Why promise net zero emissions when you can go even lower, such as negative emissions?

As countries at the COP28 climate talks are wrangling over ways to lower their greenhouse gas emissions, a Danish-led group of countries has decided to set the ultimate goal: to remove more carbon dioxide, the main source of global warming, from the atmosphere than they emit.

Visibly tired and frustrated top United Nations officials urged climate talks to push harder for an end to fossil fuels. Time seems to be running out both in the talks in Dubai and for action that could keep warming at or below the internationally agreed-upon threshold.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres returned to the summit on Monday and said it was "time to go into overdrive, to negotiate in good faith, and rise to the challenge." He said negotiators at the COP28 summit in particular must focus on the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and climate justice.

It's the killer detail in international climate talks: Consensus.

With nearly 200 nations of different sizes, economies, political systems, resources and needs, they all have to find common ground if they are going to save the one common ground they share — planet Earth.

Ongoing catastrophic rains in Eastern Africa have been worsened by human-caused climate change that made them up to two times more intense, an international team of climate scientists said Thursday.

The analysis comes from World Weather Attribution, a group of scientists who examine whether and to what extent human-induced climate change has altered the likelihood and magnitude of an extreme-weather event.

The United Nations climate conference on Friday began its final week with negotiators expected to zoom in on the future of fossil fuels on a dangerously warming planet.

"It's go-time for governments at COP28 this week," U.N. Climate Chief Simon Stiell said at a press event Friday.

For the sixth month in a row, Earth set a new monthly record for heat, and also added the hottest autumn to the litany of record-breaking heat this year, the European climate agency calculated.

And with only one month left, 2023 is on the way to smashing the record for hottest year.

The mood is about to shift, the hours grow longer and the already high sense of urgency somehow amp up even more as the United Nations climate summit heads into its final week.

Every sentence, every word — especially those about the future elimination of planet-warming fossil fuels — will matter at the U.N. conference in oil-built Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. Professional negotiators who have been working on getting options into shape will turn over their work to senior national officials, many at minister levels, who will have to make the tough political choices.

Israeli environmental experts have called on the defense establishment to carefully weigh the long-term environmental implications of reported plans to flood the immense network of tunnels in the Gaza Strip with seawater to flush the Hamas militants out.

Quoting U.S. officials, the Wall Street Journal reported Monday that the Israeli army last month set up five large water pumps near the al-Shati refugee camp in Gaza City, which are capable of flooding the tunnels within weeks by pumping thousands of cubic meters of water per hour into them.

This year's United Nations climate talks may have seen record numbers registered to attend, but activists who have spent years demonstrating at the annual event say their space to voice their demands is shrinking year on year.

Held in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates — where broad laws tightly restrict speech — climate activists have been protesting at COP28's Blue Zone, which is considered international territory. Demonstrators say there have always been strict regulations for protests at COPs, but they say actions this year have been further limited in terms of the number of people allowed to participate and which climate issues they're allowed to address on any given day. It's a stark contrast, activists say, to the growing presence of the fossil fuel industry, where those linked to the industry number around 1,400, according to an Associated Press analysis.

After a first-day blur of rare quick action and agreement, negotiators at a critical United Nations climate summit Wednesday finished up their first week in a more familiar place for them: the murky middle where momentum and roadblocks intertwine.

"Negotiations, as are often the case, are a mixed picture right now. We see big differences between individual states in some areas," German climate envoy Jennifer Morgan said, "but there is a will to make progress."