Climate

About 89% of the public want their governments to do more to tackle the climate crisis – but don’t know they’re the majority

• The Guardian is joining forces with dozens of newsrooms around the world to launch the 89% Project – and highlight the fact that the vast majority of the world’s population wants climate action. Read more

A superpower in the fight against global heating is hiding in plain sight. It turns out that the overwhelming majority of people in the world – between 80% and 89%, according to a growing number of peer-reviewed scientific studies – want their governments to take stronger climate action.

As co-founders of a non-profit that studies news coverage of climate change, those findings surprised even us. And they are a sharp rebuttal to the Trump administration’s efforts to attack anyone who does care about the climate crisis.

Mark Hertsgaard and Kyle Pope are the co-founders of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now

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Take that Antony Greem

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Labour must deliver the green transition voters want, leaving Reform and the Tories on the side of economic decline and dictators

Which former British prime minister described the climate emergency as “a clock ticking to the furious rhythm of hundreds of billions of pistons and turbines and furnaces and engines … quilting the Earth in an invisible and suffocating blanket of CO2”?

The florid style gives it away. You’d guess Boris Johnson even if you’d forgotten that the master of Brexit bombast also had a sideline in net zero evangelism. It wasn’t the most memorable part of his repertoire and it didn’t catch on as a Conservative catechism.

Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist

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Weakening or rolling back longstanding environmental regulations would worsen the problem, the American Lung Association assessment says.

An ashen pallor and an eerie stillness all that remains where there should be fluttering fish and vibrant colours in the reefscape, one conservationist says

The world’s coral reefs have been pushed into “uncharted territory” by the worst global bleaching event on record that has now hit more than 80% of the planet’s reefs, scientists have warned.

Reefs in at least 82 countries and territories have been exposed to enough heat to turn corals white since the global event started in January 2023, the latest data from the US government’s Coral Reef Watch shows.

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Protesters interrupted an all-Balanchine program on the company’s spring season opening night, which coincided this year with Earth Day.

Al Gore launched an attack on the Trump administration saying there were 'important lessons' to be learned from similarities with the early rise of Nazi Germany. In a speech at a climate week event in San Francisco, Gore said: 'We've already seen, by the way, how popular authoritarian leaders have used migrants as scapegoats and have fanned the fires of xenophobia to fuel their own rise to power, and power-seeking is what this is all about'

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Leaders from many religions — including, notably, Pope Francis — have long sought to tie their faith to environmental stewardship.

Flips between warm temperatures to cold and vice versa have become quicker, more frequent and more intense in recent decades, a new study shows.

Former VP said the administration was creating its ‘own preferred reality’ and slammed it for green energy U-turn

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Al Gore said there were “important lessons” to be learned from similarities between the early rise of Nazi Germany and the recent actions of the Trump administration, in scathing comments made Monday during remarks about climate change.

During a speech at an event to mark the beginning of San Francisco’s Climate Week, the former vice-president and established climate advocate, said that the Trump administration was “trying to create their own preferred version of reality”, akin to the Nazi party during the 1930s in Germany, Politico reported.

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Blocking sunlight could temporarily slow the climate crisis but the technologies remain highly controversial

UK scientists are to launch outdoor geoengineering experiments as part of a £50m government-funded programme.

The experiments will be small-scale and rigorously assessed, according to Advanced Research and Invention Agency (Aria), the UK government agency backing the plan, and will provide “critical” data needed to assess the potential of the technology. The programme, along with another £11m project, will make the UK one of the biggest funders of geoengineering research in the world.

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Rising sea levels are forcing the Mystic Seaport Museum in Connecticut to address the long-term sustainability of its campus.

The I.M.F. and World Bank are holding their spring meetings as President Trump’s trade war upends the global economy.

A small team is rescuing a “ridiculous amount” of shells from restaurant trash bins and using them to rebuild oyster habitat in Long Island Sound.

As temperatures rise and countries back off their decarbonization efforts, we must confront a reality central banks can’t correct

Inflation is, at base, a tax on consumption – and it hits the poor the hardest, since they consume more of their incomes and the rich consume less.

That’s one reason for concern over Donald Trump’s tariffs, which will disproportionately affect the poor. When the 90-day pause on the tariffs expires, it is reasonable to expect prices to rise, and by a lot.

Mark Blyth is a political economist and professor at Brown University. Nicolò Fraccaroli is a visiting scholar at Brown University

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Periods including “fish emerge from the ice” in mid-February and “rainbows hide” in late November offer a framework for eating, gathering and celebrating.

Geopolitical tensions are heating up on Canada’s borders, but the biggest threat may be from wildly fluctuating temperatures transforming the tundra and ocean

In early February, during the depths of winter, Twin Otter aircraft belonging to the Canadian military flew over the vast expanse of the western Arctic looking for sea ice. Below, sheets of white extended beyond the horizon.

But the pilots, who were searching for a suitable site to land a 34-tonne (76,000lb) Hercules transport plane a month later, needed ice that was 1.5-metres (5ft) thick.

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Ahead of a global summit in London comes a warning that lessons on energy security have not been learned

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US trade officials are preparing to impose tariffs of up to 3,521% on imports of solar panels from four south-east Asian countries, while the International Energy Agency has said lessons from the energy crisis following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had not been fully learned.

The US commerce department has announced the new tariffs, targeting companies in Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia and Vietnam, after an investigation begun a year ago when American manufacturers of solar panels accused Chinese companies of flooding the market with subsidised, cheap goods.

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The Guardian is joining forces with dozens of newsrooms around the world to launch a year-long exploration of the ‘silent majority’ of people who want to fight climate change

The Guardian US is launching a year-long collaborative reporting project that seeks to explore a pivotal but little-known fact about the climate crisis: the overwhelming majority of the world’s people want their governments to take stronger action.

The 89 Percent Project is a partnership between the Guardian US, Covering Climate Now, Agence France-Presse and dozens of other newsrooms across the globe. The collaboration builds on a slate of recent scientific studies finding that between 80-89% of the world’s population want stronger climate action. This overwhelming global majority, however, does not realize that they are a majority; most think their fellow citizens don’t agree. Experts agree breaking this “spiral of silence” could be pivotal to spurring critical climate action.

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Researchers find 89% of people around the world want more to be done, but mistakenly assume their peers do not

• Activate climate’s ‘silent majority’ to supercharge action, experts say
• The Guardian is joining forces with dozens of newsrooms around the world to launch the 89 Percent Project—and highlight the fact that the vast majority of the world’s population wants climate action. Read more

How much of a $450 (£339) pot would you give to a charity that cuts carbon emissions by investing in renewable energy, and how much would you keep for yourself? That was the question posed in a recent academic experiment. The answers mattered: real money was handed out as a result to some randomly chosen participants.

The average person gave away about half the money and kept the rest. But what if you had been told beforehand that the vast majority of other people think climate action is really important? Might you have given more to the charity?

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