The Guardian Climate Change

In a new Quarterly Essay, Joëlle Gergis says that while Rome wasn’t built in a day, the Albanese government’s lack of action on climate change does not reflect the urgency of the crisis

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Although the 2022 federal election ushered in a new era of progressive politics in Australia, as Labor’s first term in power has progressed many people are now wondering if the political deadlock on our nation’s climate policy has really been broken.

Although some good ground has been made, the federal government’s actions still don’t reflect the urgency of the planetary-scale crisis we are in. Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions are rising and enormous fossil fuel projects continue to be approved to meet domestic and international demand.

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Program developed by the CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology allows farmers to better understand the risks of the climate crisis, study found

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In 30 years, Vicki Mayne’s Queensland beef property will receive 30 more days of heatwaves a year.

“That pushes us to 163 days of the year,” she said.

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With elections affecting half the world’s population this year, campaigners offer their views on the chances of real change

This year elections are taking place across the globe, covering almost half of the world’s population. It is also likely to be, yet again, the hottest year recorded as the climate crisis intensifies. The Guardian asked young climate activists around the world what they want from the elections and whether politics is working in the fight to halt global heating.

On first day of predicted intense Atlantic hurricane season, Nature Conservancy urges action and warns against misinformation

Misinformation spread by climate deniers such as Florida’s extremist Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, increases the “vulnerability” of communities in the path of severe weather events, scientists are warning.

The message comes on Saturday, the first day of what experts fear could be one of the most intense and dangerous Atlantic hurricane seasons on record, threatening a summer of natural disasters across the US.

Meteorologists found 52.9C reading to be false, though new record does appear to have been set

A record temperature registered this week for the Indian capital of 52.9C (127.22F) was too high by 3C, the Indian government has said.

The Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) had investigated Wednesday’s reading by the weather station at Mungeshpur, a densely packed corner of New Delhi, “and found a 3C sensor error”, the earth sciences minister, Kiren Rijiju, said.

Bright hue of Clear Lake, state’s largest freshwater basin, may have been caused by cyanobacteria and other phytoplankton

California’s largest freshwater lake has turned bright green due to algae blooms so intense they are visible from space, Nasa has announced, sharing satellite images from mid-May.

The photographs showed that “bright green swirls were visible across most of the lake’s area”, the space agency said, and may have been caused by cyanobacteria, commonly known as blue-green algae, as well as other kinds of phytoplankton.

War in Gaza, Donald Trump in New York, voting in South Africa and an eruption in Iceland: the last seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists

• Warning: this gallery contains images that some readers may find distressing

Climate Superfund Act compels oil companies to pay potentially billions of dollars for climate impacts caused by their emissions

Vermont has become the first state to enact a law holding oil firms financially responsible for climate damages, after the Republican governor, Phil Scott, allowed it to pass without his signature late on Thursday.

Modeled after the Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund program, the Climate Superfund Act directs the state to charge major fossil fuel companies potentially billions of dollars to pay for climate impacts to which their emissions have contributed. It is expected to face legal challenges from the industry.

Western Texas briefly looked like a ‘winter wonderland’ amid dramatic temperature drop and hailstorm

Just as people start bringing out their shorts for the start of summer, one Texas town had to reach for something rarely seen in late May: a snowplough.

Parts of the state saw a dramatic 50F temperature drop on Wednesday thanks to a giant dump of hail, some “DVD-sized”. The storm made western Texas look, briefly, like a winter wonderland.

Campaign groups in 127 cities demand urgent climate action amid fears of far-right gains

Activists across Europe are holding three days of protests to protect democracy and cut pollution as they struggle to push green issues back up the agenda before the European elections next week.

Last year was the hottest on record, and the urgency of the climate crisis is pressing. However, polls are predicting wins for far-right parties seeking to scrap green rules, and there have been significant recent rollbacks of environment policy. The fate of a proposed law to restore nature – the subject of fierce attacks even from centre-right parties that had championed the green deal – still appears to be hanging in the balance.

For many on Ghoramara, the general election is about the climate crisis and survival. The island, 150km south of Kolkata and named the ‘sinking island’ by the media, has lost nearly half its area to soil erosion in the past two decades and could disappear if a solution is not found.

As voters across India cast their ballots on issues ranging from the cost of living to jobs and religion, politicians trying to win votes in Ghoramara need to put the climate crisis to the fore as the island’s dwindling population fight to save their homes from the sea amid rising water levels and increasingly fierce storms

Researchers say world has enough fossil fuel projects planned to meet demand forecasts to 2050 if net zero is reached

The world has enough fossil fuel projects planned to meet global energy demand forecasts to 2050 and governments should stop issuing new oil, gas and coal licences, according to a large study aimed at political leaders.

If governments deliver the changes promised in order to keep the world from breaching its climate targets no new fossil fuel projects will be needed, researchers at University College London and the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) said on Thursday.

Temperatures of more than 45C have left population of 29 million exhausted – but the poorest suffer most

As the water tanker drove into a crowded Delhi neighbourhood, a ruckus erupted. Dozens of residents ran frantically behind it, brandishing buckets, bottles and hoses, and jumped on top of it to get even a drip of what was stored inside. Temperatures that day had soared to 49C (120F), the hottest day on record – and in many places across India’s vast capital, home to more than 29 million people, water had run out.

Every morning, Tripti, a social health worker who lives in the impoverished enclave of Vivekanand Camp, is among those who has to stand under the blazing sun with buckets and pots, waiting desperately for the water tanker to arrive.

Sudden cut in pollution in 2020 meant less shade from sun and was ‘substantial’ factor in record surface temperatures in 2023, study finds

The slashing of pollution from shipping in 2020 led to a big “termination shock” that is estimated have pushed the rate of global heating to double the long-term average, according to research.

Until 2020, global shipping used dirty, high-sulphur fuels that produced air pollution. The pollution particles blocked sunlight and helped form more clouds, thereby curbing global heating. But new regulations at the start of 2020 slashed the sulphur content of fuels by more than 80%.

Government of Christopher Luxon has made sweeping cuts to climate projects in its first budget, with no new significant environmental investments

The New Zealand government has been accused of waging a “war on nature” after it announced sweeping cuts to climate action projects, while making no significant new investments in environmental protection or climate crisis-related policy.

In its 2024/25 budget, handed down on Thursday, the rightwing coalition announced spending on law and order, education, health and a series of tax cuts, as the country struggles with inflation and cost-of-living pressures.

Māori knowledge-based approaches to agricultural emissions reduction

Community-based renewable energy schemes

The Climate Change Commission

External and internal specialists who supply evidence and data on environmental monitoring and science

Freshwater policy initiatives

Native forest planting

Development of a circular economy, relating to recycling and reuse

Jobs for Nature, a programme creating jobs to benefit the environment

Reducing biosecurity monitoring

Big tech is playing its part in reaching net zero targets, but its vast new datacentres are run at huge cost to the environment

• Mariana Mazzucato is professor of economics at UCL, and director of the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose

When you picture the tech industry, you probably think of things that don’t exist in physical space, such as the apps and internet browser on your phone. But the infrastructure required to store all this information – the physical datacentres housed in business parks and city outskirts – consume massive amounts of energy. Despite its name, the infrastructure used by the “cloud” accounts for more global greenhouse emissions than commercial flights. In 2018, for instance, the 5bn YouTube hits for the viral song Despacito used the same amount of energy it would take to heat 40,000 US homes annually.

This is a hugely environmentally destructive side to the tech industry. While it has played a big role in reaching net zero, giving us smart meters and efficient solar, it’s critical that we turn the spotlight on its environmental footprint. Large language models such as ChatGPT are some of the most energy-guzzling technologies of all. Research suggests, for instance, that about 700,000 litres of water could have been used to cool the machines that trained ChatGPT-3 at Microsoft’s data facilities. It is hardly news that the tech bubble’s self-glorification has obscured the uglier sides of this industry, from its proclivity for tax avoidance to its invasion of privacy and exploitation of our attention span. The industry’s environmental impact is a key issue, yet the companies that produce such models have stayed remarkably quiet about the amount of energy they consume – probably because they don’t want to spark our concern.

Mariana Mazzucato is professor of economics at UCL, and director of the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose

Research that looked at 53 million births says Black and Hispanic mothers and those in lower socioeconomic groups most at risk

Heatwaves increase rates of preterm births, which can lead to poorer health outcomes for babies and impact their long-term health, a new study found.

Black and Hispanic mothers, as well as those in lower socioeconomic groups, are particularly at risk of delivering early following heat waves.

Hurricane-force winds have left nearly 650,000 buildings in the greater Dallas area without electricity

Severe weather continues to pummel parts of the US, particularly Texas, which is once again experiencing widespread power outages with no clear end in sight that left nearly 650,000 buildings without electricity.

The US Great Plains and south-east regions are experiencing an outbreak of storms that have wreaked havoc on local populations.

In a new exhibition, artists find new ways to look at and investigate their natural surroundings and how they interact with human stories

The striking collection of photographic art presented in the Carnegie Museum of Art’s Widening the Lens is very much a revision of the long tradition of landscape photography in the US. It may be very directly revising – as in AK Burns’s reinvention of landscape photographs literally ripped from photo books – or it may be much more subtly so, as with Sam Contis’s careful deconstructions of the iconography of the American west. However so, this is a show very much about counter-narratives, hidden histories, reinscription, reinvention, and revision.

Borne of a desire to consider how our relationship with images has shifted as photography has become shockingly more ubiquitous and prolific, Widening the Lens looks at photographs both as singular objects as well as pieces integrated into larger objects. It is a show that strives to be responsive to how the lines between photography and other artistic media have become blurred, and one that seeks to imagine what environmental photography looks like now.

New study published in Cell Reports Sustainability finds emission reductions provided $249bn of climate and health benefits

By increasing its use of renewable energy, the US has not only slashed its planet-warming emissions but also improved its air quality, yielding hundreds of billions of dollars of benefits, a new report has found.

The study, published in Cell Reports Sustainability on Wednesday and based on publicly available data, focuses on uptick of renewable energy in the US from 2019 to 2022.