The Guardian Climate Change

DLA Piper seeking to recover costs in relation to injunctions it secured for National Highways and HS2, records show

Britain’s biggest law firm has sought more than £1m from climate protesters to cover the cost of court orders banning them from protesting, an investigation has found.

The multibillion-pound City law firm DLA Piper has been trying to recover costs from activists for work done on behalf of National Highways Limited (NHL) and HS2 Ltd – both public bodies – obtaining injunctions banning protests on their sites.

Analysis of Inflation Reduction Act suggests working-class Americans missing out on renewable energy transition

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), passed exactly two years ago, was pitched as a policy that puts the “middle class first”. But the spending bill’s residential tax credits have so far disproportionately benefited wealthy families, new data indicates.

That’s a major challenge for the efforts to decarbonize the US economy in time to avert the worst consequences of the climate crisis.

Friederike Otto, of World Weather Attribution, says poor people and outdoor workers are dying around the world

Heat inequality is causing thousands of unreported deaths in poor countries and communities across the world, a leading analyst of climate impacts has warned, following global temperature records that may not have been seen in 120,000 years.

Sweltering conditions act as a stealthy killer that preys on the most economically fragile, said Friederike Otto, co-founder of World Weather Attribution, in an appeal for the media and authorities to pay more attention to the dangers.

From a firefighter to a fruit farmer, from Greece to Thailand, the Guardian speaks to people in places hit hardest by the climate crisis

Extreme heat records have been broken around the world this year, and scientists say 2024 is likely to be the hottest year in human history. With the climate crisis causing droughts and wildfires and having devastating effects on crops and animals, the Guardian has spoken to people living in some of the places that have been hit the hardest

People say they are determined and that prevention will be key to mitigating the effects of the climate crisis

“I used to talk to them every day.” Dimitris Petrou takes in the creatures that were once his fluffy chicks but now look like coals. The buckled cage with its carbonised birds is part of the cataclysmic scenery left behind by the fire that bore down on Athens after raging across the Attica plains consuming everything in its path.

The 72-year-old retiree and his wife, Frosso, though red-eyed and fatigued, are “somehow still going” but are profoundly shocked.

As Minnesota governor he took action on school meals, climate, family leave, guns and more – how does that compare with other developed countries?

Within hours of Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz, being chosen by Kamala Harris to be her Democratic presidential running mate, Donald Trump and team began attacking him as a “dangerously liberal extremist”.

Trump surrogates seized on Walz’s record of expanding voting rights for former felons, combatting the climate crisis, and other measures as proof that Harris-Walz would be the “most radical ticket in American history”.

An architectural zigzag design can limit how much heat is absorbed by buildings – and emitted back to space

Incorporating zigzag patterns into building walls could help cool overheated buildings, research has found.

Buildings are now responsible for approximately 40% of global energy consumption, contributing more than a third of global carbon dioxide emissions.

Rich countries dominate the ratings for the most aviation emissions, with the USA and China topping the table

At this peak holiday season the contrails crisscross the skies, and greenhouse gas emissions from international aviation reach their annual maximum. Emissions of carbon dioxide and the water vapour emitted by jet engines account for about 5% of climate heating and research shows this continues to grow.

It is no surprise that rich countries dominate the ratings for most aviation emissions, measured by the airports from which the aircraft start their flights. Britain with Heathrow and other international airports comes third behind the United States and an increasingly affluent China. Fourth is Japan and fifth the United Arab Emirates, achieved with its massive transit airport at Dubai.

This year could beat 2023 for the hottest year on record as 15-month heat streak extends, according to Noaa

The world just had its hottest July ever recorded, elongating a string of monthly temperature highs that now stretch back for 15 consecutive months, US government scientists have announced.

Last month was about 1.2C (2.1F) hotter than average across the globe, making it the hottest July on record, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) said on Thursday. This means that every month for the past 15 months has beaten its previous monthly record.

Judge had thrown out case against Trudi Warner, whose sign told jurors they had a right to acquit ‘according to conscience’

The government has dropped an appeal against a judge’s decision to throw out a contempt case against a woman who stood outside a climate activist trial holding a placard about jury rights.

In an email sent on Thursday, a lawyer from the government legal department, led by Richard Hermer, who was recently appointed attorney general, said they had “further considered this case and decided not to pursue the appeal”.

Foundation says it ‘does not endorse any organizations’ while funneling hundreds of thousands to rightwing causes

A US foundation associated with the oil company Shell has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to religious right and conservative organizations, many of which deny that climate change is a crisis, tax records reveal.

Fourteen of those groups are on the advisory board of Project 2025, a conservative blueprint proposing radical changes to the federal government, including severely limiting the Environment Protection Agency.

Police arrest Letzte Generation protesters who cut holes in fences and glued themselves to asphalt

Climate activists have broken into four German airport sites, briefly bringing air traffic to a halt at two of those before police made arrests.

Protesters from Letzte Generation – Germany’s equivalent to Just Stop Oil – gained access on Thursday to airfields in areas near the takeoff and landing strips of Cologne-Bonn, Nuremberg, Berlin Brandenburg and Stuttgart airports at dawn. Air traffic was suspended for a short time at Nuremberg and Cologne-Bonn due to police operations.

The leap in temperatures over the past 13 months has exceeded the global heating forecasts – is this just a blip or a systemic shift?

• Analysis: Cities have to avoid a dangerous trap

In a remarkably candid essay in the journal Nature this March, one of the world’s top climate scientists posited the alarming possibility that global heating may be moving beyond the ability of experts to predict what happens next.

“The 2023 temperature anomaly has come out of the blue, revealing an unprecedented knowledge gap perhaps for the first time since about 40 years ago, when satellite data began offering modellers an unparalleled, real-time view of Earth’s climate system,” wrote Gavin Schmidt, a British scientist and the director of the Nasa Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York.

With modern solutions such as air-con aggravating the problem, ancient heat-management techniques can offer answers

• Climate scientists baffled by unexpected pace of heating

Beneath the streets of Seville – the city nicknamed “El Sartén”, the frying pan of Europe, where summer temperatures regularly top 40C – a €5m (about £4m ) cooling strategy is taking the city back in time.

The millennium-old Persian technique of “qanat” features underground channels filled with water and shafts that bring the cooler underground air to the surface. Seville is doing the same, adapting a 1992 experimental qanat to use renewable power and – in a new twist – pumping the water to the tops of buildings, where it will trickle down inside the walls to cool them. Even the benches will be chilled.

More than 10,000 people sign letter to justice department for federal investigation into industry’s misinformation

Allen Myers grew up in Paradise, California, which for him is “sacred land”. At age 11, he sat beside his mother’s bedside as she passed away in his beloved family home. Years later, that house, along with 90% of the town, burned to the ground in the devastating 2018 Camp fire, which killed 85 people.

Today, he is demanding the fossil fuel industry be held accountable for its role in that deadly blaze and other climate disasters. Myers and 1,000 survivors of climate disasters signed a letter delivered in person to the US Department of Justice on Thursday, demanding federal investigation into the fossil fuel industry’s “climate crimes”.

LNG exports responsible for $957m in total annual US health costs, says new Greenpeace and Sierra Club report

The expansion of liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports is responsible for scores of premature deaths and nearly $1bn in annual health costs, according to a new report from the green groups Greenpeace and Sierra Club.

The report links air pollution from LNG export terminals to an estimated 60 premature deaths and $957m in total health costs each year, and found that if all planned and proposed terminals come online, those numbers would shoot up to 149 premature deaths and $2.33bn.

WA newspaper throws tantrum and Tony Abbott blames ‘climate cult’ after prime minister misses fossil fuel company’s party

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If we are looking for something to illustrate Australia’s inability to have any coherent and sustained response to the climate crisis over the past couple of decades, we can find it in the reaction to the fossil fuel giant Woodside’s 70th birthday dinner.

That reaction being a little bit of climate science denial, plus some political patronage and big servings of fossil fuel cheerleading barely disguised as journalism.

Experts say climate policies contained within rightwing manifesto would wreck US climate targets and cost jobs

The impact of Donald Trump enacting the climate policies of the rightwing Project 2025 would result in billions of tonnes of extra carbon pollution, wrecking the US’s climate targets, as well as wiping out clean energy investments and more than a million jobs, a new analysis finds.

Should Trump retake the White House and pass the energy and environmental policies in the controversial Project 2025 document, the US’s planet-heating emissions will “significantly increase” by 2.7bn tonnes above the current trajectory by 2030, an amount comparable to the entire annual emissions of India, according to the report.

Rising cost of living and climate crisis have played spoilers to the celebration, which has sold out every year since 2011

For more than a decade, tickets to Burning Man have sold out almost immediately – sometimes in a matter of minutes.

But this year, less than two weeks before the festival kicks off, tickets are still available – raising questions about the future of the annual desert revelry in the face of the climate crisis and economic instability.

This article was amended on 14 August 2024. It previously stated that Burning Man has been held in Nevada’s Black Rock desert since 1986. The festival actually first began on a San Francisco beach in 1986.

Exclusive: In 2024, 15 national temperature records have been set as weather extremes grow more frequent, climate historian says

• How does today’s extreme heat compare with Earth’s past climate?
• ‘You feel like you’re suffocating’: Florida outdoor workers are collapsing in the heat without water and shade

A record 15 national heat records have been broken since the start of this year, an influential climate historian has told the Guardian, as weather extremes grow more frequent and climate breakdown intensifies.

An additional 130 monthly national temperature records have also been broken, along with tens of thousands of local highs registered at monitoring stations from the Arctic to the South Pacific, according to Maximiliano Herrera, who keeps an archive of extreme events.