Climate

Widespread adoption of heat pumps could prevent thousands of premature deaths and save billions on energy bills, according to a new analysis.

After just 12 hours without power, we were cold, isolated and facing the fact that everyday life is far more precarious than it seems

It was the cold that woke me up. Some time in the early hours of Saturday, as Storm Darragh blasted through our bit of rural Oxfordshire, the power lines had come down; by the time the central heating would otherwise have been firing up, the house was decidedly arctic.

The novelty of lighting candles, chopping firewood and making coffee on a sputtering camping stove carried everyone through the first few hours. But by mid afternoon frontier spirit was palpably waning, along with everyone’s phone batteries. By early evening there wasn’t much to do except agree that obviously we have it easy compared with Ukraine – now in its third icy winter of Russia using attacks on domestic power infrastructure as an extra weapon of war, which puts this minor domestic inconvenience into perspective – and that our digitised lives have become quite madly, recklessly vulnerable to a sudden loss of power.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

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Government should point to evidence of FSA licensing of additive, says chair of environment and climate change committee

The government must urgently reassure consumers that feed additives given to cattle to reduce methane emissions are harmless, and a vital tool in tackling the climate crisis, the chair of an influential parliamentary committee has warned.

Lady Sheehan, chair of the environment and climate change committee of the House of Lords, called on ministers to step up as a row has blown up over the prospective use of the additive Bovaer in British dairy herds supplying Arla, the dairy company.

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First comprehensive study on health and climate change in small island developing states lays bare impact of the crisis and calls for action from richer countries

The 65 million people living in the world’s small island nations face “catastrophe” from the health impacts of climate breakdown, say experts behind a Lancet Countdown report.

Heatwaves, drought, insect-borne diseases and extreme weather are getting worse because of the climate crisis, putting lives and livelihoods at risk, found the report, the first comprehensive analysis of the state of climate change and health in island states.

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European Commission scientific advisers say technology to offset global heating could wreak havoc on weather

Europe should ban space mirrors, cloud whitening and other untested tools being touted to reflect the sun’s rays, the European Commission’s scientific advisers have said, but said the door should be left open for research into their development.

The scientists said the risks and benefits of solar radiation modification (SRM) – also known as solar geoengineering – were “highly uncertain”. They called for an EU-wide moratorium on using it as a way to offset global heating.

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The fine artist and illustrator Oliver Jeffers on climate change, A.I. and the idea that maybe everything is pretty much our fault.

The two solvents, known as Perc and TCE, cause kidney cancer and other ailments, and have been the subject of years of controversy.

An alliance of political groups is harnessing real fears about the local impact of wind and solar farms – and using them to spruik nuclear power

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The entrance is marked by an AI-generated image of a dead whale, floating among wind turbines. On the first floor of the East Maitland bowling club, dire warnings are being shared about how offshore wind may impact the Hunter region – alongside a feeling of not being consulted, of being steamrolled.

“Environment and energy forums” like this one in late November have been held up and down the east of Australia, aiming to build a resistance to the country’s renewable energy transition.

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Even at my lowest, I have never entirely given up my faith that good people working together can change the world for the better.

Researchers mapped brick kilns across India and used climate models to forecast the levels of heat stress workers face between now and 2050

• Photographs by Ishan Tankhar

“I work with fire. But this has been the hottest ever, even for me,” says Harilal Rajput, squinting in the blazing midday sun. Rajput, 41, is a chief fire worker at a brick kiln near the town of Danapur on the outskirts of Patna, capital of the eastern state of Bihar. He is a migrant worker; his wife, a farmer, lives in neighbouring Uttar Pradesh with their three children.

It is almost 1pm on a June afternoon and neither Rajput nor the nine fire workers he supervises have had any food since the previous night. They will eat only when their eight-hour shift ends at about 4pm. His team, he says, is “running on water”.

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An area nearly a third larger than India turned permanently arid in past three decades, research shows

An area of land nearly a third larger than India has turned from humid conditions to dryland – arid areas where agriculture is difficult – in the past three decades, research has found.

Drylands now make up 40% of all land on Earth, excluding Antarctica. Three-quarters of the world’s land suffered drier conditions in the past 30 years, which is likely to be permanent, according to the study by the UN Science Policy Interface, a body of scientists convened by the United Nations.

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Human-caused global warming helped increase dry conditions on every continent, scientists said in a new report, as talks on halting desertification were underway in Saudi Arabia.

Average global temperature in November was 1.62C above preindustrial levels, bringing average for the year to 1.60C

This year is now almost certain to be the hottest year on record, data shows. It will also be the first to have an average temperature of more than 1.5C above preindustrial levels, marking a further escalation of the climate crisis.

Data for November from the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) found the average global surface temperature for the month was 1.62C above the level before the mass burning of fossil fuels drove up global heating. With data for 11 months of 2024 now available, scientists said the average for the year is expected to be 1.60C, exceeding the record set in 2023 of 1.48C.

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Climate purity is a recipe for failure.

Male players must step up and add their voice to the campaign to stop our sport being sold out to the big polluters causing climate change

At the Cop29 climate conference last month Sofie Junge Pedersen and Katie Rood again called for Fifa to drop its sponsorship deal with the Saudi Arabian state oil company Aramco. They were among more than 130 female players who signed an open letter in October that described the partnership as a “middle finger to women’s football” that will do real damage to people and our planet.

After the letter was published, I spoke out in support of their initiative. I hoped other professional male players would join me. The women were widely applauded for speaking out but their male counterparts have not followed suit. On Wednesday, Fifa is poised to confirm Saudi Arabia as the host of the 2034 men’s World Cup.

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Forrest Meggers, a professor at Princeton University, has turned his home into a live-in laboratory that pushes the boundaries of sustainability.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac know increasing floods and wildfires are a problem. Dealing with them, however, would require trade-offs.

Hadrian’s Aqueduct supplied water to Greece’s capital for centuries but was then largely abandoned. It’s being revived to ease water scarcity amid global warming.

No solo los mayores están en riesgo. Más de tres cuartas partes de las muertes relacionadas con el calor en el país se produjeron entre personas menores de 35 años, reveló un estudio reciente.

Syrian insurgents take Aleppo, protests in Georgia, martial law in Seoul and the reopening of Notre Dame in Paris: the past seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists

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