The Guardian Climate Change

Convicted of non-violent offences in Insulate Britain action, Dr Diana Warner is second GP to have licence suspended, which a medical tribunal ruled could damage patient trust

A retired GP has become the second doctor to have their medical licence suspended after being convicted of non-violent offences during peaceful climate protests.

Dr Diana Warner, who worked as a GP for 35 years in surgeries around Bristol, was imprisoned for a total of six weeks for twice breaching private anti-protest injunctions banning people from blocking traffic on the M25 in 2021 and 2022. She was also jailed for six weeks for gluing her hand to the dock during her plea hearing at a magistrates court in east London in 2022.

As the world heats up, methane released from thawing permafrost and warming tropical wetlands is intensifying climate breakdown. But curbing it is achievable

Controlling methane provides our best, and perhaps only, lever for shaving peak global temperatures over the next few decades. This is because it’s cleansed from the air naturally only a decade or so after release. Therefore if we could eliminate all methane emissions from human activities, methane’s concentration would quickly return to pre-industrial levels. Essentially, humans have released in excess of 3bn tonnes of methane into the atmosphere in the past 20 years. Quashing those emissions within a decade or two would save us 0.5C of warming. No other greenhouse gas gives us this much power to slow the climate crisis.

If the Earth keeps warming, though, reducing emissions from human activities may not be enough. We may also need to counter higher methane emissions in nature, including from warming tropical wetlands and thawing Arctic permafrost. The highest natural methane emissions come from wetlands and seasonally flooded forests in the tropics – such as the Brazilian Amazon forest I recently visited at the Mamirauá sustainable development reserve – and they are expected to rise with warming. Tropical wetlands yield so much methane because they are warm, wet (by definition) and low-oxygen environments perfect for growing methane-emitting microbes.

Exclusive: Most popular routes can be reached quickly by train, as government mulls expansion proposal

More than half of the journeys taken from London City airport last year can be reached in six hours or less by train, data reveals.

The Labour government is preparing to make the final call on the airport’s application to significantly increase its passenger numbers. The airport wants to increase capacity from 6.5 million to 9 million passengers a year by putting on more weekend and early morning flights.

Wildfires in Athens, Israeli bombardment in Gaza, Ukraine’s offensive in Russia and Snoop Dogg at the Olympic Games handover: the last seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists

• Warning: this gallery contains images that some readers may find distressing

Dr Adi Paterson’s statements are apparently at odds with the group’s official position, which says nuclear is needed to tackle the climate crisis

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The chair of a leading Australian nuclear advocacy group has called concerns that carbon dioxide emissions are driving a climate crisis an “irrational fear of a trace gas which is plant food” and has rejected links between worsening extreme weather and global heating.

Several statements from Dr Adi Paterson, reviewed by the Guardian, appear at odds with statements from the group he chairs, Nuclear for Australia, which is hosting a petition saying nuclear is needed to tackle an “energy and climate crisis”.

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”.