The Guardian Climate Change

The small town of Dimock saw its water become brown, undrinkable, even flammable – and its residents are still feeling the effects

Fracking has burst back on to the national stage in the US presidential election contest for the must-win swing state of Pennsylvania. But for one town in this state that saw its water become mud-brown, undrinkable and even flammable 15 years ago, the specter of fracking never went away.

Residents in Dimock, a rural town of around 1,200 people in north-east Pennsylvania, have been locked in a lengthy battle to remediate their water supply that was ruined in 2009 after the drilling of dozens of wells to access a hotspot called the “Saudi Arabia of gas” found deep underneath their homes.

As the Cop16 conference begins, scientists and academics say human activity has pushed the world into a danger zone

Humanity is “on the precipice” of shattering Earth’s limits, and will suffer huge costs if we fail to act on biodiversity loss, experts warn. This week, world leaders meet in Cali, Colombia, for the Cop16 UN biodiversity conference to discuss action on the global crisis. As they prepare for negotiations, scientists and experts around the world have warned that the stakes are high, and there is “no time to waste”.

“We are already locked in for significant damage, and we’re heading in a direction that will see more,” says Tom Oliver, professor of applied ecology at the University of Reading. “I really worry that negative changes could be very rapid.”

We need to deal with the climate effects of global capitalism the way we deal with inflation – by applying the brakes

The impact of the climate crisis is evident everywhere. Finance ministers meet in Washington DC this week for the annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund in the wake of two devastating hurricanes in the US within a month. Parts of the Sahara have been flooded for the first time in half a century.

Scientists attribute the growing number of extreme weather events to a planet that continues to get hotter as the result of rising concentrations of greenhouse gases linked to human activity. Global temperature records are being broken with every year that passes and the idea that this can continue indefinitely is a fantasy.

Experts say UN event will be critical for world’s declining wildlife population as host nation pushes for inclusivity

World leaders, environmental activists and prominent researchers have begun to arrive in Cali, Colombia, for a biodiversity summit that experts say will be decisive for the fate of the world’s rapidly declining wildlife populations.

The host nation is also hoping that the summit, which formally opens on Sunday evening, will be the most inclusive in history.

Slavery also on agenda at meeting of government heads, which King Charles will attend for first time as monarch

Britain faces growing calls at this week’s Commonwealth summit to pay billions of pounds in reparations to poorer countries for causing climate change as well as slavery.

The leaders of some of the nations at most risk from the effects of climate change plan to use the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in Samoa to lobby for reparative justice from the UK and other wealthy countries that are among the biggest polluters.

World Without End topped bestseller lists but was criticised for embracing nuclear power

In 2019, France’s best known climate expert sat down to work with its most feted graphic novelist. The result? Perhaps the most terrifying comic ever drawn.

Part history, part analysis, part vision for the future, World Without End weaves the story of humanity’s rapacious appetite for fossil fuel energy, how it has made possible the society people take for granted, and its disastrous effects on the climate.

Oakland residents told to flee as 80 firefighters battle blaze amid power shut-offs to combat major ‘diablo wind’

A fast-moving brush fire Friday in northern California damaged at least 10 structures in the hills of Oakland, prompting an evacuation order as it grew to 13 acres (4 hectares).

No injuries were immediately reported. Crews were called to the area around 1.30pm for a vegetation fire. In less than 30 minutes, the blaze had grown, requiring more firefighters to race to the scene. By 2.30pm, more than 80 firefighters were working to control the blaze alongside state crews, the Oakland fire department said.

The death of Yahya Sinwar, tributes to Liam Payne, Comet Tsuchinshan-Atlas and the world twins festival: the past seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists

Democratic presidential nominee has raised alarm about Trump’s plans but has not said much about her own

• US politics – live updates

As the US south-east struggles to rebuild after two deadly and climate-fueled hurricanes, some environmental advocates are demanding Kamala Harris flesh out a strong climate plan.

Since Hurricanes Helene and Milton ravaged parts of the country, the vice-president has slammed Donald Trump’s climate record by airing a new campaign ad showing the oft-criticized moment the former president redrew a hurricane’s path with a marker, and taking aim at Trump’s spread of climate misinformation and history of withholding disaster aid.

It’s all in the line of sight

• See more of Fiona Katauskas’s cartoons here

Survey of young people aged 16-25 from all US states shows concerns across political spectrum

The overwhelming majority of young Americans worry about the climate crisis, and more than half say their concerns about the environment will affect where they decide to live and whether to have children, new research finds.

The study comes just weeks after back-to-back hurricanes, Helene and Milton, pummeled the south-eastern US. Flooding from Helene caused more than 600 miles of destruction, from Florida’s west coast to the mountains of North Carolina, while Milton raked across the Florida peninsula less than two weeks later.

Oil majors’ conduct can constitute reckless endangerment due to fossil fuels’ affect on global heating, advocates claim

New York state prosecutors could press criminal charges against big oil for its role in fueling hurricanes and other climate disasters, lawyers wrote in a new prosecution memorandum that has been endorsed by elected officials across the state.

The 50-page document, published by the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen and the progressive prosecutors network Fair and Just Prosecution on Thursday, comes as the US south-east struggles to recover from the deadly hurricanes Helene and Milton, both of which scientists have found were exacerbated by the climate crisis. It details the havoc wrought on New York by 2021’s Hurricane Ida and 2012’s Hurricane Sandy, and other deadly climate events such as extreme heatwaves across the US this past summer.

The destruction in northern Italy has ignited debate in a country where just 6% of homes are insured against natural disaster

It was 2am when the parish priest, Giovanni Samorì, was woken by a phone call from the mayor of Traversara ordering him to start ringing the church bells. The traditional call now forms part of the civil protection procedure deployed by many Italian towns. Its aim: to warn residents of impending calamity.

As torrential rain pounded the village, Samorì sprang into action, a task he compares to “sounding the death knell”. It worked: the evacuation of Traversara’s 480 residents was swift and, despite the priest’s foreboding, there were no deaths.

Landmark review says urgent action needed to conserve resources and save ecosystems that supply fresh water

More than half the world’s food production will be at risk of failure within the next 25 years as a rapidly accelerating water crisis grips the planet, unless urgent action is taken to conserve water resources and end the destruction of the ecosystems on which our fresh water depends, experts have warned in a landmark review.

Half the world’s population already faces water scarcity, and that number is set to rise as the climate crisis worsens, according to a report from the Global Commission on the Economics of Water published on Thursday.

Emergency requests by 27 states to pause rule requiring fossil fuel-powered plants to reduce emissions were denied

The US supreme court declined on Wednesday to put on hold a new federal rule targeting carbon pollution from coal- and gas-fired power plants at the request of numerous states and industry groups in another major challenge to Joe Biden’s efforts to combat climate change.

The justices denied emergency requests by West Virginia, Indiana and 25 other states – most of them Republican-led – as well as power companies and industry associations, to halt the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rule while litigation continues in a lower court. The regulation, aimed at cutting greenhouse gas emissions that drive the climate crisis, took effect on 8 July.

Shoshone national forest officials pause gruesome policy of exploding carcasses to minimize hazard during dry spell

Rangers in Wyoming’s Shoshone national forest believe they have figured out how to mitigate an elevated risk of wildfires: they are no longer using explosives to blow up dead horses.

The temporary pause in the seemingly bizarre and somewhat gruesome policy comes as a lengthy dry spell in the state’s backcountry combines with hotter-than-usual temperatures, increasing the possibility of wildfires. Experts say drought and heat from the climate crisis is fueling a rise in extreme wildfires worldwide.

The devastation wrought by Helene and Milton could shake up priorities and bring the climate crisis more to the fore

Despite its enormous implications, the climate crisis has so far mostly been a dormant issue in the US presidential election. Some hope the devastation wrought in quick succession by two major hurricanes will shake up the priorities of American voters before a stark choice between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump on polling day.

Last month, Hurricane Helene became one of the deadliest storms ever to hit the US, killing more than 220 people and causing billions of dollars in damage as it tore a path northwards, through the key election swing states of Georgia and North Carolina. This was followed two weeks later by Hurricane Milton, which rampaged across Florida.

Tech barons are forever predicting some amazing new technology to fix the climate crisis. Yet fixes already exist

There are so many ways to fiddle while Rome burns, or as this season’s weather would have it, gets torn apart by hurricanes and tornadoes and also goes underwater – and, in other places, burns. One particularly pernicious way comes from the men in love with big tech, who are forever insisting that we need some amazing new technology to solve our problems, be it geoengineering, carbon sequestration or fusion – but wait, it gets worse.

At an artificial intelligence conference in Washington DC, the former Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently claimed that “[w]e’re not going to hit the climate goals anyway because we’re not organized to do it” and that we should just plunge ahead with AI, which is so huge an energy hog it’s prompted a number of tech companies to abandon their climate goals. Schmidt then threw out the farfetched notion that we should go all in on AI because maybe AI will somehow, maybe, eventually know how to “solve” climate, saying: “I’d rather bet on AI solving the problem than constraining it.”

Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. She is the author of Orwell’s Roses and co-editor with Thelma Young Lutunatabua of the climate anthology Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility

Wolsingham school’s carbon-cutting event had been planned by pupils but parents raised concerns

A school has made a U-turn on a student-led plan to turn the heating off for a “blue nose” climate action day after parents raised concerns.

The heating was due to be turned off at Wolsingham school, County Durham, on Friday but the plan has now been postponed until the summer term of next year when it is likely to be warmer.

As the threats of climate change continue to become realities in new and sometimes terrifying ways, more and more teams and leagues will have to address the problem

The Arizona Diamondbacks have a climate problem. To be more precise, Phoenix has a climate problem and, as a result, the Diamondbacks have a field that needs renovations if the team is going to keep fans cool – and no one is sure whose responsibility it is to pay for it.

The team’s lease on Chase Field expires in 2027, and negotiations with Maricopa county have stalled. The organization’s plan to fund the $400m to $500m project is modeled on the Arizona Cardinals’ successful bid to fund their own field renovation through stadium sales and recaptured income, and the plan is supported by the Chamber of Commerce, the Arizona Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Greater Phoenix Leadership, the Economic Council and Downtown Phoenix, Inc.