The Guardian Climate Change

The assessment, mandated by Congress, is used by federal and local governments to prep for climate disasters

Donald Trump’s administration has dismissed all contributors to the US government’s flagship study on how to prepare for climate change impacts, prompting strong criticism from experts over a “senseless” move.

The climate assessment is used by federal and local governments to understand how to prepare for climate crisis impacts including from extreme heat, hurricanes, flooding and drought.

Exclusive: As they wait on latest weather forecasts, concertgoers delay buying tickets. But this has caused some major events to cancel

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Music festivals are a threatened species that could die out if they fail to adapt to the climate crisis.

While soaring insurance and production costs, disruptions to supply chains, mass cancellations and shifts in consumer buying habits have all contributed to a flailing live music scene, extreme and unpredictable weather is an underlying contributor to these factors, an RMIT University report has found.

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Former PM claims net zero policies losing public support and says there should be greater focus on carbon capture

Tony Blair has called for the government to change course on climate, suggesting a strategy that limits fossil fuels in the short term or encourages people to limit consumption is “doomed to fail”.

In comments that have prompted a backlash within Labour, the former prime minister suggested the UK government should focus less on renewables and more on technological solutions such as carbon capture.

Climate experts say warming atmosphere from climate change could fuel severe freezing rain and ice storms like the one that hit the upper midwest last month

Winter has been slow to release its icy grip from the upper midwest this year, and in northern Michigan, its effects will be keenly felt for months, perhaps years.

A devastating ice storm that hit late last month has left an estimated 3m acres of trees snapped in half or damaged from the weight of up to an inch-and-a-half of ice across the northern part of lower Michigan.

Scientists on Union glacier in Antarctica fear the region is reaching a dangerous tipping point

• Words and photographs by James Whitlow Delano

Every time Dr Ricardo Jaña crosses the turbulent seas that separate Chile from Antarctica, it feels like his first time. The glaciologist at the Chilean Antarctic Institute (Inach) has sailed each year for 12 years through the Drake Passage, where the prevailing westerly winds, unimpeded by any land mass, raise the waters in chaotic waves that lash his boat.

“I feel powerless and resigned to the forces of nature,” says Jaña, who is the research chief at the Union Glacier Joint Scientific Polar Station.

Jaña skis around the glacier making global navigation satellite system measurements

World now in era of repressive regimes’ impunity, climate inaction and unchecked corporate power, says report

The first 100 days of Donald Trump’s presidency have “supercharged” a global rollback of human rights, pushing the world towards an authoritarian era defined by impunity and unchecked corporate power, Amnesty International warns today.

In its annual report on the state of human rights in 150 countries, the organisation said the immediate ramifications of Trump’s second term had been the undermining of decades of progress and the emboldening of authoritarian leaders.

Advocates say workers risk their health and fear speaking out about conditions amid Trump’s immigration crackdown

On a sunny day in February three workers swept up the piles of ash left behind on an Altadena driveway from when the Eaton fire raged through the Los Angeles neighborhood the month before.

The flames of the blaze had consumed nearly every home on the street, leaving only brick chimneys and charred vehicles. Red signs at the entrances of properties warned in English: “Unsafe, do not enter or occupy … entry may result in death or injury.” Hazards such as lead paint, asbestos and batteries were strewn amongst the ashes, but few workers cleaning the neighborhood that day wore masks or other personal protective equipment (PPE).

These days they call him Ian the renewable energy is expensive potato

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In today’s newsletter: Notorious for its disruptive protests, the group’s radical tactics may be best known as a turning point in climate resistance

Good morning.

This weekend Just Stop Oil put down their soup cans, hung up their hi-vis and disbanded, saying that now the UK government had stopped extracting oil and gas from the North Sea, they had achieved what they set out to do back in 2022.

Ukraine | US President Donald Trump has said he thinks Volodymyr Zelenskyy is ready to give up Crimea, despite his Ukrainian counterpart’s previous assertions on the Black Sea peninsula annexed by Russia in 2014.

Canada | The suspect in a car-ramming attack that killed 11 people and injured dozens at a Filipino heritage festival in the Canadian city of Vancouver has been charged with eight counts of second degree murder, prosecutors have said.

UK economy | UK banks’ earnings reports will be studied this week for signs of turmoil linked to Donald Trump’s tariff drama, with uncertainty over global growth likely to weigh on lenders with heavy exposure to China, including HSBC.

​Politics | The Liberal Democrats have publicly challenged Nigel Farage to give details of his party’s donations after calculating that Reform UK spent more than £2m on personalised letters to postal voters before the local elections.

Health | Consuming large amounts of ultra-processed food (UPF) increases the risk of an early death, according to a international study that has reignited calls for a crackdown on UPF.

My fear growing up was gun violence. But a bigger threat to my body may have come from an invisible villain

Everyone experiences a moment that shapes who they are – a moment when childhood innocence is lost, and the burdens and traumas of the world become clearer.

For me, that moment occurred in elementary school when my friend discovered a gun in Englewood, New Jersey’s Denning Park. For days, I worried about what might be lurking behind the trees and in the shadows. This anxiety lingered through high school; I even wrote in my local newspaper that “I couldn’t remember anything more frightening for a young girl in elementary school”.

Conservationists fear fallout from president’s proclamation on fishing in federally protected area of Pacific Ocean

Environmental conservation groups are expressing major concerns over Donald Trump’s recent proclamation to reverse fishing regulations across the Pacific Islands Heritage Marine national monument, a federally protected area in the central Pacific Ocean spanning nearly 500,000 sq miles.

As one of the most pristine tropical marine environments in the world, the monument is now at risk following Trump’s decision last week to unleash American commercial fishing in the area with far-reaching environmental consequences.

Global heating sceptics now argue it is more palatable with the electorate to pivot from climate denialism to anti-renewable energy scepticism

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The only regular meeting of Australia’s Saltbush Club takes place most Thursday evenings at a golf club in Five Dock, in Sydney’s inner west. The group’s founding members – a collection of the country’s most prominent and avid global heating deniers – include Gina Rinehart, the former Queensland premier Campbell Newman, former Business Council of Australia head Hugh Morgan, and Coalition MP Colin Boyce.

At Five Dock, the crowd is mostly old and mostly white. They sometimes host contrarian speakers. But about six years ago, this gathering of climate sceptics decided to stop talking publicly about the climate.

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Council housing microgrid and tube-powered heat network among schemes supported by Mayor of London fund

• London councils yet to spend £130m in local climate funds

Carbon offset funding received from developers should be spent mostly on energy efficiency, renewable energy and district heating projects, according to guidance from the mayor of London. But some councils say the amount of funding they receive is often not enough to cover the cost of these kinds of projects.

However, others have found solutions to this by combining their offset cash with other sources of funding to pay for major projects. Perhaps the most innovative example of this is Islington council’s award-winning Bunhill heat and power network in north London, which has received more than £5m in offset funding.

There is a cynical, ‘anti-space’ ideology emerging, especially on some parts of the left. But this is misguided

John F Kennedy once called space-faring “the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which Man has ever embarked”. We go to space because, he said – like George Mallory said of his reason to conquer Everest – “it is there.”

While it is truer to say that the race for space between Washington and Moscow was driven as much by cold war competition as by humanity’s pioneering spirit and the imperatives of scientific exploration, billions of ordinary people around the world recognized as much at the time and still were able to marvel at our species’ accomplishments in the heavens regardless of the flag under which they were achieved, from Sputnik to the moon landing.

Developed countries pressed to submit national plans well before Cop30 as time runs out to avoid 1.5C temperature rise

Rich countries are dragging their feet on producing new plans to combat the climate crisis, thereby putting the poor into greater danger, some of the world’s most vulnerable nations have warned.

All governments are supposed to publish new plans this year on cutting greenhouse gas emissions, but so far only a small majority have done so, and some of the plans submitted have been inadequate to the scale of action needed.

The Anohni and the Johnsons singer is collaborating with marine scientists for two special shows at Sydney’s Vivid festival that will show the reef’s plight

Anohni Hegarty is about to go to the Great Barrier Reef for the first time. “I feel like I’m going to Auschwitz,” she says nervously. “On the one hand, I’m so excited to go because the landscape is so beautiful, and I know there’s going to be so much that’s gorgeous. And yet, I’m also scared.”

In a week, the British-born, New York-based avant garde singer of Anohni and the Johnsons is flying to Lizard Island, a paradise of powdery sands on the reef, 1,600km north-west of Brisbane. Its luxury villas and bluest of blue waters are a stark contrast to the grim nature of Anohni’s assignment: documenting the current state of the world’s biggest coral reef.

Trees are being cleared for rainforest mega-event – but state governor says a ‘new history’ is under way

Fake metal trees have been set into the concrete ground of the Amazonian host city of this year’s climate summit, prompting scandalised contrasts with the once-living vegetation that has been cleared in preparation for Cop30 in Brazil.

But in an unlikely convergence of views, both the centre-right state governor and leftwing social movements insist this is a storm in a plant pot compared with the darkening geopolitical threats to the world’s biggest diplomatic gathering, which will take place in November in Belém.

Hurricane Katrina: Mississippi Remembers captures the grief and resilience of survivors in the Magnolia state

Twenty years ago this August, the United States Gulf coast was irrevocably changed when Hurricane Katrina, one of the deadliest and costliest storms to ever hit the country, made landfall. Making landfall as a strong category 3, the storm, which was so vast it stretched the length of the Mississippi Gulf coast all the way into Alabama, hit the Mississippi-Louisiana coastal border before continuing northward.

Since then, superstorms fueled by the climate crisis have become relatively commonplace in the country, but the impact of Katrina endures to this day. Immediately following the storm, the country and world were enthralled by tragic stories out of New Orleans, where the levees failed to a catastrophic effect and the local, state and federal responses were disastrous. But Mississippi, which received the maximum impact from the storm surge, was largely left out of the national narrative around Katrina.

The Herds project from the team behind Little Amal will travel 20,000km taking its message on environmental crisis across the world

Hundreds of life-size animal puppets have begun a 20,000km (12,400 mile) journey from central Africa to the Arctic Circle as part of an ambitious project created by the team behind Little Amal, the giant puppet of a Syrian girl that travelled across the world.

The public art initiative called The Herds, which has already visited Kinshasa and Lagos, will travel to 20 cities over four months to raise awareness of the climate crisis.

Hearing scheduled for Friday as residents receive anonymous leaflets that downplay pollution dangers

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company is stirring controversy in Memphis, Tennessee. That’s where he’s building a massive supercomputer to power his company xAI. Community residents and environmental activists say that since the supercomputer was fired up last summer it has become one of the biggest air polluters in the county. But some local officials have championed the billionaire, saying he’s investing in Memphis.

The first public hearing with the health department is scheduled for Friday, where county officials will hear from all sides of the debate. In the run-up to the hearing, secretive fliers claiming xAI has low emissions were sent to residents of historically Black neighborhoods; at the same time, environmental groups have been amassing data about how much pollution the AI company is likely generating.