The Guardian Climate Change

Multimillion-dollar home perched at edge of Cape Cod Bay in Wellfleet affected by erosion accelerated by climate crisis

The waters of Cape Cod Bay are coming for the big brown house perched on the edge of a sandy bluff high above the beach. It’s just a matter of when.

Erosion has marched right up to the concrete footings of the multimillion-dollar Massachusetts home where it overlooks the bay. Massive sliding doors that used to open onto a wide deck, complete with a hot tub, are now barricaded by thin wooden slats that prevent anyone from stepping through and falling 25ft to the beach below.

Members reportedly sought access to IT systems at agency that Project 2025 has called ‘harmful to US prosperity’

Staffers with Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency” (Doge) reportedly entered the headquarters of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) in Silver Spring, Maryland, and the Department of Commerce in Washington DC today, inciting concerns of downsizing at the agency.

“They apparently just sort of walked past security and said: ‘Get out of my way,’ and they’re looking for access for the IT systems, as they have in other agencies,” said Andrew Rosenberg, a former Noaa official who is now a fellow at the University of New Hampshire. “They will have access to the entire computer system, a lot of which is confidential information.”

Labour pledges to protect 66,500 more properties, criticising previous Tory efforts

Ministers are topping up flood defence investment in England to a “record” £2.65bn, after accusing the previous government of “putting lives at risk” by under-spending.

An extra £250m is being pledged on top of the £2.4bn previously announced, to shore up defences and protect an extra 66,500 properties from flooding over a two-year period, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) said.

Analysis drawing on satellite data and 13 climate models concludes that global heating makes marine heatwaves 20 times more likely

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Marine heatwaves linked to the deaths of 30,000 fish off the Western Australia coast were up to 100 times more likely to occur because of climate change, new research has found.

Waters off WA have been affected by prolonged marine heatwaves since September.

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Prof James Hansen says pace of global heating has been significantly underestimated, though other scientists disagree

The pace of global heating has been significantly underestimated, according to renowned climate scientist Prof James Hansen, who said the international 2C target is “dead”.

A new analysis by Hansen and colleagues concludes that both the impact of recent cuts in sun-blocking shipping pollution, which has raised temperatures, and the sensitivity of the climate to increasing fossil fuels emissions are greater than thought.

Freeze to EU’s LIFE programme funding would deprive 30 NGOs of up to 70% of annual incomes

Several environmental NGOs could be effectively shut down in Europe, if a defunding push by rightwing MEPs is successful, campaigners say.

At the same time that centre and far right MEPs are revving up strategies to defang, deregulate or decapitate the European Green Deal, an EU plan to cut emissions to net zero by 2050, a proposed funding freeze in the European Parliament would weaken green groups.

Scientists say unusually mild temperatures linked to low-pressure system over Iceland directing strong flow of warm air towards north pole

Temperatures at the north pole soared more than 20C above average on Sunday, crossing the threshold for ice to melt.

Temperatures north of Svalbard in Norway had already risen to 18C hotter than the 1991–2020 average on Saturday, according to models from weather agencies in Europe and the US, with actual temperatures close to ice’s melting point of 0C. By Sunday, the temperature anomaly had risen to more than 20C.

Trump administration pulling references online ‘won’t make crisis’ stop impacting Americans’ lives, say experts

Donald Trump’s administration has started to remove or downgrade mentions of the climate crisis across the US government, with the websites of several major departments pulling down references to anything related to the climate crisis. Climate scientists said they were braced “for the worst”.

A major climate portal on the Department of Defense’s website has been scrapped, as has the main climate change section on the site of the Department of State. A climate change page on the White House’s website no longer exists, nor does climate content provided by the US agriculture department, including information that provides vulnerability assessments for wildfires.

Liberty Energy executive, who has called climate change activists alarmist, confirmed in vote of 59-38

The US Senate on Monday confirmed Chris Wright, a fracking executive, to be Donald Trump’s energy secretary.

The vote was 59-38.

This country has a long history of taking its unique wildlife and landscapes for granted – but what has happened in this term of parliament is remarkable

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There is something significant missing from most of the political and media discussion about the Australian government’s promised, and now abandoned, nature protection laws: the environment. Logically, it should be a focus of the debate. In practice, it barely gets a look-in.

This would be an extraordinary state of affairs were it not so familiar. Australia has a long history of taking its unique wildlife and landscapes for granted, stretching back to European colonisation. But what has happened in this term of parliament is a pretty remarkable extension of that.

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Environmental disasters have plagued the water body for decades. Now the region is thrust in the global spotlight

The enormous semi-enclosed bay, its waters flanked by the Florida and Yucatán peninsulas and partially blockaded by Cuba, has been called the Golfo de México for centuries, a name that first appeared on a world map in 1550. And for centuries the name bothered no one.

Thomas Jefferson used the name without shame, even as he, Donald Trump-like, imagined dominating nearby nations. If the US could take Cuba, Jefferson wrote in 1823, it would control the “Gulf of Mexico and the countries and isthmus bordering on it”. Country music stars, no less than founding fathers, liked the romance of the place. Tracy Lawrence dreams of a Gulf of Mexico filled with whiskey. Johnny Cash wanted to dump his blues down in the Gulf.

Crevasses increasing in size and depth in response to climate breakdown, Durham University researchers find

The Greenland ice sheet – the second largest body of ice in the world – is cracking more rapidly than ever before as a response to climate breakdown, a study has found.

Researchers used 8,000 three-dimensional surface maps from high-resolution commercial satellite imagery to assess the evolution of cracks in the surface of the ice sheet between 2016 and 2021.

CJ Taylor was pushing back a fire front when a wind change almost killed him. A new exhibition aims to recreate a flashover – and disturb the public into action

The roar of an advancing bushfire, for those who have heard it, is often described as being as loud as an aircraft or an approaching freight train. “But my recollection was the opposite,” says volunteer firefighter and visual artist CJ Taylor, of the moment a fire burned over him. “Everything went quiet.”

It was November 2019, and Taylor and a group of fellow South Australian Country Fire Service volunteers had been deployed to north-eastern New South Wales, near the Guy Fawkes River national park. They were trying to push back a fire front but a sudden wind change meant it was gaining ground too quickly.

Greenpeace co-director responds to report finding fewer than one in 20 working in sector identifies as non-white

Environmental organisations “are still very white, especially at the top”, the co-director of Greenpeace has said as research showed little to no improvement in the ethnic diversity of their workforces.

Areeba Hamid’s comments came as the third annual racial action on the climate emergency (Race) report into diversity among environmental charities found fewer than one in 20 of those working in the sector identified as people of colour or as other racial or ethnic minority groups.

Authorities say there is 'more significant rain to come' in north Queensland, amid warnings to residents not to return to flooded homes. Dams and river catchments from Mackay to Cairns remain swollen from a week of heavy rain, which has dumped more than 1.2 metres at some locations. More than 400 people – mostly in Townsville, Ingham and Cardwell – are in evacuation shelters after being advised on Sunday to flee

• North Queensland floods: hundreds evacuated, dozens rescued as 1.2m of rain dumped in some areas

• Queensland floods: authorities ready for ‘likelihood of more flooding’ – video

• Heatwave warning as ‘intensely hot’ weather continues in south-eastern Australia

Some tropical lows are stalling, dumping huge volumes of rain – and climate change is playing a role

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Record-breaking floods across north Queensland have turned deadly, with one woman drowning while being rescued on Sunday. And the flood waters were still rising, with rain set to continue.

With reports of up to one metre of rainfall in parts of north-east Queensland, the heaviest rain has fallen between Lucinda to Townsville in northern Queensland as the Bureau of Meteorology warns the big wet will continue for days.

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This article originally appeared in the Conversation. Steve Turton is an adjunct professor of environmental geography at CQUniversity Australia

Exclusive: National Fire Chiefs Council says firefighters’ ability to respond is at risk as it calls for preventive action

The UK is not prepared for the impact of climate breakdown, fire chiefs have said, as they called on the government to take urgent action to protect communities.

The National Fire Chiefs Council (NFCC) said the ability of fire services to tackle weather-related emergencies was at risk, despite them often being the primary frontline response to major weather events including flooding, fires caused by heatwaves, and storm-related emergencies, all of which are becoming more common.

The isolated Pacific nation is trying to build its first football team amid a battle for survival against rising sea levels

The Marshall Islands, an isolated sprawl of atolls covering 750,000 square miles of the Pacific Ocean but home to barely 42,000 people, may be the final frontier for the world’s most popular sport. It claims to be the last country on Earth without a football team, and to this day, the islands have never hosted an 11-a-side game.

Until recently, football was an alien concept in a nation occupied by the US since the second world war, with baseball and basketball the traditional sports. As interest has grown in recent years, another barrier has emerged. Land has always been at a premium on these fragile shores, but never more than now with rising sea levels bringing fears of permanent flooding.

The chancellor’s apparent volte-face in backing a third runway has left many in her party disillusioned and led them to label it as an act of desperation

In 2020, Rachel Reeves, the MP for Leeds West and Pudsey, was clear why she opposed expansion of nearby Leeds Bradford airport. It would, she said, “significantly increase air and noise pollution”, so on environmental grounds, it should not happen.

By the autumn of 2021, as shadow chancellor, Reeves was the senior Labour figure chosen to lead her party’s hugely ambitious plans for a green industrial revolution.

The chancellor is under fire after a study cited as evidence for expanding the terminal to boost the UK’s economic growth was ordered by Heathrow itself

Rachel Reeves was facing criticism on Saturday night as it was confirmed that a report she cited as evidence that a third ­runway at Heathrow would boost the UK economy was commissioned by the airport itself.

Experts and green groups also challenged Reeves’s view that advances in the production of ­sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) had been a “gamechanger” that would substantially limit the environmental damage of flying, ­saying the claims were overblown and did not stand up to scrutiny.