The announcement that last year was the warmest on record puts another nail in the coffin of climate denial. Not that one was needed. The pseudo-debate about climate science has always been about politics, not science, writes Jeffrey Sachs .

There are two main sources of climate denial. The first is libertarian ideology, which opposes government more than climate change. Climate change requires public policy and, for libertarians, that's enough to declare it false. Since libertarianism is the elixir of financiers and wealthy peers, climate denial haunts Wall Street, the City of London, a surprising number of FT readers and the House of Lords.

The real climate fight, however, is not about ideology but between oil companies like ExxonMobil, Chevron, and Koch Industries, and the general public. The oil groups will suffer massive capital losses when climate controls are finally instituted. Perhaps even libertarians can appreciate that the real battle is therefore over money, lots of it, and the corruption of government by that big money.

Human-induced climate change represents an "existential threat" to the oil industry. Professor Paul Ekins and Christophe McGlade at University College London have shown this rigorously in an important new paper in the journal Nature. They asked the key question: what does climate safety mean for the future use of the proven fossil fuel reserves in various parts of the world?

Their conclusions are stark. Roughly one-third of the world's oil, a half of the world's natural gas and 80 per cent of coal reserves are unburnable by 2050 if we are to keep warming within the internationally agreed 2C limit.

Read this article in full at www.ft.com/the-exchange

Credit: By Jeffrey Sachs