The Guardian Climate Change

In a city where surfing is a way of life, the wait to get back in the water has been agonizing. But new research offers a glimmer of hope

Alex Sinunu was used to surfing three or four times a week in Santa Monica Bay – after all, the beach was just a mile from his home and he could ride his bike there with his board. But ever since the megafires that swept through neighboring Pacific Palisades in early January, the ocean has been filled with ash, debris – and endless questions.

The massive blaze consumed thousands of homes and other structures, many of them on the edge of the Pacific coastline. Subsequent rainstorms sent tons of debris washing into the ocean, turned the water brown and raised fears about the toxins that could be coming from all the charred remains of buildings and cars – including asbestos, lithium-ion batteries and plastics.

Opposition leader says he will ‘leave it to other experts to talk about’ while simultaneously criticising Labor’s ‘secret’ climate targets

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Peter Dutton is, for now at least, keeping in the shadows the modelling that he claims shows his gas policy will reduce electricity prices, while simultaneously criticising Anthony Albanese for not releasing Labor modelling on climate targets.

On day one of the election campaign, the opposition leader said the Liberals had commissioned modelling on his plan to increase gas supply in Australia, but he repeatedly declined to say what the model found about price impacts.

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Tao Leigh Goffe argues climate breakdown is the mutant offspring of European scientific racism and colonialism

We all think we know what is causing the breakdown of the planet’s climate: burning fossil fuels that release carbon dioxide, change the chemistry of the air and trap more heat from the sun, leading to rising temperatures.

But Tao Leigh Goffe, an associate professor of Africana, Puerto Rican and Latino Studies at the City University of New York, wants us to visualise a far more specific cause: the shunting of a ship’s prow on to the sandbank of a paradise island in 1492.

Greenpeace lost – not because it did something wrong but because it was denied a fair trial

The stunning $667m verdict against Greenpeace last week is a direct attack on the climate movement, Indigenous peoples and the first amendment.

The North Dakota case is so deeply flawed – at its core, the trial was really about crushing dissent – that I believe there is a good chance it will be reversed on appeal and ultimately backfire against the Energy Transfer pipeline company.

Nasa data for 2024 shows reversal of dynamic in which melting ice usually accounts for majority of increase

Normally, two-thirds of sea level rise is due to melting ice from mountain glaciers and Greenland and Antarctic ice caps, and one-third from the thermal expansion of the oceans.

Last year, the hottest year on record, this was reversed, with warmer water accounting for two-thirds of the sea level rise of 0.59cm (0.23in) – considerably more than the 0.43cm scientists were expecting. Nasa, the US agency that produces the figures from its satellite data, believes that the mixing of hotter surface waters with cooler sea at depth during an El Niño year may have caused this unexpected blip, although more violent winds could also have been a contributing factor.

The decision to put documents on the assassination of John F Kennedy into the public domain comes alongside a ‘digital book burning’ of data

What does the public need to know? The Trump White House boasts of being the most transparent administration in history – though commentators have suggested that the inadvertent leak of military plans to a journalist may have happened because senior figures were using messaging apps such as Signal to avoid oversight. Last week, it released thousands of pages of documents on John F Kennedy’s assassination. Donald Trump has declared that Kennedy’s family and the American people “deserve transparency and truth”.

Strikingly, this stated commitment to sharing information comes as his administration defunds data collection and erases existing troves of knowledge from government websites. The main drivers appear to be the desire to remove “woke” content and global heating data, and the slashing of federal spending. Information resources are both the target and collateral damage. Other political factors may be affecting federal records too. Last month, Mr Trump sacked the head of the National Archives without explanation, after grumbling about the body’s involvement in the justice department’s investigation into his handling of classified documents.

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Less use of gas and coal in electricity supply and industry sectors drove reduction, Department for Energy Security and Net Zero says

The UK’s carbon emissions fell by 4% last year, according to official figures.

Provisional statistics published on Thursday by the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) show UK territorial greenhouse gas emissions were 371m tonnes carbon equivalent (MtCO2e) in 2024, down from 385 MtCO2e in 2023.

Net zero is a target that countries should be striving for to stop the climate crisis. But beyond the buzzword, it is a complex scientific concept – and if we get it wrong, the planet will keep heating.

Biodiversity and environment reporter Patrick Greenfield explains how a loophole in the 2015 Paris climate agreement allows countries to cheat their net zero targets through creative accounting, and how scientists want us to fix it

Gene Likens, who first identified acidic rainwater in 1960s, said the Trump administration’s ‘rollbacks are alarming’

The US could be plunged back into an era of toxic acid rain, an environmental problem thought to have been solved decades ago, due to the Donald Trump administration’s rollback of pollution protections, the scientist who discovered the existence of acid rain in North America has warned.

A blitzkrieg launched by Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on clean air and water regulations could revert the US to a time when cities were routinely shrouded in smog and even help usher back acid rain, according to Gene Likens, whose experiments helped identify acidic rainwater in the 1960s.

The biggest forest fire on record in South Korea has displaced thousands, charred large areas and killed at least 26 people in the south-eastern province of North Gyeongsang, authorities say. The affected areas have had only half the average rainfall this season, while the country has experienced more than double the number of fires this year than last.

Woo-Kyun Lee, a climatic environment professor, said a rapid increase in temperatures, prolonged dryness and stronger winds had exacerbated the fires. 'For this reason, wildfires in our country are bound to become more frequent, spread on a larger scale,' he said

• South Korea wildfires become biggest on record

Changes to the thermosphere caused by climate crisis could lead to increase in collisions

Chicken Licken warned that the sky was falling down, and now the climate crisis might be making that come true. Carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are cooling and contracting the upper atmosphere, even though these same gases warm the lower atmosphere.

A new concern is now up in the thermosphere at around 125-620 miles (200-1,000km) above Earth, where the International Space Station and about 11,900 satellites are in low Earth orbit, with the number of satellites rapidly increasing.

Sweeping synthesis of 2,000 global studies leaves no doubt about scale of problem and role of humans, say experts

Humans are driving biodiversity loss among all species across the planet, according to a synthesis of more than 2,000 studies.

The exhaustive global analysis leaves no doubt about the devastating impact humans are having on Earth, according to researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology (Eawag) and the University of Zurich. The study – which accounted for nearly 100,000 sites across all continents – found that human activities had resulted in “unprecedented effects on biodiversity”, according to the paper, published in Nature.

Third of global GDP could be lost this century if climate crisis runs unchecked, says report

Taking strong action to tackle the climate crisis will increase countries’ economic growth, rather than damage their finances as critics of net zero policies have claimed, research from the world’s economic watchdog has found.

Setting ambitious targets on cutting greenhouse gas emissions, and setting out the policies to achieve them, would result in a net gain to global GDP by the end of the next decade, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), in a joint report with the UN Development Programme.

Data collected by two planes suggests large open-cut coalmine in Bowen Basin is releasing methane at higher rates than official estimates

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Emissions of the potent greenhouse gas methane at a Queensland coalmine were likely between three and eight times higher than officially reported, according to UN-backed research that flew aircraft over the site.

Queensland’s open-cut coalmines are known to be a major source of methane and experts are worried that official figures could be a gross underestimation of actual emissions.

Neil Record, chair of Net Zero Watch, hosted the Conservative leader and others shortly before her policy U-turn

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Kemi Badenoch enjoyed a £14,000 week-long “residential” with her family along with a small group of the shadow cabinet courtesy of the Tory donor Neil Record, who chairs a climate sceptic lobby group.

The Conservative leader was joined by other members of the party team at a location in Gloucestershire during the February half-term; most of the shadow cabinet were not invited.

Every bee is precious, and as the weather gets more erratic I’m growing concerned about the effect it is having on their wellbeing

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• Photographs by Kate Medley

I’m an only child and grew up in the US in a time when children were free-range. My parents would open the door in the morning and say, “come back for meals.” I would disappear into the forest and wetlands. I loved the constant stories around me that I didn’t understand: the stories of animals.

When I was about seven there was a litter of kittens in the house, and a board crushed one of the kittens. The vet examined her mouth and said, “she’s not going to make it”, and minutes later she died in his hands. I couldn’t understand how he knew that – I wanted that superpower to understand animals, and that is why I wanted to become a vet. I got a degree and have been working as an environmental health scientist for more than 25 years.

UK Health Security Agency’s tool highlights viruses and bacteria, many not yet seen in the country, that could pose biosecurity risk

Deadly disease-causing organisms from pathogen families that include bird flu, plague and Ebola pose a threat to health in the UK and should be prioritised for research, government experts have said.

The first tool of its kind from the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) lists 24 types of viruses and bacteria where a lack of vaccines, tests and treatment, changes due to the climate crisis or growing drug resistance pose a biosecurity risk.

Algae blooms can be a problem for marine life and people but it’s not yet clear if warmer oceans and nutrient runoff are causing more of them

Confronting images of dead seadragons, fish and octopuses washed up on South Australian beaches – and disturbing reports of “more than 100” surfers and beachgoers experiencing flu-like symptoms after swimming or merely breathing in sea spray – attracted international concern last week.

Speculation about the likely cause ranged from pollution and algae to unusual bacterial infections or viruses. We can reveal the culprit was a tiny – but harmful – type of planktonic algae called Karenia mikimotoi.

With the cost of feeding a family up by an estimated £2,290, consumers, like many across Europe, are taking direct action

Marcel Demir was not impressed. The Swedish student had been monitoring the price of chocolate and crisps and had noticed that both had gone up astronomically.

“Absolutely, prices have gone up,” he said, standing outside a branch of Sweden’s grocery store chain Coop in Stockholm Central train station. “I usually buy crisps and chocolate and they’ve gone up a lot. Chocolate recently. Crisps over the last year.”

From our broken environmental laws to the role of gas, there are some big questions that remain unanswered by both major parties

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A national election campaign is days away and the focus in Canberra is on a federal budget that wasn’t going to happen until a tropical cyclone threatened southern Queensland a fortnight ago. The climate crisis and environment are expected to get passing mentions.

But there is a strong case that they should be at the forefront of debate over the next six weeks, understandable cost-of-living concerns notwithstanding.