Climate

In the hospital, I learned the first lesson of parenting: You are not in control of what is going to happen, nor can you predict it.

There’s no point trying to make plans around the whims of Trump. The PM instead needs to turn to Europe

To Elon Musk, I say this! To perform one Nazi salute at Donald Trump’s inauguration, while simultaneously offering full support to European neo-Nazis, might be considered a misfortune. To perform two Nazi salutes at Donald Trump’s inauguration, while simultaneously offering full support to European neo-Nazis, begins to look like carelessness.

I didn’t write that joke. I have cannibalised it from one by the gay Irish Victorian Oscar Wilde, a typical diversity hire who would have achieved nothing had his work not been promoted by the famously woke 19th-century British establishment. Luckily, Wilde was dead long before he had the opportunity to emigrate to the US and take an air traffic controller job from a more deserving straight white male, where his gayness would have caused planes to crash.

Stewart Lee tours Stewart Lee vs the Man-Wulf this year, with a Royal Festival Hall run in July

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Heading off the environmental crisis and growing the economy are not at odds. They are two sides of a coin – as our politicians should realise

If you care about the world we are handing on to future generations, the news on Thursday morning was dramatic. This January was the warmest on record; temperatures in 18 of the past 19 months have exceeded pre-industrial averages by 1.5C. There can be no comfort that the epoch-changing climate crisis is 20 or even 10 years away. It is already upon us.

Temperatures should have been moderated this winter by cooler air over the Pacific; it did not happen. Scientists are bewildered and scared. James Hansen, doyen of climate crisis research, believes that, unless this pace of deterioration is reversed, warm ocean waters flowing from the southern to the northern hemisphere will be trapped as vast sea currents cease. Sea levels will rise to impose a civilisational threat. It is a global imperative to dial down the rate of carbon emissions.

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Resilience is wearing thin in the town, with business owners facing mass booking cancellations and insurers turning their backs

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The tourist road from Dunkeld to Halls Gap is eerily quiet. Blackened trees stretch spidery branches towards a sky still smudged with smoke. The road is open but few cars take it save for a wildlife rescue vehicle inching slowly along, its occupants scanning the burnt-out forest for limping wallabies reported in the area. A lone currawong shrieks, invisible.

Fire ripped through this part of the Grampians/Gariwerd national park six weeks ago, and still burns on the other side of the mountain range – an immense rocky ridge jutting out through the smoke haze. But already new growth is starting to sprout. Green spikes burst from the charcoal stumps of grass-trees. Near a dry creek bed, tiny fern fronds unfurl out of the ash.

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The party’s agenda is about energy security, lower bills, economic growth and good jobs

• Ed Miliband is the Labour MP for Doncaster North and secretary of state for energy security and net zero

During four years in opposition and in the seven months since this government came to office, we have been clear: smart climate policy means not only protecting future generations from the biggest existential threat we face, but fighting to make working people better off today, growing our economy and confronting the economic injustices we face.

In a world where climate policy is being questioned, this government’s message to those in the Tory and Reform parties who say that we should go backwards on climate is simple: you are wrong, and this government is going to speed up, not slow down, the clean energy transition, because that is how to grow our economy and fight for working people through our Plan for Change.

Ed Miliband is the Labour MP for Doncaster North and secretary of state for energy security and net zero

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Scotland’s botanic gardens suffer ‘unimaginable’ loss of rare specimens

For more than a century, whenever winter came to Scotland, they stood tall against the wind and rain and snow. But last month, battered by Storm Éowyn, hundreds of rare and historic trees in the living collection of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh were lost.

The charity has four sites in Scotland. Its tallest tree in Edinburgh, a 166-year-old Himalayan cedar, fell during Éowyn’s gusts of up to 80mph, while Benmore Botanic Garden on the west coast has suffered “unimaginable” devastation.

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Aid projects were designed to help Central Americans withstand extreme weather at home. Their end could undercut Trump’s goal of reducing migration.

President Trump tangled with its forecasters during his first term. As he slashes government spending, many wonder what that means for weather data.

Developing countries urge biggest polluters to act as Trump’s return to the White House heightens geopolitical turmoil

The vast majority of governments are likely to miss a looming deadline to file vital plans that will determine whether or not the world has a chance of avoiding the worst ravages of climate breakdown.

Despite the urgency of the crisis, the UN is relatively relaxed at the prospect of the missed date. Officials are urging countries instead to take time to work harder on their targets to cut greenhouse gas emissions and divest from fossil fuels.

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Exclusive: Analysis suggests development in flood regions result of Labour push for 1.5m new homes in five years

More than 100,000 new homes will be built on the highest-risk flood zones in England in the next five years as part of the government’s push for 1.5m extra properties by the end of this parliament, Guardian analysis suggests.

Building on areas with the highest risk of serious flooding is supposed to be discouraged. Experts say development should be avoided unless absolutely necessary because there is a significant chance of regular deluges, which will flood the properties, cause hundreds of millions of pounds of economic damage and make homes uninsurable.

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Some have halted work on the Biden-era $5 billion program to build E.V. charging stations. Others plan to keep building. Most are confused.

The move would run counter to a Biden administration push to cut back on single-use plastic, which was considered a milestone.

Musk believes Tesla’s rivals are more vulnerable to Trump’s moves against electric vehicles

Donald Trump’s attempts to slash incentives for electric cars would cause sales of the vehicles to plummet, with this effort cheered on by a seemingly confounding supporter – Elon Musk, the billionaire chief executive of Tesla and erstwhile champion for action on the climate crisis.

Trump has said that he “will revoke the electric vehicle mandate, saving our auto industry and keeping my sacred pledge to our great American auto workers”.

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The central bank has halted hiring to align with a White House directive and pulled back its work on climate change.

Emboldened by President Trump, West Virginia and other states are challenging a law that makes corporate polluters pay for past emissions.

Billions of pounds from energy bill payers to run out in 2027 but could be extended as soon as Monday

Green campaigners fear ministers are poised to award billions of pounds in fresh subsidies to Drax power station, despite strong concerns that burning trees to produce electricity is bad for the environment.

Drax burns wood to generate about 8% of the UK’s “green” power, and 4% of overall electricity. This is classed as “low-carbon” because the harvested trees are replaced by others that take up carbon from the atmosphere as they grow.

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By using a fiber-optic cable to detect tiny vibrations a mile below the surface, scientists discovered a surprising way that ice sheets move.

What the economics of coal-rich states like Wyoming tells us about the transition away from the dirtiest fossil fuel.

Producers are struggling to stave off environmental threats to Chablis’s distinctive character.

A green belt circling the capital of Burkina Faso is preparing the country for the climate crisis

As far as the eye can see is a hodge-podge of trees, vegetable plots and water tanks. Up close it may look like a gigantic allotment, but this unusual project actually stretches for 2,000 hectares (4,942 acres), a green belt that now completely rings the city of Ouagadougou.

The green belt began life many years ago in the 1970s, with the aim of building a protective wall against the encroaching desert that lies beyond the greenery, just a few steps away. In Burkina Faso, one-third of the territory – about 9 million hectares of productive land – is degraded, with an estimated average degradation rate of 360,000 hectares per year, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). “Burkina Faso is not a climatically favoured country, but the drought of the 1980s exacerbated the problem, leading to significant population movements toward less degraded areas,” explains Sidnoma Abdoul Aziz Traoré, an environmental economist and expert in land degradation at the Centre Universitaire de Ziniaré (CUZ). But the situation, he says, is not irreversible.

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