The Guardian Climate Change

Microsoft, Amazon and Google say they still aim to achieve net zero output despite construction boom

Microsoft, Amazon and Google’s collective carbon emissions have increased by nearly a fifth in the past year, driven largely by datacentre construction.

In the financial year ending March 2026, the three tech companies emitted 119m mTCO₂e (metric tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent), or about a third of those of France.

As Nigeria braces for another season of devastating rains, people affected describe the mental toll of repeatedly rebuilding their lives

Murky water first tore down a perimeter fence, then bubbled into the yard before spilling into every room. Within minutes, electronics, kitchen appliances, furniture, documents and academic certificates lay submerged.

With the water rising rapidly, Daniel Ebiesua evacuated his home in the Shogunle area of Lagos, with his wife, their two-week-old baby, four-year-old son and his mother-in-law to a neighbour’s upstairs apartment. There they stayed trapped for four hours, helplessly watching the flood swallow the streets below.

The tube cannot easily be adapted to cope with heatwaves, making conditions almost unbearable

As the escalator descends below ground at King’s Cross St Pancras station in London, the shift from what was already a hot station entrance to the furnace-like subterranean depths is perceptible.

On the tube it’s worse: a man leans back in his seat, eyes closed, sweltering; people hold electric fans an inch away from their faces. London commuters are known for their stoicism and the heat appears to be another tribulation to accept. They will need to: heatwaves in the capital are becoming routine.

Heatwaves have long been part of the Tour but temperatures now are pushing the riders to limit of human endurance

The Tour de France and the heat of the midday sun are old bedfellows, going back long before an era when the biggest catastrophe of the Tour’s opening week was a major fault in the Visma team bus’s air conditioning. Flip back 50 years to my favourite Tour read, the late Geoffrey Nicholson’s The Great Bike Race, and we find the doyen of cycling writers discussing a Tour that began in baking conditions in the Vendée, and continued through the canicule in central France and Normandy.

“The heatwave,” wrote Nicholson, “is becoming a serious worry.” He describes the late Raymond “Pou-Pou” Poulidor as “an old sweat” – pun alert – “in legionnaire matters”, who was “careful to limit himself to two litres of water on a stage … it is part of the collective wisdom of the peloton that too much water leads to depression and fatigue.” Tell that to the Tour men of 2026 as they glug down one bidon after another.

With some still unable to accept humanity’s role in climate chaos, we tackle common misconceptions and deceptions

Some people – and media organisations – still have difficulty connecting the heatwaves currently gripping much of the world and human-caused climate chaos. Others are in outright denial. So how to address their evasions, distractions and lies?

The Guardian has trawled through climate sceptics’ claims and put their doubts to one of the UK’s top climate scientists, Prof Ed Hawkins at the University of Reading.

Teachers call for schools to be urgently adapted for hot weather amid reports of nausea, fainting and heatstroke

The extreme heat that has hit the UK twice in the past few weeks has left teachers struggling to cope as temperatures in some classrooms climb above 40C, with pupils and staff suffering from heatstroke, nausea and headaches.

Teachers say they have been desperately trying to keep children safe, with some covering younger pupils in wet paper towels as they lie on the floor, while older students have been given trays of water under their desks to put their feet in.

They’ve got a chance in hell

• See more of Fiona Katauskas’s cartoons here

Trump administration urged to relist a species in ‘very, very serious trouble’ under Endangered Species Act

Climate change is driving a gray whale “catastrophic mortality event” in the Pacific Ocean as melting sea ice depletes food sources and the animals starve, environmental groups warn.

Meanwhile, a range of other issues, like ship strikes, oil spills, microplastic pollution, algal blooms and Russian harvesting are also probably contributing to the die-off that has nearly halved the whales’ estimated population. It fell from 20,000 in 2019 to fewer than 13,000 this year, and the deaths appear to be accelerating.

As UK swelters in another heatwave, 50-minute Chris Packham film outlines threats to security, economy and health

MPs are calling on the UK government to host a televised national climate emergency briefing in response to what has been described as the most “insidious threat to our society”.

In November, in the “first-of-its-kind, national emergency briefing”, nine experts gave stark assessments in Westminster Hall of the scale of the changes needed to adapt the country to the rapidly changing climate and ecological landscape.

Critics accuse president of ‘fattening the wallets of his cronies’ as working Americans face higher energy rates

The Trump administration has directly spent $2.7bn of taxpayer money on its crusade against wind power while pouring $1.125bn into boosting coal, which critics say is pushing up Americans’ bills.

They say the moves are evidence that the president aims to serve fossil-fuel companies like those which donated record sums to his presidential campaign, rather than the working-class Americans to whom he pledged to lower energy bills and other costs.

In Iceland, people commemorated its first glacier formally declared lost to climate change. Western culture needs more of these rituals

I remember interviewing a North Atlantic right whale expert years ago. He was a practical, science-minded man. But as we discussed a female whale that had lost her calf, he became visibly emotional. She had lost the previous one, too, struck by a ship. He seemed almost embarrassed by the depth of his feeling.

I wasn’t surprised. I found his grief honorable.

Concentrations of gas were continuously raised in Europe during June hot spell, with potentially deadly effects

Widespread air pollution was a feature of June’s record-breaking heat across western Europe and is likely to increase again as the UK experiences its third heatwave of the summer.

UK weather warnings for extreme heat from 22 June were followed by a rare high air pollution alert from the London mayor.

Britain expands heat alerts while estimates suggest June’s death toll could surpass 20,000 across continent

The UK is sweltering through the peak of its third heatwave of the year as countries around Europe struggle to recover from an early onslaught of baking summer heat.

Punishing temperatures pushed higher by fossil fuel pollution have broken records across the continent in recent weeks. Western Europe experienced its hottest June on record, scientists confirmed on Thursday, accompanied by high global ocean temperatures that could cause “mass-mortality events” for some species.

Exclusive: ‘The preferred policy is, of course, a carbon price,’ Dr Huw McKay says, amid slowdown in BHP action on emissions

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A former chief economist at mining company BHP says stronger climate policy by governments is needed to “move the needle” and incentivise tough decarbonisation decisions at major resource companies.

Internal documents, leaked to Guardian Australia and the ABC earlier this year, showed BHP had delayed vast renewables projects in the Pilbara, scrapped a project that would have delivered significant cuts to global emissions, and war-gamed options to push the electrification of its polluting diesel truck and train fleets into the next two decades.

Most cases used to be seen after exertion or being left in cars, but extreme heat has widened risk

Extreme temperatures are causing heatstroke in pets even when they are restricted to homes and gardens, vets have warned, as parts of the UK enter the third heatwave of the year.

Temperatures have reached 40C or more in recent weeks in countries including Germany, France and Spain, with western Europe experiencing its hottest June on record. While such events have been linked to hundreds of excess deaths in people, the rising mercury is also taking its toll on animals.

Temperatures across ravaged region 3C above average as scientists warn of risks for people, ecosystems and infrastructure

• Record wildfires in Europe show failure to adapt carries a mounting cost

Western Europe has been scorched by its hottest June on record, scientists have said, as the UK enters its third heatwave of the year and wildfires ravage France and Spain.

Inflamed by carbon pollution, the deadly June heatwave helped push surface air temperatures for the region 3.06C above their average from recent decades, according to the EU’s Copernicus climate monitoring service.

They suck up energy and water, and blast out heat. Just who is better off from all this investment – aside from tech bros?

The two great existential threats of our time – the climate crisis and AI – come hurtling together in the explosion of datacentres across Australia and around the world.

You can hardly avoid hearing about them these days, either with awed reverence of the promised benefits to humankind or with fear and anger given the implications for the climate, inflation, jobs and even housing affordability.

Experts warn that some marine species are at risk of ‘mass mortality events’ in ever-warming oceans

UK waters are being hit with an “extreme” marine heatwave, the Met Office has said, as scientists warn that high ocean temperatures globally could result in “mass-mortality events” for some species.

The forecasters said these elevated temperatures have developed rapidly because of last month’s heat dome, during which most of Europe sweltered in its worst ever heatwave that scientists said would have been impossible without the climate crisis.

Climate crisis prompts calls for workplace temperature limits and rights to heat breaks and adjusted working hours

As Europe’s sweltering summer continues, trades unions are mounting a push for new laws to counter deadly heat stress that is linked to an estimated 230 workplace deaths a year.

This year’s toll may be even higher, with 1,300 excess European deaths already connected to the June heatwave by the World Health Organization, and other estimates running as high as 20,000.

Estonia, Luxembourg and UK are the top three in biennial Yale University index in tackling pollution and other issues

Much of the world has made encouraging strides in reducing toxic problems such as water and air pollution that have long plagued communities. But there is still a widespread lack of progress among countries in dealing with the climate crisis, according to the latest edition of an influential environmental scorecard.

The biennial Yale University index again ranks Estonia as the best-performing of 177 assessed countries, after strong recent efforts to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions and protect its ecosystems. Luxembourg is second, and the UK is third, having moved up from fifth place in the 2024 index.