodologies, we estimate an increase in global average temperature of around 1.30°C in 2023 compared with 1850-1900,
- of which 0.67°C is due to emissions from all major carbon emitters and
- 0.33°C to emissions from the 14 largest carbon emitters" [2].
The unattributed 0.63°C is due to other actors responsible for unaccounted fossil fuel combustion, agricultural and land use activities, other industrial processes, as well as unattributed greenhouse gases (N2O and halogenated species) and short-lived climate factors." (2)
The contributions of the 166 other emitters are, taken together, of roughly the same importance as those of the 14 largest carbon emitters.
Where it gets disturbing is that the biggest emitters also have scientists who analyze the data, and they had already estimated the extent of the changes that fossil fuel consumption was causing. They knew it with precise data as early as 1982!
Oil companies, of course, as well as coal and cement producers...
"The 14 biggest carbon emitters are :
account for 30% of total cumulative anthropogenic (man-made) CO2 emissions, roughly as much as the other 166 major carbon-emitting companies combined (27%).
From a national perspective,
It would be easy to attribute full responsibility to a group of companies or countries, but this would be to forget that these companies and countries are social and industrial constructs. No individual can build an oil refinery or a cement plant, no one can operate a coal mine alone; we have all contributed to it and benefited from it in some way. A few consumer countries that stop using fossil fuels won't make a difference on their own.
The fact is that a small group has actively prevented human society from becoming aware of the problem before it's too late. As a result, society and its national or international representatives would be fully justified in forcing these companies to put their power at the service of repairing the damage caused, and preventing the distribution of the profits they continue to record to private interests. Several researchers have presented the basis for doing this (3, 4).
There are better things to do than buy weapons with the profits from fossil fuels.
Illustration: Hsaart from Pixabay
References
1- Yann Quilcaille - The 100 Most Influential Climate Leaders 2025 - Times magazine
https://time.com/collections/time-100-climate-2025/7326540/yann-quilcaille/
2- Quilcaille, Y., Gudmundsson, L., Schumacher, D.L. et al. Systematic attribution of heatwaves to the emissions of carbon majors. Nature 645, 392-398 (2025).
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09450-9
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09450-9
3- Carbon majors and the scientific case for climate liability
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-08751-3
4-Allen, Myles. - Liability for climate change. Nature 421,
https://www.nature.com/articles/421891a
https://doi.org/10.1038/421891a
Climate Change and the Escalation of Global Extreme Heat
https://www.climatecentral.org/report/climate-change-and-the-escalation-of-global-extreme-heat-2025
How does a 750-gram liter of gasoline emit 2.3 kilos of CO2? - Thot Cursus
https://cursus.edu/fr/25329/comment-un-litre-dessence-de-750-grammes-emet-il-23-kilos-de-co2
Yann Quicaille - https://usys.ethz.ch/en/people/profile.Mjg1NjM0.TGlzdC82MzcsMzIwMTk3MjIy.html
Climate Change Made Extreme Heat Days More Likely
https://eos.org/articles/climate-change-made-extreme-heat-days-more-likely
"Over the 12-month period, 4 billion people - about 49% of the global population - experienced at least 30 days of extreme heat (hotter than 90% of temperatures observed in their local area over the 1991-2020 period"
"In 195 countries/territories, climate change at least doubled the number of extreme heat days, as compared to a world without climate change."
"All 67 extreme heat events - identified as significant based on record-setting temperatures or major impacts to people or property - were found to be influenced by climate change."
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