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Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates have an estimated wealth of $466bn – and are emblematic of a Davos-centric worldview that sees free markets and tech as the answer

The latest must-have for America’s ultra-rich isn’t another mega yacht or space program – it’s a plan to save the world from the climate crisis.

Related: The race to zero: can America reach net-zero emissions by 2050?

The mindset is to invest funds in a bunch of things and hope a few will really succeed

Related: ‘They aren't used to losing’: wealthy New York enclave battles over offshore windfarm

The potential of soils to slow climate change by soaking up carbon may be less than previously thought

The storage potential of one of the Earth’s biggest carbon sinks – soils – may have been overestimated, research shows. This could mean ecosystems on land soaking up less of humanity’s emissions than expected, and more rapid global heating.

Soils and the plants that grow in them absorb about a third of the carbon emissions that drive the climate crisis, partly limiting the impact of fossil-fuel burning. Rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere can increase plant growth and, until now, it was assumed carbon storage in soils would increase too.

Related: Global soils underpin life but future looks ‘bleak’, warns UN report

I was taught to use my head, not my heart. But acknowledging sadness at what is lost can help us safeguard the future

Over the course of my career, the climate crisis has changed from something only experts could see – reading clues trapped in frozen air bubbles or statistical patterns in long-term data sets – to something that everyone on Earth is living through. For me, it has gone from being something I study to a way that I see the world and experience my life. It’s one thing to publish a study on the hypothetical impact of increasing temperature on California’s people and ecosystems; it’s another to feel my stomach gripped by fear as my parents flee a catastrophic California wildfire cranked up by longer, hotter, drier summers.Bearing witness to the demise or death of what we love has started to look an awful lot like the job description for an environmental scientist these days. Over dinner, my colleague Ola Olsson matter‑of‑factly summed up his career: “Half the wildlife in Africa has died on my watch.” He studied biodiversity because he loved animals and wanted to understand and protect them. Instead his career has turned into a decades-long funeral.As a scientist, I was trained to be calm, rational, and objective, to focus on the facts, supporting my claims with evidence and showing my reasoning to colleagues to tear apart in peer review. I was trained to use my brain but not my heart; to report methods and statistics and findings but not how I felt about them. In graduate school, I was surrounded by brilliant, serious men who spoke in even, measured tones about the loss of California snowpack and crop yields; I tried to do the same.

I felt my credibility as a scientist was on the line, as was the respect of those who would sit on my future hiring committee and determine whether I would get a tenure- track job. I internalised the idea that scientists should be “policy-relevant and yet policy-neutral, never policy-prescriptive.” I was not supposed to have a preference, much less an emotional attachment, to one outcome or another, even on matters of life and death; that was for “policymakers” to decide. (This reticence goes against the wishes of 60% of Americans, as expressed in Pew Research polling, that scientists take an active role in policy debates about scientific issues.)My dispassionate training has not prepared me for the increasingly frequent emotional crises of climate change. What do I tell the student who chokes up in my office when she reads that 90% of the seagrasses she’s trying to design policies to protect are slated to be killed by warming before she retires? In such cases, facts are cold comfort. The skill I’ve had to cultivate on my own is to find the appropriate bedside manner as a doctor to a feverish planet; to try to go beyond probabilities and scenarios, to acknowledge what is important and grieve for what is being lost.

Related: To stop climate disaster, make ecocide an international crime. It's the only way | Jojo Mehta and Julia Jackson

Kimberly Nicholas is associate professor of sustainability science at Lund University in Sweden. This is an edited excerpt from her new book, Under the Sky We Make

Coal, oil and gas firms have received $3.8tn in finance since the Paris climate deal in 2015

The world’s biggest 60 banks have provided $3.8tn of financing for fossil fuel companies since the Paris climate deal in 2015, according to a report by a coalition of NGOs.

Despite the Covid-19 pandemic cutting energy use, overall funding remains on an upward trend and the finance provided in 2020 was higher than in 2016 or 2017, a fact the report’s authors and others described as “shocking”.