Climate

Research shows UK police arrest environmental and climate protesters at three times the average global rate

British police arrest environmental protesters at nearly three times the global average rate, research has found, revealing the country as a world leader in the legal crackdown on climate activism.

Only Australia arrested climate and environmental protesters at a higher rate than UK police. One in five Australian eco-protests led to arrests, compared with about 17% in the UK. The global average rate is 6.7%.

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Some young climate activists who were galvanized under Donald Trump’s first presidency are taking a different approach to his second.

They would become the most commonly seen species to receive federal protection if the proposal is adopted.

Faced with a president-elect who has called global warming a “scam,” activists are changing their strategies and pushing a message of hope.

US Fish and Wildlife Service extends protections to ‘iconic’ insects, who experts say may not survive climate crisis

The US Fish and Wildlife Service announced a decision on Tuesday to extend federal protections to monarch butterflies after years of warnings from environmentalists that populations are shrinking and the beloved pollinator may not survive the climate crisis.

Officials plans to add the butterfly to the threatened species list by the end of next year following an extensive public comment period.

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Wildfires and thawing permafrost are causing the region to release more carbon dioxide than its plants remove, probably for the first time in thousands of years.

Drastic shift driven by frequent wildfires, pushing surface air temperatures to second-warmest on record since 1900

The Arctic tundra is undergoing a dramatic transformation, driven by frequent wildfires that are turning it into a net source of carbon dioxide emissions after millennia of acting as a carbon sink, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) said on Tuesday.

This drastic shift is detailed in Noaa’s 2024 Arctic Report Card, which revealed that annual surface air temperatures in the Arctic this year were the second-warmest on record since 1900.

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The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is one of the foremost federal science agencies whose foundational work has wide implications and immense value for people’s daily lives and for our economy.

As an economist who is part of an interdisciplinary team focused on understanding climate impacts and advocating for smart solutions, I can tell you that NOAA science and data is crucial for our work at UCS. To give a few examples, we’ve used NOAA sea level rise data to analyze and quantify the impacts of flooding on coastal real estate and critical infrastructure. We use NWS weather alerts for our Danger Season mapping tool. The reality is that climate change now touches almost every aspect of our lives and economy and having robust scientific information gives us the power to confront these challenges effectively.

NOAA also provides critical, widely relied-upon forecasts for hurricanes and marine conditions, monitors wildfire smoke, and contributes to essential global scientific endeavors to help us understand and respond to changes on our planet.

That’s why the Trump administration’s nominee to lead NOAA must live up to a high standard for scientific integrity and make a commitment to safeguard the mission of the agency and the work of its dedicated career staff. When the nominee is announced, here’s what we’ll be looking for and why.  

NOAA administrator must support NOAA’s crucial scientific work

The most important priority for the incoming NOAA administrator is to show is that they understand the breadth and importance of NOAA’s scientific work for our nation and commit to fully supporting that work and fostering an environment where agency scientific experts can do this work without political interference.

It should go without saying, but given the incoming administration’s track record with inappropriate agency nominees, it’s worth stating explicitly: the NOAA administrator should not have conflicts of interest or be beholden to fossil fuel and other special interests.

As my colleague Juan Declet-Barreto wrote in a recent blog post “We need a strong and independent NOAA.”

Here are some of the key responsibilities for the job:

• Familiarity with the core missions and functions of the agency’s six branches—NOAA Marine & Aviation Operations (OMAO), NOAA Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), National Ocean Service (NOS), Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR), National Weather Service (NWS), and the National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS)—and how their work is closely coordinated and integrated.
• Commitment to uphold and enforce NOAA’s strong scientific integrity policy. This policy helps ensure that the scientists at NOAA do the highest quality scientific work free from harassment and interference, and that the public can rely on and trust NOAA science for that reason.
• Commitment to safeguard NOAA and its work from attacks such as those proposed in Project 2025 that seek to dismantle the agency, privatize core components of its work, and politicize the science it produces. To be clear, NOAA’s line offices work together closely, and dismantling the agency would make it far less effective and, in some cases, unable to provide the services the public needs. Privatizing parts of NOAA such as the National Weather Service makes no sense—and even private companies like AccuWeather have said so. NOAA’s comprehensive and freely available weather and climate information is vital for the public and already being used by private sector entities like TV and radio forecasters and meteorologists. This life-saving information must be freely accessible to all so that everyone can use it and rely on having it, not just those who are able to pay.
• Commitment to advocate for the resources, budget and staffing NOAA needs to do its work well. NOAA’s budget is a very small part of the overall federal budget, and it provides incredible bang for the buck. There will be inevitable attacks on its budget as we saw under the previous Trump administration, and it will be crucial for the NOAA administrator to clearly articulate what NOAA delivers for taxpayers and why it is worth investing in. Draconian cuts will save very little money but can completely hobble the agency’s work. The Secretary of Commerce also plays a vital role in advocating for NOAA’s crucial work which falls within the Commerce Department’s purview and budget.
• Commitment to continue to invest in the tools, data and practices that will keep NOAA’s work at the cutting edge of science, including investing in satellites and earth observation systems, AI weather forecasting tools, integrating community knowledge and science, collaborating with scientific agencies around the world (for example, key data sharing and harmonization agreements), and building public-private partnerships.
• Commitment to protecting marine fisheries, mammals, and ecosystems that are crucial to livelihoods, food security, commerce, planetary health and more.  

What does NOAA do?

NOAA gathers, maintains, analyzes and provides for free an enormous amount of data, scientific information and tools that help us understand climate and weather conditions wherever we live. It also monitors ocean conditions crucial for maritime traffic and fisheries and helps with marine conservation efforts.

To gather this data, it has a powerful array of satellites as well as the much-admired hurricane hunters who fly into the most hazardous weather to improve predictions. These kinds of data are literally lifesaving when extreme weather events like heatwaves and hurricanes threaten, and it’s also incredibly important for our economic prosperity.

Here are just some of the powerful examples of NOAA’s valuable work:

• NOAA’s National Hurricane Center provides seasonal hurricane forecasts and crucial information all through the hurricane season as tropical depressions form and progress. Just in this last year, the accurate and constantly updated forecasts for catastrophic hurricanes Beryl, Helene and Milton, among others, helped save lives and provided emergency responders with the information they needed to protect people and infrastructure. NOAA has also invested in creating and updating numerous related tools like its storm surge  and wind speed products.
• NOAA collects global and localized sea level rise data from tide gauges and satellite altimetry which are analyzed and made available through its sea level rise portal. These data help communities around the nation understand the accelerating rate of sea level rise—largely due to climate change—and the frequency and magnitude of high-tide flooding they can expect as a result. This information is crucial for local planners, infrastructure owners, operators and engineers, homeowners, businesses, and many others.
• NOAA monitors wildfire smoke conditions and maps how those hazards travel hundreds of miles away from the original site of the wildfires. The latest science shows that particulate matter pollution from wildfires is a serious health hazard for people who may need to work or be outdoors, especially for young children, pregnant women and their babies in utero, and people with pre-existing heart or lung ailments.
• NOAA’s marine forecast products are a bedrock source of information for the maritime industry. These products are available in multiple formats and routinely used by the crew of seagoing vessels to navigate and prepare for conditions at sea.
• NOAA is working with the NSF to help the insurance industry better understand and prepare for the impacts of climate change on their businesses. This work could not be more salient as the industry is facing an acute upheaval as extreme weather and climate disasters multiply, and consumers are facing the brunt of raised insurance rates and dropped policies.
• NOAA makes invaluable scientific contributions to global initiatives like the Famine Early Warning System, the Joint Typhoon Early Warning Center and the World Meteorological Organization.

The federal government’s data.gov portal links to more than 100,000 datasets generated or provided by NOAA. Having this kind of information is not just vital to understand the scope of the problems our nation faces but it helps policymakers develop effective policies and solutions so communities across the nation can thrive in the face of a warming world.

UCS will be advocating for a new NOAA administrator who can live up to the task the nation needs them to perform so we can all be safer and prosper.

Widespread adoption of heat pumps could prevent thousands of premature deaths and save billions on energy bills, according to a new analysis.

After just 12 hours without power, we were cold, isolated and facing the fact that everyday life is far more precarious than it seems

It was the cold that woke me up. Some time in the early hours of Saturday, as Storm Darragh blasted through our bit of rural Oxfordshire, the power lines had come down; by the time the central heating would otherwise have been firing up, the house was decidedly arctic.

The novelty of lighting candles, chopping firewood and making coffee on a sputtering camping stove carried everyone through the first few hours. But by mid afternoon frontier spirit was palpably waning, along with everyone’s phone batteries. By early evening there wasn’t much to do except agree that obviously we have it easy compared with Ukraine – now in its third icy winter of Russia using attacks on domestic power infrastructure as an extra weapon of war, which puts this minor domestic inconvenience into perspective – and that our digitised lives have become quite madly, recklessly vulnerable to a sudden loss of power.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

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Government should point to evidence of FSA licensing of additive, says chair of environment and climate change committee

The government must urgently reassure consumers that feed additives given to cattle to reduce methane emissions are harmless, and a vital tool in tackling the climate crisis, the chair of an influential parliamentary committee has warned.

Lady Sheehan, chair of the environment and climate change committee of the House of Lords, called on ministers to step up as a row has blown up over the prospective use of the additive Bovaer in British dairy herds supplying Arla, the dairy company.

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First comprehensive study on health and climate change in small island developing states lays bare impact of the crisis and calls for action from richer countries

The 65 million people living in the world’s small island nations face “catastrophe” from the health impacts of climate breakdown, say experts behind a Lancet Countdown report.

Heatwaves, drought, insect-borne diseases and extreme weather are getting worse because of the climate crisis, putting lives and livelihoods at risk, found the report, the first comprehensive analysis of the state of climate change and health in island states.

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European Commission scientific advisers say technology to offset global heating could wreak havoc on weather

Europe should ban space mirrors, cloud whitening and other untested tools being touted to reflect the sun’s rays, the European Commission’s scientific advisers have said, but said the door should be left open for research into their development.

The scientists said the risks and benefits of solar radiation modification (SRM) – also known as solar geoengineering – were “highly uncertain”. They called for an EU-wide moratorium on using it as a way to offset global heating.

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The fine artist and illustrator Oliver Jeffers on climate change, A.I. and the idea that maybe everything is pretty much our fault.

The two solvents, known as Perc and TCE, cause kidney cancer and other ailments, and have been the subject of years of controversy.

An alliance of political groups is harnessing real fears about the local impact of wind and solar farms – and using them to spruik nuclear power

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The entrance is marked by an AI-generated image of a dead whale, floating among wind turbines. On the first floor of the East Maitland bowling club, dire warnings are being shared about how offshore wind may impact the Hunter region – alongside a feeling of not being consulted, of being steamrolled.

“Environment and energy forums” like this one in late November have been held up and down the east of Australia, aiming to build a resistance to the country’s renewable energy transition.

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Even at my lowest, I have never entirely given up my faith that good people working together can change the world for the better.

Researchers mapped brick kilns across India and used climate models to forecast the levels of heat stress workers face between now and 2050

• Photographs by Ishan Tankhar

“I work with fire. But this has been the hottest ever, even for me,” says Harilal Rajput, squinting in the blazing midday sun. Rajput, 41, is a chief fire worker at a brick kiln near the town of Danapur on the outskirts of Patna, capital of the eastern state of Bihar. He is a migrant worker; his wife, a farmer, lives in neighbouring Uttar Pradesh with their three children.

It is almost 1pm on a June afternoon and neither Rajput nor the nine fire workers he supervises have had any food since the previous night. They will eat only when their eight-hour shift ends at about 4pm. His team, he says, is “running on water”.

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An area nearly a third larger than India turned permanently arid in past three decades, research shows

An area of land nearly a third larger than India has turned from humid conditions to dryland – arid areas where agriculture is difficult – in the past three decades, research has found.

Drylands now make up 40% of all land on Earth, excluding Antarctica. Three-quarters of the world’s land suffered drier conditions in the past 30 years, which is likely to be permanent, according to the study by the UN Science Policy Interface, a body of scientists convened by the United Nations.

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Human-caused global warming helped increase dry conditions on every continent, scientists said in a new report, as talks on halting desertification were underway in Saudi Arabia.