Climate

The US president is making energy deals with Japan and Ukraine, and in Africa has even touted resurrecting coal

Donald Trump’s repeated mantra of “drill, baby, drill” demands that more oil and gas be extracted in the United States, but the president has set his sights on an even broader goal: keeping the world hooked on planet-heating fossil fuels for as long as possible.

In deals being formulated with countries such as Japan and Ukraine, Trump is using US leverage in tariffs and military aid to bolster the flow of oil and gas around the world. In Africa, his administration has even touted the resurrection of coal, the dirtiest of all fossil fuels, to bring energy to the continent.

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Injecting pollutants into the atmosphere to reflect the sun would be extremely dangerous, but the UK is funding field trials

Some years ago in the pages of the Guardian, we sounded the alarm about the increasing attention being paid to solar geoengineering – a barking mad scheme to cancel global heating by putting pollutants in the atmosphere that dim the sun by reflecting some sunlight back to space.

In one widely touted proposition, fleets of aircraft would continually inject sulphur compounds into the upper atmosphere, simulating the effects of a massive array of volcanoes erupting continuously. In essence, we have broken the climate by releasing gigatonnes of fossil-fuel carbon dioxide, and solar geoengineering proposes to “fix” it by breaking a very different part of the climate system.

Raymond T Pierrehumbert FRS is professor of planetary physics at the University of Oxford. He is an author of the 2015 US National Academy of Sciences report on climate intervention

Michael E Mann ForMemRS is presidential distinguished professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Our Fragile Moment: How Lessons from Earth’s Past Can Help Us Survive the Climate Crisis

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If you don’t believe the scientists, will you believe the insurance companies?

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My homeplace has experienced four natural disasters in eight years. But I’d never seen the like of this bird before, vibrantly green and startlingly beautiful

We were midway through our cyclone preparation when my mother broke her leg. She stepped into her bedroom to retrieve something, tripped and fell, and that was that. My mother is 74 and hardy, so this sudden break took us by surprise. Once I got her home, leg in brace, we’d lost significant time, and my household was down to one functional human: me.

This is the fourth natural disaster I’ve experienced in the last eight years. One-in-100-year floods (2017), unprecedented bushfires (2019), one-in-1,000-year floods (2022) and now Cyclone Alfred. Cyclones are a new threat. I’ve lived in my homeplace, in northern New South Wales, for almost 50 years and we’ve never had a cyclone cross land in our vicinity. We were, as they say, in uncharted waters.

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Swings between drought and floods striking from Dallas to Shanghai, while Madrid and Cairo are among cities whose climate has flipped

Climate whiplash is already hitting major cities around the world, bringing deadly swings between extreme wet and dry weather as the climate crisis intensifies, a report has revealed.

Dozens more cities, including Lucknow, Madrid and Riyadh have suffered a climate “flip” in the last 20 years, switching from dry to wet extremes, or vice versa. The report analysed the 100 most populous cities, plus 12 selected ones, and found that 95% of them showed a distinct trend towards wetter or drier weather.

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Dozens of nonprofit groups have been unable to access the federal government’s payment system. The E.P.A. hasn’t explained why.

The added capacity for the year was the most from any single source in more than two decades.

Alfred is being used as the latest front in an ideological war, but facts are relevant to how we prepare for a climate-changed future

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It’s not a good time for climate science. The Trump administration has sacked more than a thousand staff from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the country’s leading agency for weather forecasting and climate science, potentially damaging its ability to do lifesaving work forecasting hurricanes and other extreme weather events. The New York Times reported plans are under way to fire another 1,000. If true, that will take the cuts to about 20% of the workforce.

On Monday, it was announced Nasa was axing its chief scientist, Katherine Calvin, who had been appointed to lead the agency’s work on climate change. In trademark Donald Trump/Elon Musk style, there appears little care or sense in where cuts have been made. It’s destruction for destruction’s sake, with tens of thousands of peer-reviewed scientific papers underpinning the understanding of climate science dismissed as a “hoax” or, somehow, “woke”. As in most areas, what happens in the US on forecasting and science capability will have an impact beyond its borders.

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About 19 positions will be cut, including those in offices focused on technology policy and diversity, equity and inclusion.

To applause from oil and gas executives, Chris Wright said natural gas was preferable to renewable energy and climate change was a “side effect of building the modern world.”

The justices declined to hear unusual arguments from Republican-led states that sought to end lawsuits against energy companies over their role in global warming.

Authorities warn more fatalities expected as a year’s worth of rain falls on Bahía Blanca in eight hours

Rescue teams in Argentina are searching for two girls, aged one and five, who were swept away by severe floods that ripped through Buenos Aires province, killing at least 16 people.

A year’s worth of rain fell on the city of Bahía Blanca and the town of Cerri on Friday, rapidly inundating neighbourhoods and destroying homes, bridges and roads. The rainfall – 400mm (15.7in) recorded in just eight hours – was more than twice the city’s previous record of 175mm (6.8in) set in 1930.

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Chris Wright signals abandonment of Biden’s ‘irrational, quasi-religious’ climate policies at industry conference

The world needs more planet-heating fossil fuel, not less, Donald Trump’s newly appointed energy secretary, Chris Wright, told oil and gas bigwigs on Monday.

“We are unabashedly pursuing a policy of more American energy production and infrastructure, not less,” he said in the opening plenary talk of CERAWeek, a swanky annual conference in Houston, Texas, led by the financial firm S&P Global.

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André Corrêa do Lago suggests US organisations can play a constructive role even if government limits participation

The US will be “central” to solving the climate crisis despite Donald Trump’s withdrawal of government support and cash, the president of the next UN climate summit has said.

André Corrêa do Lago, president-designate of the Cop30 summit for the host country, Brazil, hinted that businesses and other organisations in the US could play a constructive role without the White House.

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Regional voters are often stereotyped so I propose a new demographic category ahead of the election: conservative, uncommitted rural voters with environmental sympathies

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Recently, an arborist operating in my town in remote north-western Australia put out a public statement. He found it necessary, given the number of queries he had received, to explain his reasons for cutting down native vegetation.

It sounds like the start of a joke, but what this contractor’s earnest explanation illustrates is how in tune regional voters can be with their environs.

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This past week was a busy one for the Union of Concerned Scientists.

On Monday, a whopping 48 scientific societies, associations, and organizations—representing almost 100,000 scientists from diverse disciplines—sent a letter, organized by UCS, to members of Congress demanding they protect federally funded scientific research and federal scientists. Anyone who’s worked with any scientific organization on a collective effort knows it is quite the feat to get such incredible unity in the scientific community.

On Thursday, the Campaign Legal Center filed suit on behalf of UCS and other groups against Elon Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) for acting beyond their power to slash federal funding, dismantle federal agencies, and fire federal employees.

On Friday, UCS staff and members rallied with thousands of others at the Stand Up for Science 2025 events in cities and towns across the country. I spoke at the DC rally, and I was impressed to see the turnout and energy of the scientists and science supporters who trekked to the National Mall to tell the world in a unified voice that the administration’s attacks on science are unacceptable and the scientific community will not be silent.  

That night, I shared my rally message on MSBNC “Prime.” Here is the full segment on how the Trump administration’s all-out assaults on science and scientists are harming real people’s health and safety.

This has been a challenging month. Many in the scientific community—and in the general population—have been unclear about what to do in response to the Trump administration’s aggressive and unlawful disruptions to the federal government. The speed and scale at which the Trump Administration has taken a sledgehammer to federal science agencies and the dedicated experts within them has been alarming and disorienting. With limited levers of power across the government to stop these actions, and a complete disregard for policy, process, and law by Trump Administration officials, it is no surprise that people feel disillusioned and powerless.

But we mustn’t. The scientific community has never been one to walk away from a challenging problem. In fact, we pursue them. We undoubtedly face an uphill battle in our current environment, but there is a path forward. We must preserve as much as we can in the federal government, prevent new damages from happening, and rebuild from outside the government when necessary.

In my conversation with MSNBC host and White House veteran Symone Sanders Townsend, she noted that no savior is coming to save us, that we need to lead ourselves out of this, and it is the scientists who are now stepping into the streets.

I felt that on Friday as I spoke to a sea of science supporters overlooking the Reflecting Pool. It is us, as the scientific community, who now have the chance to lead, to be brave, and to do everything in our power to insist on an administration and a world that uses science for good.

I’m determined to face the wind and I hope you are, too.

We live in dark, depressing and – frankly – terrifying times. Will technology push us over the edge or help us exit our many crises?

Today we live in an era defined by crisis. Indeed, we are facing multiple overlapping threats at once: from accelerating climate breakdown to the rise of authoritarianism across the world, we are in a situation that the historian Adam Tooze calls “polycrisis”. It is no wonder that hope is scarce, pessimism is high and despair is pervasive. As one meme that captures the grim, morbid mood of our age reads: “My retirement plan is civilisational collapse.”

But not everyone shares this gloomy outlook. On the extreme other end of public sentiment sit Silicon Valley billionaires: they are some of the most optimistic people on earth. Of course, it’s easy to be optimistic when you are sitting on enough money to sway national politics. And yet, the source of their optimism isn’t simply money. It is also a deep-seated faith in unfettered technological advances.

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If we are to take seriously the threats of drought, climate change and water security, we should not reduce this place to a warring of two — or even many — sides.

Every fabric has an environmental cost. Here’s how to make informed choices.

Campaigners say funding halt is a ‘staggering blow’ to vulnerable nations and to efforts to keep heating below 1.5C

Donald Trump’s withdrawal of US overseas aid will almost decimate global climate finance from the developed world, data shows, with potentially devastating impacts on vulnerable nations.

The US was responsible last year for about $8 in every $100 that flowed from the rich world to developing countries, to help them cut greenhouse gas emissions and cope with the impacts of extreme weather, according to data from the analyst organisation Carbon Brief.

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