The Guardian Climate Change

Several US states want to criminalise atmospheric experiments, which could prevent meteorological studies

Conspiracy theories about weather manipulation go back centuries and are more dangerous than you might think.

In the ninth century, St Agobard of Lyon wrote a treatise called On Hail and Thunder attacking the popular superstition that storm-raisers could call up tempests at will. Bizarrely, these magicians were supposedly paid by aerial sailors from the land of Magonia, who sailed in the clouds and collected the crops destroyed by hail and storms.

Activists horrified as EPA reverses pollution laws and reviews landmark finding that gases harm public health

Donald Trump’s administration is to reconsider the official finding that greenhouse gases are harmful to public health, a move that threatens to rip apart the foundation of the US’s climate laws, amid a stunning barrage of actions to weaken or repeal a host of pollution limits upon power plants, cars and waterways.

Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued an extraordinary cavalcade of pollution rule rollbacks on Wednesday, led by the announcement it would potentially scrap a landmark 2009 finding by the US government that planet-heating gases, such carbon dioxide, pose a threat to human health.

With apparent support for airport expansion and fossil fuel exploration, it may look as if the party is abandoning the climate challenge, but it’s just pantomime

There’s no getting away from it: in the last few months we’ve seen leaders and corporations do very real damage to the energy transition. Donald Trump has paused future spending on clean energy infrastructure and he’s cancelled decarbonisation targets. And the new European Commission has loudly promised to cut environmental “red tape”.

If you only read the headlines, you might think we’re facing the same issue here in the UK. But overall, Labour has remained committed to its long-term climate goals. Someone close to No 10 has said the prime minister wants to allow a massive new North Sea fossil fuel development (but they know this would still need to pass a climate assessment). The government has invited Heathrow to apply to expand (knowing it will need to fulfil a myriad of conditions). There are reports that Labour could move funds away from carbon capture and storage (but that’s always been a speculative technology). And there were reports that GB Energy’s funding might be cut (but that might be nonsense, or it might just mean spending being moved around government). More concretely, it is moving fast towards supporting a second runway at Gatwick (knowing that planning conditions, and then long political and legal battles, could scupper the scheme).

Richard Power Sayeed is a historian of modern Britain. He is currently researching the politics of energy, and is the author of 1997: The Future that Never Happened

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The US president is making energy deals with Japan and Ukraine, and in Africa has even touted resurrecting coal

Donald Trump’s repeated mantra of “drill, baby, drill” demands that more oil and gas be extracted in the United States, but the president has set his sights on an even broader goal: keeping the world hooked on planet-heating fossil fuels for as long as possible.

In deals being formulated with countries such as Japan and Ukraine, Trump is using US leverage in tariffs and military aid to bolster the flow of oil and gas around the world. In Africa, his administration has even touted the resurrection of coal, the dirtiest of all fossil fuels, to bring energy to the continent.

Injecting pollutants into the atmosphere to reflect the sun would be extremely dangerous, but the UK is funding field trials

Some years ago in the pages of the Guardian, we sounded the alarm about the increasing attention being paid to solar geoengineering – a barking mad scheme to cancel global heating by putting pollutants in the atmosphere that dim the sun by reflecting some sunlight back to space.

In one widely touted proposition, fleets of aircraft would continually inject sulphur compounds into the upper atmosphere, simulating the effects of a massive array of volcanoes erupting continuously. In essence, we have broken the climate by releasing gigatonnes of fossil-fuel carbon dioxide, and solar geoengineering proposes to “fix” it by breaking a very different part of the climate system.

Raymond T Pierrehumbert FRS is professor of planetary physics at the University of Oxford. He is an author of the 2015 US National Academy of Sciences report on climate intervention

Michael E Mann ForMemRS is presidential distinguished professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Our Fragile Moment: How Lessons from Earth’s Past Can Help Us Survive the Climate Crisis

If you don’t believe the scientists, will you believe the insurance companies?

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My homeplace has experienced four natural disasters in eight years. But I’d never seen the like of this bird before, vibrantly green and startlingly beautiful

We were midway through our cyclone preparation when my mother broke her leg. She stepped into her bedroom to retrieve something, tripped and fell, and that was that. My mother is 74 and hardy, so this sudden break took us by surprise. Once I got her home, leg in brace, we’d lost significant time, and my household was down to one functional human: me.

This is the fourth natural disaster I’ve experienced in the last eight years. One-in-100-year floods (2017), unprecedented bushfires (2019), one-in-1,000-year floods (2022) and now Cyclone Alfred. Cyclones are a new threat. I’ve lived in my homeplace, in northern New South Wales, for almost 50 years and we’ve never had a cyclone cross land in our vicinity. We were, as they say, in uncharted waters.

Swings between drought and floods striking from Dallas to Shanghai, while Madrid and Cairo are among cities whose climate has flipped

Climate whiplash is already hitting major cities around the world, bringing deadly swings between extreme wet and dry weather as the climate crisis intensifies, a report has revealed.

Dozens more cities, including Lucknow, Madrid and Riyadh have suffered a climate “flip” in the last 20 years, switching from dry to wet extremes, or vice versa. The report analysed the 100 most populous cities, plus 12 selected ones, and found that 95% of them showed a distinct trend towards wetter or drier weather.

Alfred is being used as the latest front in an ideological war, but facts are relevant to how we prepare for a climate-changed future

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It’s not a good time for climate science. The Trump administration has sacked more than a thousand staff from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the country’s leading agency for weather forecasting and climate science, potentially damaging its ability to do lifesaving work forecasting hurricanes and other extreme weather events. The New York Times reported plans are under way to fire another 1,000. If true, that will take the cuts to about 20% of the workforce.

On Monday, it was announced Nasa was axing its chief scientist, Katherine Calvin, who had been appointed to lead the agency’s work on climate change. In trademark Donald Trump/Elon Musk style, there appears little care or sense in where cuts have been made. It’s destruction for destruction’s sake, with tens of thousands of peer-reviewed scientific papers underpinning the understanding of climate science dismissed as a “hoax” or, somehow, “woke”. As in most areas, what happens in the US on forecasting and science capability will have an impact beyond its borders.

Authorities warn more fatalities expected as a year’s worth of rain falls on Bahía Blanca in eight hours

Rescue teams in Argentina are searching for two girls, aged one and five, who were swept away by severe floods that ripped through Buenos Aires province, killing at least 16 people.

A year’s worth of rain fell on the city of Bahía Blanca and the town of Cerri on Friday, rapidly inundating neighbourhoods and destroying homes, bridges and roads. The rainfall – 400mm (15.7in) recorded in just eight hours – was more than twice the city’s previous record of 175mm (6.8in) set in 1930.

Chris Wright signals abandonment of Biden’s ‘irrational, quasi-religious’ climate policies at industry conference

The world needs more planet-heating fossil fuel, not less, Donald Trump’s newly appointed energy secretary, Chris Wright, told oil and gas bigwigs on Monday.

“We are unabashedly pursuing a policy of more American energy production and infrastructure, not less,” he said in the opening plenary talk of CERAWeek, a swanky annual conference in Houston, Texas, led by the financial firm S&P Global.

André Corrêa do Lago suggests US organisations can play a constructive role even if government limits participation

The US will be “central” to solving the climate crisis despite Donald Trump’s withdrawal of government support and cash, the president of the next UN climate summit has said.

André Corrêa do Lago, president-designate of the Cop30 summit for the host country, Brazil, hinted that businesses and other organisations in the US could play a constructive role without the White House.

Regional voters are often stereotyped so I propose a new demographic category ahead of the election: conservative, uncommitted rural voters with environmental sympathies

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Recently, an arborist operating in my town in remote north-western Australia put out a public statement. He found it necessary, given the number of queries he had received, to explain his reasons for cutting down native vegetation.

It sounds like the start of a joke, but what this contractor’s earnest explanation illustrates is how in tune regional voters can be with their environs.

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We live in dark, depressing and – frankly – terrifying times. Will technology push us over the edge or help us exit our many crises?

Today we live in an era defined by crisis. Indeed, we are facing multiple overlapping threats at once: from accelerating climate breakdown to the rise of authoritarianism across the world, we are in a situation that the historian Adam Tooze calls “polycrisis”. It is no wonder that hope is scarce, pessimism is high and despair is pervasive. As one meme that captures the grim, morbid mood of our age reads: “My retirement plan is civilisational collapse.”

But not everyone shares this gloomy outlook. On the extreme other end of public sentiment sit Silicon Valley billionaires: they are some of the most optimistic people on earth. Of course, it’s easy to be optimistic when you are sitting on enough money to sway national politics. And yet, the source of their optimism isn’t simply money. It is also a deep-seated faith in unfettered technological advances.

Campaigners say funding halt is a ‘staggering blow’ to vulnerable nations and to efforts to keep heating below 1.5C

Donald Trump’s withdrawal of US overseas aid will almost decimate global climate finance from the developed world, data shows, with potentially devastating impacts on vulnerable nations.

The US was responsible last year for about $8 in every $100 that flowed from the rich world to developing countries, to help them cut greenhouse gas emissions and cope with the impacts of extreme weather, according to data from the analyst organisation Carbon Brief.

Damage to trees in western North Carolina from Hurricane Helene was ‘extraordinary and humbling’ but urban areas face particular problems

The city of Asheville and its surrounding areas have been left vulnerable to floods, fires and extreme heat after Hurricane Helene uprooted thousands of trees that provided shade and protection from storms.

Helene was catastrophic for the region’s trees – in part due to the heavy precursor rainstorm that pounded southern Appalachia for two days straight, drenching the soil before Helene hit, bringing yet more heavy rain and 60-100mph winds.

Experience has taught many residents in flood-prone areas around Lismore and northern New South Wales the value of leaving early

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Valerie Thompson is heading home to Brunswick Heads in an hour. The 52-year-old lives in a low-lying area just north of Byron Bay and was among those who got out early before Tropical Cyclone Alfred.

The idea that the climate crisis may generate a cyclone that ploughs into south-east Queensland was already a “nightmare scenario” for the country’s insurance industry – the same companies that wanted to charge Thompson $30,000 a year to insure her home. If they were taking it seriously, why shouldn’t she?

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Tougher laws said to be inspiring clandestine attacks on the ‘property and machinery’ of the fossil fuel economy

It was raining and the sparkling lights of the City of London shone back from the cold, wet pavement as two young men made their way through streets deserted save for a few police and private security. In the sleeping heart of the global financial system, they felt eyes on them from the city’s network of surveillance cameras, but hoped their disguise of high-vis vests and hoods hiding their faces would conceal them.

Reaching Lime Street, they stopped by a maintenance hole and looked around to make sure no one was watching. One took off the cover, located a bundle of black cables and started hacking away. Hours later, an email was circulated to news desks: “Internet cut off to hundreds of insurers in climate-motivated sabotage.”

Guardian Australia reporters, editors and contributors reflect on their experiences of wind, rain and power outages from ex-Tropical Cyclone Alfred

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At 9am it’s still gusting like a bastard in our corner of Surfers Paradise. The street is still OK, but there’s a fair bit of debris, and branches are still coming down during the more violent squalls. Quite deceptive really: one minute you think things have died down, and next minute another mini gale howls through.

Trump pulls out of Cop28 loss and damage deal that recognises harms done by richer, polluting economies to vulnerable nations

The Trump administration has withdrawn the US from a global agreement under which the developed nations most responsible for the climate crisis pledged to partly compensate developing countries for irreversible harms caused by global heating.

The loss and damage fund was agreed at the Cop28 UN climate summit in late 2023 – a hard-won victory after years of diplomatic and grassroots advocacy by developing nations that bear the brunt of the climate crisis despite having contributed the least to greenhouse gas emissions. The fund signalled a commitment by developed, polluting countries to provide financial support for some of the irreversible economic and noneconomic losses from sea level rise, desertification, drought and floods already happening.