The Guardian Climate Change

Scientists say they are ingesting more microplastics in Mediterranean as the plankton they feed on struggle to survive in warming waters

As the Latin name suggests, Sardina pilchardus can be called a sardine or a pilchard when it is tinned or offered on a fishmonger’s slab. One common definition is that if it is longer than 15cm it is called a pilchard and if smaller, a sardine.

However, when pilchards fell out of favour with consumers, 15cm pilchards were rebranded as Cornish sardines and sales picked up again. To add to the confusion, other small silver fish are often passed off as sardines.

We are raiding the Guardian Long Read archives to bring you some classic pieces from years past, with new introductions from the authors.

This week, from 2022: In northern Norway, trees are rapidly taking over the tundra and threatening an ancient way of life that depends on snow and ice

By Ben Rawlence. Read by Christien Anholt

Northern Ontario is seeing a ‘shorter window’ on only overland routes for vital deliveries to remote First Nations

At first there was no answer on the satellite phone. But on the third call, Donald Meeseetawageesic heard his sister’s voice. “We need somebody to come and tow us out,” he told her.

It was a warmer-than-normal night in early March and Meeseetawageesic, the elected band councillor for Eabametoong First Nation, was stranded in a 4x4 truck on the dark winter road leading to his community. The tyres were stuck in the deep snow and the temperature outside was below freezing. Help was about 60km (37 miles) away.

Experts say previous economic models underestimated impact of global heating – as well as likely ‘cascading supply chain disruptions’

Economic models have systematically underestimated how global heating will affect people’s wealth, according to a new study that finds 4C warming will make the average person 40% poorer – an almost four-fold increase on some estimates.

The study by Australian scientists suggests average per person GDP across the globe will be reduced by 16% even if warming is kept to 2C above pre-industrial levels. This is a much greater reduction than previous estimates, which found the reduction would be 1.4%.

These creatures evolved over millenia to create nature’s finest circular economy, but are now struggling to survive

There’s no preparing for a first encounter with a thriving coral reef: your attention ricochets between dramas of colour, form and movement. A blaze of fire coral, darting clown fish, crimson sponge, electric blue ray … a turtle! Your heart soars, your head spins. Nowhere else will you encounter such density and diversity of life.

Corals are the architects of all this splendour. Their immobile forms suggest plants, but they’re animals – solar-powered ones. Each is a colony of thousands, sometimes millions, of tiny coral polyps, each resembling a slimmed-down sea anemone, just millimetres tall.

Between 24 March and 2 April, we will be profiling a shortlist of 10 of the invertebrates chosen by readers and selected by our wildlife writers from more than 2,500 nominations. The voting for our 2025 invertebrate of the year will run from midday on Wednesday 2 April until midday on Friday 4 April, and the winner will be announced on Monday 7 April.

Head of Riverkeeper, which helped clean up Hudson River, talks about challenges during the second Trump term

Donald Trump’s push to repurpose the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) amid funding cuts and staffing losses poses a huge threat to water safety and environmental advances in one of the big environmental success stories in the US in recent decades: the clean-up of the Hudson River.

Once a byword for environmental degradation, the Hudson River is now recovering, in part due to the work of Riverkeeper, a non-profit environmental organization that established a model of legal activism for water protection and inspired more than 300 programs globally. It is also where Robert F Kennedy Jr cut his teeth as an environmental lawyer, before becoming a senior member of Trump’s rightwing cabinet.

We asked 18 Republicans whose districts benefit most from Biden’s IRA climate law if they back Trump’s demands

Billions of dollars in clean energy spending and jobs have overwhelmingly flowed to parts of the US represented by Republican lawmakers. But these members of Congress are still largely reticent to break with Donald Trump’s demands to kill off key incentives for renewables, even as their districts bask in the rewards.

The president has called for the dismantling of the Inflation Reduction Act – a sweeping bill passed by Democrats that has helped turbocharge investments in wind, solar, nuclear, batteries and electric vehicle manufacturing in the US – calling it a “giant scam”. Trump froze funding allocated under the act and has vowed to claw back grants aimed at reducing planet-heating pollution.

Meanwhile, Adelaide records driest period in decades and Perth swelters through temperatures above 35C

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Queensland cities and towns are dealing with the effects of flooding – including extensive stock losses and widespread damage – after a year’s worth of rain fell in a matter of days.

The north Queensland city of Townsville would “almost certainly” surpass its annual rainfall record this week, just three months into 2025, according to the Bureau of Meteorology’s senior meteorologist, Jonathan How.

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Class, education and gender found to influence difference in views but anxiety about finances was a common theme

Young people are more worried about their finances, work pressures and job insecurity than social media, the climate crisis and culture war debates, research shows.

The polling also challenges the simplistic characterisation of generational conflict, revealing that differences within gen Z, whether around class, education or gender, are often more pronounced than the differences between generations.

If a tree-planting scheme in western England can match the first national forest, people as well as wildlife will benefit

The benefits for bats were presumably not at the top of the government’s list of reasons for announcing the creation of the new western forest. The chancellor, Rachel Reeves, regards rules that protect these nocturnal mammals as a nuisance. Nevertheless, the rare Bechstein’s bat, as well as the pine marten and various fungi, are expected to be among species that benefit from the multiyear project, to which central government has so far committed £7.5m.

Like England’s only existing national forest, in the Midlands, this one will be broken up across a wide area, featuring grassland, farmland, towns and villages as well as densely planted, closed-canopy woodland. John Everitt, who heads the National Forest organisation (which is both a charity and a government arm’s length body), describes this type of landscape as “forest in the medieval sense with a mosaic of habitats”.

Riot of native wildflowers that enthralled visitors in the past several years have failed to sprout due to too little rain

It’s one of the best known rites of spring in California: extraordinary displays known as “superblooms” that coat the hillsides in an abundance of color. Some years the blooms are massive enough to draw tourists from around the world to revel in the fields, such as in 2023 when more than 100,000 people showed up on a weekend to gawk at the poppies in Lake Elsinore, a small city about an hour outside Los Angeles.

But this year, not so much. Thanks to a brutally dry winter, the hills around the usual southern California superbloom hotspots have been conspicuously bare. Callista Turner, a state park ranger, could count the number of blooms on two hands as she surveyed the 8 miles (13km) of rolling hills at the Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve in the final week of March, which is typically when superbloom season peaks. “We’re still waiting to see what kind of season we have,” she says. “It’s a very slow start.”

The last two big storms to hit Mexico have left the city vulnerable to organised crime and in fear of the next climate shock

Flora Montejo always dreamed of buying her own home. After almost three decades working as a nurse, the 68-year-old invested her retirement savings in a two-storey house in San Agustín, a working-class suburb of the Mexican resort town of Acapulco.

Montejo’s retirement dream was shortlived. Not long after moving into her newly remodelled home, Hurricane John dumped record levels of rainfall on Acapulco, triggering landslides and flash floods after calm creeks turned into roaring rivers.

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