The Guardian Climate Change

Global heating means atmosphere can drive both extreme droughts and floods with rapid switches

Climate “whiplash” between extremely wet and dry conditions, which spurred catastrophic fires in Los Angeles, is increasing exponentially around the world because of global heating, analysis has found.

Climate whiplash is a rapid swing between very wet or dry conditions and can cause far more harm to people than individual extreme events alone. In recent years, whiplash events have been linked to disastrous floods in east Africa, Pakistan and Australia and to worsening heatwaves in Europe and China.

Luke Evans, whose work has been called ‘breathtakingly new’, says he has lost experimental data and all equipment

A scientist in Liverpool has lost more than a decade of work after the prefabricated building that served as his research lab was destroyed in a suspected arson attack.

Luke Evans, the chief executive of Scintilla CME and a PhD student at the University of Liverpool, was due to submit his work in March. His research centres on advanced fuel cell technology that converts organic waste into clean energy, and could be crucial in the transition away from fossil fuels.

Forecasters warn of ‘particularly dangerous weather situation’ in California; Gavin Newsom hits back at House speaker for ‘politicizing’ tragedy

• Big oil pushed to kill bill that would have made them pay for wildfire disasters
• Tell us about financial consequences you are facing

LA mayor, Karen Bass, has shared a phone number for residents who have evacuated to get assistance in finding and retrieving pets in evacuation areas.

Posting on X, Bass wrote:

Pets are family.

The City is making help available to find and retrieve pets in evacuation areas.

The scope of the Cop26 net zero banking alliance may have been limited, but the exodus of six US banks signifies a seismic political shift

Last week, as flames began tearing through greater Los Angeles, claiming multiple lives and forcing more than 100,000 people to evacuate, JP Morgan became the sixth major US bank to quit the Net Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA) since the start of December. A smaller story, certainly, but the departure of top US banks from the NZBA in the weeks since Donald Trump’s re-election nonetheless speaks to a seismic political shift prompting major financial institutions to turn away from the climate-related commitments they made in the optimistic years after the Paris agreement.

The NZBA is a voluntary network of global banks committed to “align lending and investment portfolios with net zero emissions by 2050”. It is part of the umbrella Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ), which counts among its membership dozens of “alliances” covering the various segments of global finance. For its part, the NZBA requires new members to submit science-aligned targets within 18 months of joining, alongside disclosing plans for and status updates on meeting them.

Adrienne Buller is director of The Break Down and the author of The Value of a Whale: on the illusions of green capitalism

I feel like I am safe in saying that we are not thriving on our changing planet – and we will not in the coming decades

My house in Altadena burned down in the wildfires on Wednesday. It all happened quickly. On Tuesday around 7pm, my wife and daughters went to a hotel as a precaution. I left the house with the dogs when the mandatory evacuation order came in around 3am. As best as I can put the timeline together, our home burned down around the same time that the sun came up, and I was able to drive in and see the damage around 2pm.

Neighbors that went in after said it looked like a “war zone”. I have never been in a war zone thankfully, but I didn’t think so. There was nothing violent or chaotic about it. No one stopped me from driving in. There were no sirens. I stood alone – no one else around – in front of my house that was at that point just a fireplace and chimney. The house across the street was about halfway done with burning down, and the house behind ours had just started to burn.

Benjamin Hamlington is a research scientist at Nasa Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a team lead at Nasa Sea Level Change team

World Economic Forum says responses from experts in business, politics and academia also highlight climate crisis

Global leaders have said that escalating armed conflict is the most urgent threat in 2025 but the climate emergency is expected to cause the greatest concern over the next decade, according to the World Economic Forum.

Ahead of its yearly gathering in the Swiss ski resort of Davos next week, the WEF asked more than 900 leaders from business, politics and academia about the risks that most concern them.

British arm of Heartland, which has taken oil and Republican funding, to be led by ex-Ukip head Lois Perry

Climate science deniers are lining up a political offensive in Britain after a US lobby group opened a UK branch which is already working with Nigel Farage.

The Reform UK leader was the guest of honour at the launch of Heartland UK/Europe, which is to be headed by a former leader of Ukip and climate denier.

We are raiding the Guardian Long Read archives to bring you some classic pieces from years past, with new introductions from the authors.

This week, from 2022: Despite the rise of headline-grabbing megafires, fewer fires are burning worldwide now than at any time since antiquity. But this isn’t good news – in banishing fire from sight, we have made its dangers stranger and less predictable. By Daniel Immerwahr

Region faces ‘extreme fire risk’ warnings and ‘significant risk of rapid fire spread’ as official death toll expected to rise

• California wildfires: live updates

As forecasters warn of another “particularly dangerous weather situation” across northern Los Angeles, residents braced for new wildfire evacuation orders, even as the official death toll from last week’s fires in Altadena and the Pacific Palisades was expected to rise.

Los Angeles, and parts of Ventura county to the north, faced “extreme fire risk” warnings through Wednesday, with officials warning of “significant risk of rapid fire spread” due to the Santa Ana winds – which have gusts of up to 75mph – . The “particularly dangerous weather situation” designation is used very rarely, and was designed by meteorologists to signal “the extreme of the extremes”. The winds were predicted to reach near hurricane-force in some areas.

As PM pins hopes on AI, what effect will building energy-hungry datacentres have on Labour’s clean power pledge?

Keir Starmer this week launched a plan to bring a 20-fold increase in the amount of artificial intelligence (AI) computing power under public control by 2030.

But the race to build more electricity hungry AI datacentres over the next five years appears to work against another government target: to plug in enough low-carbon electricity projects to create a clean power system by the same date.

Allocation of funds from Inflation Reduction Act makes it harder for president-elect to halt green initiatives

The Biden administration has raced to allocate $74bn of funding for climate initiatives before Donald Trump’s inauguration, leaving $20bn vulnerable to potential rollback by the incoming president, new figures reveal.

As the inauguration of Trump looms, the outgoing administration has been accelerating its allocation of cash for climate change and clean energy programs before they are throttled by the incoming US president.

After the worst rains in decades, rivers are drying up and crops failing, leaving people in the interior without clean water or healthcare, and cutting transport links

John Adjako lets out a deep sigh when his thoughts turn to his income as a boatman. It has been dwindling for the past few months during the drought in the Upper Suriname region where he lives and where his boat is one of the dozens moored each day at the Atjoni jetty.

December generally sees a surge of local passengers and tourists heading to the interior of Suriname, a country on the north-east coast of South America, where the Amazon meets the Atlantic Ocean.

More than 150 Nobel and World Food prize laureates sign open letter calling for immediate ramping up of food production

More than 150 Nobel and World Food prize laureates have signed an open letter calling for “moonshot” efforts to ramp up food production before an impending world hunger catastrophe.

The coalition of some of the world’s greatest living thinkers called for urgent action to prioritise research and technology to solve the “tragic mismatch of global food supply and demand”.

Fires have killed at least 24, displaced thousands, destroyed over 12,000 structures as winds predicted until Wednesday

Fire crews are trying to get the upper hand on blazes that are tearing through Los Angeles before expected high wind gusts threaten their progress. The fires, which may become the most expensive in US history, have killed at least 24 people, displaced thousands, destroyed more than 12,000 structures and have 100,000 people under evacuation orders.

Sustained winds of up to 40mph (64km/h) and gusts in the mountains reaching 65mph (105km/h) are predicted through Wednesday, forecasters said. Winds picked up on Monday and were expected to strengthen on Tuesday, fire behavior analyst Dennis Burns said.

Warning of ‘particularly dangerous situation’ with gusts expected as LA fire chief says: ‘We are not in the clear yet’

• California wildfires – live updates

Firefighters battling the disastrous wildfires around Los Angeles were prepared for a return of dangerous winds that could again stoke the flames as the death toll in the tragedy has hit at least 24.

Fierce gusts known as Santa Ana winds have been largely blamed for turning the wildfires into devastating infernos that leveled huge tranches of neighborhoods around America’s second-largest city, which has also been hit by drought.

Mike Johnson criticizes California state and local officials; Gavin Newsom says ‘hundreds of firefighting assets are currently prepositioned across Southern California’

• Tell us about the financial consequences you are facing due to the California fires

Weather forecasters are predicting that the dry season in Los Angeles is likely to get worse in the coming weeks and that the drought which intensified last week across southern California will continue to worsen into March.

Meteorologist Eric Holthaus has written for the Guardian and says the rain forecast for the next three weeks in Los Angeles means the city’s record-dry start to its rainy season will keep getting worse.

This year’s rainy season is running at just 2% of normal for Los Angeles, which has only seen 0.16in of rain so far.

Weather models increasingly indicate that southern California will receive no rain at all during the rest of January, and potentially no rain during the first week or two of February as well.

The news from California is clear, but we don’t want to see it. It’s too confounding, big, complex. But we can sense the danger

When I send anxious texts to friends in Los Angeles – friends who have been evacuated or who are waiting to leave , friends escaping a fire zone, wondering if their life’s work has been destroyed, worrying about the smoke’s effect on an asthmatic child – I always begin with the same three words:are you OK?

But a continent away, watching photos and videos of a city I love being incinerated, overcome by waves of terror, grief and mourning, I have other questions.

Greens senator sees climate crisis and environment as the ‘elephant in the room’ for 2025 election

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The Greens are demanding Labor put a moratorium on the destruction of koala habitat and overcome political opponents and mining interests to implement its full suite of promised environment protection laws, in an early attempt to position nature as a federal election issue.

“What we need is the government, the Labor party, to be tougher and to have some guts to stand up and stare them down,” says the party’s environment spokesperson, Sarah Hanson-Young.

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Growers blame weather challenges in UK and Europe, which Met Office says will become more frequent with climate breakdown

Broccoli, cauliflower and other brassicas may be in short supply this spring as the mild autumn and winter has caused the crops to come up early, growers have said.

Any shortages will prolong the so-called “hungry gap”, which runs from April to early June, when very few crops grown in the UK are ready to eat.

Global events can feel bigger and more intractable than ever, but there’s still hope