US-China climate talks reopen with pledge to take ‘big steps’

By Jennifer A. Dlouhy

UNITED STATES Climate Envoy John Kerry opened the first major climate talks with Chinese officials in almost a year, as both sides pledged to work for tangible results despite deep tensions between the superpowers.

China is seeking “substantial” dialogue this week, the country’s climate envoy Xie Zhenhua said Monday, as officials gathered at the Beijing Hotel. Those talks could also make a contribution “to improving our bilateral relations,” he added.

Kerry said he hoped the two sides would take “some of the big steps that will send a signal to the world” about how seriously China and the US take the common threat to humanity. “I hope we can work with the greatest purpose we have ever worked to try to get this done,” he added.

Negotiations between the world’s top two greenhouse gas emitters on how to tackle global warming were suspended last year, in the wake of then US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s controversial visit to Taiwan. Their renewed communication comes amid a broader Biden administration push to restore high-level dialogue.

Kerry is the third senior US official to visit Beijing in five weeks. While US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen mostly left China with pledges to keep talking, climate appears to be an arena where the two sides can make breakthroughs.

“China and US share similar ideas and have a similar past in addressing climate change,” Xie said, speaking through a translator. Together, the two nations have made progress, he said, citing agreements in 2014 and 2021, and collaboration at UN climate summits.

Xie said he and Kerry have agreed to have “candid and friendly” battles as they discuss challenges on climate and the green transition over the next three days.

Laying groundwork

KERRY, a former US secretary of state who was tapped to be the US special presidential envoy for climate two years ago, arrived in China on Sunday for three full days of talks.

The negotiations are aimed at laying the groundwork for potential pronouncements at the UN General Assembly in September, the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation leaders summit in California and the UN climate summit in Dubai.

“It is imperative that China and the United States make real progress in the little more than four months,” before the UN talks, Kerry said Monday. “The world and the climate crisis demand that we make progress rapidly and significantly.”

Talks are set to proceed on multiple tracks, covering ambitions in addressing climate change, a new loss and damage fund for compensating climate victims and on arenas for possible bilateral collaboration. Those areas could include deploying more wind and solar power and handling the intermittent nature of those electricity sources, according to senior US State Department officials, who requested anonymity to discuss private details.

“In too many parts of the world emissions are going up,” said Kerry. “It is imperative that we work together—not competitively, but cooperatively—in order to reduce the impacts of unabated coal power in the world.”

H e also urged both nations to partner to rapidly reduce carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases such as methane.

China is by far the world’s largest installer of solar and wind and already on track to beat President Xi Jinping’s clean power targets, yet the nation is also continuing to expand its massive fleet of coal-fired plants under efforts to bolster energy security.

“We need to partner in order to accelerate the reduction of these emissions and, my friend, we cannot allow the continued building of unabated coal-fired power plants,” Kerry told Xie, adding that the US also had more to do on its own energy transition. The envoys, who had a one-on-one dinner Sunday, have held about 55 personal meetings in recent years, the two men said.

Experts in climate diplomacy and USChina relations stressed that even a formal statement from Xie and Kerry’s discussions that commits to keep talking—and to revive a joint working group they agreed to form in November 2021—would represent progress.

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Temperatures in Death Valley, which runs along part of central California’s border with Nevada, reached 128 degrees Fahrenheit (53.33 degrees Celsius) on Sunday at the aptly named Furnace Creek, the National Weather Service said.

The hottest temperature ever recorded on Earth was 134 F (56.67 C) in July 1913 at Furnace Creek, said Randy Ceverny of the World Meteorological Organization, the body recognized as keeper of world records. Temperatures at or above 130 F (54.44 C) have only been recorded on Earth a handful of times, mostly in Death Valley.

“With global warming, such temperatures are becoming more and more likely to occur,” Ceverny, the World Meteorological Organization’s records coordinator, said in an email. “Long-term: Global warming is causing higher and more frequent temperature extremes. Short-term: This particular weekend is being driven by a very very strong upper-level ridge of high pressure over the Western US.”

Furnace Creek is an unincorporated community within Death Valley National Park. It’s home to the park’s visitor center, which includes a digital thermometer popular with tourists. On Sunday afternoon, dozens of people gathered at the thermometer—some wearing fur coats as a joke—hoping to snap a picture with a temperature reading that would shock their friends and family.

That digital thermometer hit 130 degrees at one point on Sunday, but it’s not an official reading. The National Weather Service said the highest temperature recorded on Sunday was 128 F (53.3 C)—a high that was unlikely to be surpassed as the sun went down.

A few miles away at Badwater Basin—the lowest point in North

America at 282 feet (85.95 meters) below sea level—tourists took selfies and briefly walked along the white salt flats ringed by sandy-colored mountains as wisps of clouds crawled overhead. Meteorologists say that thin cloud cover most likely kept temperatures from reaching potential record highs.

William Cadwallader lives in Las Vegas, where temperatures reached 116 F (46.67 C) on Sunday, nearing the all-time high of 117 degrees. But Cadwallader said he’s been visiting Death Valley during the summer for years just to say he’s been to the hottest place on Earth.

“I just want to go to a place, sort of like Mount Everest, to say, you know, you did it,” he said.

The heat wave is just one part of the extreme weather hitting the US over the weekend. Five people died in Pennsylvania on Saturday when heavy rains caused a sudden flash flood that swept away multiple cars. A 9-month-old boy and a 2-year-old girl remained missing. In Vermont, authorities were concerned about landslides as rain continued after days of flooding.

Death Valley’s brutal temperatures come amid a blistering stretch of hot weather that has put roughly one-third of Americans under some type of heat advisory, watch or warning. Heat waves are not as visually dramatic as other natural disasters, but experts say they are more deadly. A heat wave in parts of the South and Midwest killed more than a dozen people last month.

Residents in the western US have long been accustomed to extreme temperatures, and the heat appeared to prompt minimal disruptions in California over the weekend. Local governments opened cooling centers for people without access to air conditioning to stay cool. The heat forced officials to cancel horse racing at the opening weekend of the California State Fair as officials urged fairgoers to stay hydrated and seek refuge inside one of the seven airconditioned buildings.

Temperatures in Phoenix hit 114 F (45.56 C) on Sunday, the 17th consecutive day of 110 degrees or higher. The record is 18 days, set in June 1974. Phoenix is on track to break that record on Tuesday, said Gabriel Lojero, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.

Heat records are being shattered all over the US South, from California to Florida. But it’s far more than that. It’s worldwide, with devastating heat hitting Europe along with dramatic floods in the US Northeast, India, Japan and China.

For nearly all of July, the world has been in uncharted hot territory, according to the University of Maine’s Climate Reanalyzer.

June was also the hottest June on record, according to several weather agencies. Scientists say there is a decent chance that 2023 will go down as the hottest year on record, with measurements going back to the middle of the 19th century.

Death Valley dominates global heat records. In the valley, it’s not only hot, it stays brutally warm.

Some meteorologists have disputed how accurate Death Valley’s 110-year-old hot-temperature record is, with weather historian Christopher Burt disputing it for several reasons, which he laid out in a blog post a few years ago.

The two hottest temperatures on record are the 134 F in 1913 in Death Valley and 131 F (55 C) in Tunisia in July 1931. Burt, a weather historian for The Weather Company, finds fault with both of those measurements and lists 130 F (54.4 C) in July 2021 in Death Valley as his hottest recorded temperature on Earth.

“130 degrees is very rare if not unique,” Burt said.

In July 2021 and August 2020, Death Valley recorded a reading of 130 F (54.4 C), but both are still awaiting confirmation. Scientists have found no problems so far, but they haven’t finished the analysis, NOAA climate analysis chief Russ Vose said.

There are other places similar to Death Valley that may be as hot, such as Iran’s Lut Desert, but like Death Valley are uninhabited so no one measures there, Burt said. The difference was someone decided to put an official weather station in Death Valley in 1911, he said.

A combination of long-term human-caused climate change from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas is making the world hotter by the decade, with ups and downs year by year. Many of those ups and downs are caused by the natural El Nino and La Nina cycle. An El Nino cycle, the warming of part of the Pacific that changes the world’s weather, adds even more heat to the already rising temperatures. Scientists such as Vose say that most of the record warming the Earth is now seeing is from humancaused climate change, partly because this El Nino only started a few months ago and is still weak to moderate. It isn’t expected to peak until winter, so scientists predict next year will be even hotter than this year.

B orenstein reported from Washington and Beam reported from Sacramento, California.