The Guardian


Wildfires drive record leap in global level of climate-heating CO2
Data for 2024 shows humanity is moving yet deeper into a dangerous world of supercharged extreme weather
Wildfires that blazed around the world in 2024 helped to drive a record annual leap in carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, surprising scientists. The data shows humanity is moving yet deeper into a dangerous world of supercharged extreme weather.
The CO2 level at the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii jumped by 3.6 parts per million (ppm) to 427ppm, far above the 280ppm level before the large-scale burning of fossil fuels sparked the climate crisis. The Mauna Loa observations, known as the Keeling curve, began in 1958 and are the longest running direct measurements of CO2.
Continue reading...I’ve been climbing Tasmanian mountains for years – but I’m terrified of heights | Ben Walter
Our society emphasises the value of conquering and overcoming your fears – but I can live with the idea of not climbing every mountain
Earlier this year, I finally climbed Mount Anne. This has taken an unlikely amount of time – I’ve been climbing Tasmanian mountains for years, but had never been up one of the island’s signature summits.
A “peak bagging” hobby is great fun, and takes you out to all sorts of interesting places. Some Tasmanians set themselves to climb the Abels, a list of 158 mountains that are at least 1100m high, but the list compiled by the Hobart Walking Club, the one I follow, is far more ridiculous – a total of 481 summits to find your way up. A list that huge seems bigger than most of them.
Continue reading...Australia is becoming an uninsurable nation. There may only be one solution | Nicki Hutley
With the outlook for risk of fire, flood and other disasters increasing, this is not a problem that will go away
As we watch the horror of the Los Angeles fires, Australians are painfully reminded of our own vulnerability to climate change, which continues to exacerbate the impact and frequency of these unnatural disasters.
The images of loss and destruction in LA are particularly painful to those who have experienced such losses first-hand in Australia.
Nicki Hutley is an independent economist and councillor with the Climate Council
Continue reading...UK accused of undermining democratic rights with climate protest crackdown
British director of Human Rights Watch attacks ‘dangerous hypocrisy’ of government
Britain’s crackdown on climate protest is setting “a dangerous precedent” around the world and undermining democratic rights, the UK director of Human Rights Watch has said.
Yasmine Ahmed accused the Labour government of hypocrisy over its claims to be committed to human rights and international law.
Continue reading...Revealed: drinking water sources in England polluted with forever chemicals
Exclusive: Water industry calls for PFAS ban after analysis of sampling data shows contamination across country
- What are PFAS, how toxic are they and how do you become exposed?
- The Guardian view on chemical pollution: the UK can’t ignore the risks from PFAS
Raw drinking water sources across England are polluted with toxic forever chemicals, new analysis has revealed, prompting the water sector to demand that ministers ban the substances and polluters pay for the astronomical cleanup costs.
The areas covered by Affinity Water and Anglian Water were found to be particularly badly affected, and experts have said they fear “we are drastically underestimating the size of the problem”.
Continue reading...UK farmland being contaminated by ‘forever chemicals’ linked to cancers, report finds
Levels of PFAS chemicals found in sludge destined for British land would not be considered safe for allotments
- Where are the UK’s ‘forever chemical’ hotspots?
- Industry using ‘tobacco playbook’ to fend off ‘forever chemicals’ regulation
- The Guardian view: the UK can’t ignore the risks from PFAS
Sewage sludge spread on farmland is contaminating soils, water and potentially the food chain with “forever chemicals”, and whistleblowers from the Environment Agency say the systems in place to prevent such pollution are “not fit for purpose”.
Watershed Investigations and the Guardian obtained samples of treated sewage sludge destined to be spread on land from five different catchments, and found levels of PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) forever chemicals that would not be considered safe on allotments, as well as levels of flame-retardant chemicals described by experts as “exceptionally high”.
Continue reading...The media needs to show how the climate crisis is fueling the LA wildfires
With few exceptions, the news has shied away from showing how the unfolding climate crisis plays a large role in the disaster
Last week, as the Sunset fire was bearing down on her Los Angeles home, Allison Agsten approached a group of television news crews gathering in her neighborhood. Did any of them plan to mention the role of the climate crisis in their reporting?
The question was professional as well as personal for Agsten, who runs a climate journalism center at the University of Southern California and has trained reporters on how to connect the climate crisis to what’s happening in the world. She has lived in her home along Runyon Canyon, near Hollywood, for a decade.
Continue reading...Window to stop decline of England’s nature closing fast, watchdog says
Office for Environmental Protection calls for urgent action after finding government is falling short on most targets
The window to stop the decline of England’s nature is swiftly closing, the environmental watchdog has said, as its latest report finds that the government is falling short on most of its targets to improve the environment.
Some of Labour’s actions, however, including setting up a water commission and writing a new environmental improvement plan, were praised by the Office for Environmental Protection (OEP) in its annual review of how the government was meeting the legally binding environment targets.
Continue reading...Economic growth could fall 50% over 20 years from climate shocks, say actuaries
Exclusive: Report by risk experts says previous assessments ignored severe effects of climate crisis
Global economic growth could plummet by 50% between 2070 and 2090 from the catastrophic shocks of climate change unless immediate action by political leaders is taken to decarbonise and restore nature, according to a new report.
The stark warning from risk management experts the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries (IFoA) hugely increases the estimate of risk to global economic wellbeing from climate change impacts such as fires, flooding, droughts, temperature rises and nature breakdown. In a report with scientists at the University of Exeter, published on Thursday, the IFoA, which uses maths and statistics to analyse financial risk for businesses and governments, called for accelerated action by political leaders to tackle the climate crisis.
Continue reading...New weather system to strike eastern Australia, with Sydney on ‘southern cusp’ of storms
Eastern NSW, particularly northern rivers, and Gold Coast at high risk for severe thunderstorms and winds on Thursday, BoM forecasts
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Persistent rain and strong winds will sweep across New South Wales into the weekend, the Bureau of Meteorology predicts, with Sydney on the “southern cusp” of the stormy weather.
Angus Hines, a senior meteorologist at the Bureau of Meteorology, said Sydney’s weather could shift from storms to a “dreary” mix of wind, rain and cloud. It would be “persistently windy” and “quite chilly”, he said.
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Continue reading...Australians should be angry about another year of climate inaction. But don’t let your anger turn into despair | Greg Jericho
I’ve been writing about climate change for years. I know my graphs won’t change minds, but facts matter
2025 has not started well, and you should be bloody angry.
We are less than five months from the federal election and both major parties’ climate change policies are an amalgam of indolence and lies.
Continue reading...What do the Los Angeles fires tell us about the coming water wars? | Judith Levine
Will water soon be a marketable commodity or a priceless public good?
There’s a scene in the film Mad Max: Fury Road where the evil ruler Immortan Joe, gazing down from a cliff upon his parched, emaciated subjects, turns two turbines, and water gushes from three gigantic sluices. The wretched masses surge forward to catch the deluge in their pots and bowls. And as imperiously as he opened the gates, Joe shuts them. “Do not become addicted to water,” he roars. “It will take hold of you.” But, of course, he already has taken hold of them by withholding, essentially, life.
We don’t have to await the dystopian future for the water wars to begin. The struggle over water, between private interests and the public good, the powerful and the weak, is raging now. From Love Canal to Flint, Michigan; Bolivia to Ukraine to Tunisia; budget-cutting, privatization, corporate malfeasance and climate crises are conspiring to create political violence, mass migration, property damage and death.
Continue reading...Climate ‘whiplash’ events increasing exponentially around world
Global heating means atmosphere can drive both extreme droughts and floods with rapid switches
Climate “whiplash” between extremely wet and dry conditions, which spurred catastrophic fires in Los Angeles, is increasing exponentially around the world because of global heating, analysis has found.
Climate whiplash is a rapid swing between very wet or dry conditions and can cause far more harm to people than individual extreme events alone. In recent years, whiplash events have been linked to disastrous floods in east Africa, Pakistan and Australia and to worsening heatwaves in Europe and China.
Continue reading...‘We’re very fortunate’: stargazers to see almost all planets in the night sky at the same time
Expert says the planet parade will be best viewed around 21 January and recommends downloading a sky map app to help spot them
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Stargazers are being treated to a rare “planet parade” this month, with most of the planets visible in the night sky at the same time.
Astrophysicist Dr Rebecca Allen, co-director of Swinburne University’s space technology and industry institute, said it would be a rare opportunity to see so many planets lined up above the horizon, especially outer ones like Neptune.
Continue reading...‘I applaud the EPA’: agency launches formal review of five toxic chemicals
Review could lead to bans on plastic chemicals including vinyl chloride, compound at center of 2023 Ohio train wreck
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is launching a formal review of five highly toxic plastic chemicals, including vinyl chloride, the notorious compound at the center of the East Palestine, Ohio, train wreck fire. The move could lead to strong limits or bans on the substances.
Vinyl chloride is most commonly used in PVC pipe and packaging production, but is also cancerous and highly flammable. For about 50 years, the federal government has considered limits on the substance, but industry has thwarted most regulatory efforts, hidden the substances’ risks and is already mobilizing against the new review.
Continue reading...3M knew firefighting foams containing PFAS were toxic, documents show
Exclusive: Newly uncovered documents reveal chemicals giant was aware ‘environmentally neutral’ products did not biodegrade
The multibillion-dollar chemicals company 3M told customers its firefighting foams were harmless and biodegradable when it knew they contained toxic substances so persistent they are now known as “forever chemicals” and banned in many countries including the UK, newly uncovered documents show.
From the 1960s until 2003, 3M made foams containing PFOS and PFOA (perfluorooctane sulfonate and perfluorooctanoic acid), synthetic chemicals that can take tens of thousands of years to degrade in the environment and have been linked to cancers and a range of other health problems such as thyroid disease, high cholesterol, hormonal problems and fertility issues.
Continue reading...Scouts embrace rewilding to connect UK teenagers with nature
Adventure centre projects will promote interest in natural world, boosting young people’s wellbeing
A £150,000 initiative to tackle the “teenage dip” in nature connectedness will involve the Scout Association introducing rewilding to its adventure centres across the UK.
The funding, announced on Wednesday by the environmental charity Rewilding Britain, will support 11 projects aimed at putting young people at the heart of nature restoration. Several focus explicitly on reversing the sharp decline in young people’s engagement with the natural world during adolescence.
Continue reading...Major banks are abandoning their climate alliance en masse. So much for ‘woke capital’ | Adrienne Buller
The scope of the Cop26 net zero banking alliance may have been limited, but the exodus of six US banks signifies a seismic political shift
Last week, as flames began tearing through greater Los Angeles, claiming multiple lives and forcing more than 100,000 people to evacuate, JP Morgan became the sixth major US bank to quit the Net Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA) since the start of December. A smaller story, certainly, but the departure of top US banks from the NZBA in the weeks since Donald Trump’s re-election nonetheless speaks to a seismic political shift prompting major financial institutions to turn away from the climate-related commitments they made in the optimistic years after the Paris agreement.
The NZBA is a voluntary network of global banks committed to “align lending and investment portfolios with net zero emissions by 2050”. It is part of the umbrella Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ), which counts among its membership dozens of “alliances” covering the various segments of global finance. For its part, the NZBA requires new members to submit science-aligned targets within 18 months of joining, alongside disclosing plans for and status updates on meeting them.
Adrienne Buller is director of The Break Down and the author of The Value of a Whale: on the illusions of green capitalism
Continue reading...I’m a climate scientist and my house in LA burned down. My work has never been more real
I feel like I am safe in saying that we are not thriving on our changing planet – and we will not in the coming decades
My house in Altadena burned down in the wildfires on Wednesday. It all happened quickly. On Tuesday around 7pm, my wife and daughters went to a hotel as a precaution. I left the house with the dogs when the mandatory evacuation order came in around 3am. As best as I can put the timeline together, our home burned down around the same time that the sun came up, and I was able to drive in and see the damage around 2pm.
Neighbors that went in after said it looked like a “war zone”. I have never been in a war zone thankfully, but I didn’t think so. There was nothing violent or chaotic about it. No one stopped me from driving in. There were no sirens. I stood alone – no one else around – in front of my house that was at that point just a fireplace and chimney. The house across the street was about halfway done with burning down, and the house behind ours had just started to burn.
Benjamin Hamlington is a research scientist at Nasa Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a team lead at Nasa Sea Level Change team
Continue reading...RAF bases are hotspots of ‘forever chemical’ groundwater pollution, MoD documents show
Exclusive: Sampling results show ‘extremely concerning’ concentrations of PFOS and PFOA at sites across UK
RAF bases are hotspots of toxic “forever chemical” pollution in water, analysis of Ministry of Defence documents has revealed.
Moreover, some of the highest concentrations of these chemicals in British drinking water sources are near RAF bases, official sampling results obtained by the Guardian and Watershed Investigations show.
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