The global climate conference in Glasgow in November is heading for failure unless rich countries can come up with financial assistance for poorer countries. There are less than 100 days to go until the Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow where the fate of the planet will be in the balance. Yet Britain has spent the past week debating whether it is necessary to rinse the dishes before putting them in the dishwasher. It may well be, as Allegra Stratton, the prime minister’s Cop26 spokeswoman, has suggested that such micro-actions can help to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that are contributing to global warming and the cycle of extraordinary extreme weather events that so many countries, including Britain, have been experiencing. Yet this frivolous debate risks diverting attention from the immensity of the task ahead to ensure this crucial summit does not end in failure. But while delivering the G7’s $100 billion promise is necessary for success, it is hardly sufficient. The costs of climate change are rising. Ethiopia, for example, says it needs $275 billion by 2030 to meet its green energy plans. Rich countries must find ways to mobilise far larger sums. At their summit in Cornwall last month, G7 leaders committed to establish a Build Back Better World fund, its remit to include tackling climate change. Boris Johnson, who with President Biden came up with the idea, must put flesh on its bones before Cop26.

Times 31st July 2021 read more »

Boris Johnson has been urged to step up efforts to secure agreement on stemming global warming, amid concern in some corners of Whitehall over a lack of urgency ahead of a crucial international summit he will chair in November. With less than 100 days to go to the Glasgow conference, there were warnings that hopes of a landmark deal may be unravelling. And Mr Johnson’s independent climate change adviser warned it was time for him to use “every diplomatic lever” to secure pledges from fellow leaders on cutting emissions of greenhouse gases and financial support to help developing countries adapt.

Independent 30th July 2021 read more »

Boris Johnson has given his support to plans to allow thousands of delegates treated with Russian and Chinese vaccines to attend the Cop26 climate change summit despite cabinet opposition, The Times has been told. The prime minister is facing a cabinet split over plans to allow officials and leaders who have been jabbed with Sinovac or Sinopharm vaccines from China, or Sputnik V from Russia, into the UK without quarantining. The vaccines are not recognised by either the UK or European medical regulators because of concerns over their efficacy. Officials have raised concerns about the public health implications of allowing in the delegates.

Times 31st July 2021 read more »

The president of the Cop26 climate conference is said to be “pissed off” about a series of high-profile interventions by the government’s climate spokeswoman. Allegra Stratton, the former Downing Street press secretary, conducted a series of interviews this week, including one in which she suggested that people who care about saving the planet should join the Green Party. In another interview she highlighted a series of small steps that the public could take to make a greener world, including not rinsing their dishes before putting them in the dishwasher. The Times has been told by several sources that Alok Sharma, the president of the conference, is concerned by her comments. The claims were strongly denied by a source close to Sharma, who said: “We don’t recognise this claim.” One Whitehall source said: “Alok is pissed off, it risks opening us up to ridicule. Her comments about dishwashers are ridiculous. Lots of people don’t even have dishwashers. He feels it’s undermining the good work he’s doing on messaging.”

Times 31st July 2021 read more »

TO get a more hopeful angle on COP26, the annual United Nations climate conference coming to Glasgow in November, it may be useful to jump forwards to COP58. In the words of one report from 2053, the meeting includes “the sixth mandated global stocktake”. It recounts that we are burning “far less CO2 into the atmosphere than in any year since 1887”. The Global Footprint Network has the world “working at par in relation to the Earth’s bioproduction, waste intake and processing … What for many years had been true only for Cuba and Costa Rica had become true everywhere”.

The National 31st July 2021 read more »

Greenland’s vast ice sheet is undergoing a surge in melting, with the amount of ice vanishing in a single day this week enough to cover the whole of Florida in two inches of water, researchers have found. The deluge of melting has reached deep into Greenland’s enormous icy interior, with data from the Danish government showing that the ice sheet lost 8.5bn tons of surface mass on Tuesday alone. A further 8.4bn tons was lost on Thursday, the Polar Portal monitoring website reported.

Guardian 30th July 2021 read more »

Independent 30th July 2021 read more »

British summers are likely to regularly see temperatures of above 40C even if humanity manages to limit global warming to 1.5C, the UK’s leading meteorologists have warned. The UK is already seeing increasingly extreme weather, with 2020 the third warmest, fifth wettest and eighth sunniest year on record – the first ever to fall into the top 10 for all three variables.

Telegraph 29th July 2021 read more »

Times 29th July 2021 read more »

Headlines feature floods in Germany and London and heatwaves in California, but the real frontline states of climate change are the Small Island Developing States. Shorelines battered by more intense storms, drinking water tainted by rising seas, fish stocks disrupted by the acidifying ocean; the small islands, on this issue, are the canaries in the coalmine. The small islands are also natural allies of the UK and other prosperous nations that want to see global action on climate change accelerate.

Times 29th July 2021 read more »

“The scientific community has done a really good job projecting when we would get to 1.2 degrees Celsius, which is about where we are now,” Kalmus said. “The community hasn’t done as good of a job projecting how bad climate impacts would be at 1.2 degrees Celsius.” Indeed, from heat domes to wildfires to rapidly melting ice sheets, a lot of the very real effects of the climate crisis that we are seeing seem far worse—or far from—what was predicted. So in this summer in which it feels impossible to look at the news without seeing a climate catastrophe of some kind, I asked several climate scientists how the constant onslaught of tragedy affects where they put us on the climate timeline. What they had to say was not particularly reassuring. “It’s already worse than what I imagined. I feel like the heat dome event in the Pacific Northwest moved up my sense of where we are at by about a decade, or even more,” said Kalmus. “I think a lot of my colleagues probably feel the same.”

Bulletin of Atomic Scientists 27th July 2021 read more »

The UK is already undergoing disruptive climate change with increased rainfall, sunshine and temperatures, according to scientists. The year 2020 was the third warmest, fifth wettest and eight sunniest on record, scientists said in the latest UK State of the Climate report. No other year is in the top 10 on all three criteria. The experts said that, in the space of 30 years, the UK has become 0.9C warmer and 6% wetter. The report’s lead author Mike Kendon, climate information scientist at the UK Met Office, told BBC News: “A lot of people think climate change is in the future – but this proves the climate is already changing here in the UK.

BBC 29th July 2021 read more »

Extremes of weather will strike the UK more frequently owing to the climate crisis, scientists said after data showed that last year was one of the warmest, as well as one of the wettest and sunniest, on record.

Guardian 29th July 2021 read more »

How many years until we must act on climate? Zero, say these climate thinkers. We asked a panelist of experts on when we need to start changing our economies and ways of consuming and producing. Their answer: now.

Guardian 28th July 2021 read more »

Summer temperatures will exceed 40C on a ‘regular basis’ in the UK even in a best-case scenario of just 1.5C of global warming – while storms would become considerably more ferocious, meteorologists have warned. The record temperature is currently 38.7C in the UK, which has seen about 1.3C of warming so far since the industrial revolution. But that is set to increase and regularly reoccur even if world leaders can take the actions needed to meet their target of limiting warming to 1.5C – which most experts believe to be extremely unlikely.

iNews 29th July 2021 read more »

Biodiversity in the UK: bloom or bust?.

Environmental Audit Committee 30th June 2021 read more »

“Record-shattering” extremes – which break weather records by large margins – will become more likely as a result of climate change, a new study finds. The paper, published in Nature Climate Change, finds that the northern mid-latitudes are particularly vulnerable to record-shattering heat. This is exemplified by the recent heatwave over north-western US and Canada, in which many long-standing temperature records were broken by as much as 5C.

Carbon Brief 26th July 2021 read more »

A new study tracking the planet’s vital signs has found that many of the key indicators of the global climate crisis are getting worse and either approaching, or exceeding, key tipping points as the earth heats up. Overall, the study found some 16 out of 31 tracked planetary vital signs, including greenhouse gas concentrations, ocean heat content and ice mass, set worrying new records.

Guardian 27th July 2021 read more »

The water war of the 21st century could come in two forms. The first would be in a mismanaged or panicked response to rising seas. Around 150 million people live one metre or less above current sea levels. Many will be displaced and become climate refugees, creating huge instability. The second kind of war may be just around the corner. The Egyptian leader Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has warned Ethiopia he wouldn’t rule out using military force if the huge new “Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam” means Egyptians going without water further down the Nile. The ambition of the Nobel peace prize-winning Ethiopian premier, Abiy Ahmed, is to fill a reservoir to create the biggest hydroelectric plant in Africa and thus become a major energy exporter. Sisi worries that the Ethiopians are unilaterally discarding the colonial-era share-out of the Nile waters between Egypt and Sudan. He fears not only the loss of drinking water — the Egyptian population is growing at the rate of 1.5 million a year and by 2025 water supply will drop below 500 cubic metres per capita, a level that hydrologists call “absolute scarcity” — but also a loss of face. Ethiopia’s leader is staying cool. “No force can stop Ethiopia from building a dam,” Ahmed says. “If there’s a need to go to war we could get millions readied.”

Times 27th July 2021 read more »

The first in-person meeting of climate ministers in 18 months has seen some tentative progress, says the UK minister who will lead the Glasgow COP26 meeting. Alok Sharma said that the countries aligned more closely on climate issues but on some key matters they were “not yet close enough”. One of the outstanding questions is the phasing out of coal for energy. Continued use was incompatible with a key climate target, Mr Sharma said. Representatives from 51 countries attended the informal gathering in London over the weekend.

BBC 26th July 2021 read more »

Cabinet Office 26th July 2021 read more »

UK will use COP26 to support developing countries’ transition from coal to renewable energy. COP26 president Alok Sharma said it was crucial that November’s meeting ‘consigned coal to history’.

iNews 26th July 2021 read more »

Countries have finished key climate talks deadlocked on the issue of phasing out coal-fired power, UK minister Alok Sharma has said. Amid a backdrop of extreme flooding, ministers from more than 50 countries met in London this week to discuss tougher measures to tackle the climate crisis ahead of Cop26 – a key global summit to be held in Glasgow in just under 100 days. Mr Sharma, who is president-designate of Cop26, said that “progress was made” over the two-day summit, but warned that “vital issues” remain unsolved in the run up to the event. “We have discussed the critical issues in the Cop26 negotiations. As we have done so, heavy rains and flash floods have swept London – a sobering reminder of the urgency of our task,” he told reporters at a press briefing held on Monday evening.

Independent 26th July 2021 read more »

“Record-shattering” heatwaves, even worse than the one that recently hit north-west America, are set to become much more likely in future, according to research. The study is a stark new warning on the rapidly escalating risks the climate emergency poses to lives. The shocking temperature extremes suffered in the Pacific north-west and in Australia 2019-2020 were “exactly what we are talking about”, said the scientists. But they said the world had yet to see anything close to the worst impacts possible, even under the global heating that had already happened. The research found that highly populated regions in North America, Europe and China were where the record-shattering extremes are most likely to occur. One illustrative heatwave produced by the computer models used in the study showed some locations in mid-northern America having temperatures 18C higher than average.

Guardian 26th July 2021 read more »

‘Record-shattering’ heatwaves to become far more likely without urgent climate action, research warns.

Independent 26th July 2021 read more »

Times 27th July 2021 read more »

Prolonged heatwaves up to 4C hotter than previous temperature records could start to happen every six years by 2050 without tough action on greenhouse gas emissions, a new report warns. Scientists estimate that, in a ‘high emissions scenario’, the chance of “week-long record-shattering” heat extremes over the next 30 years is between two and seven times higher than it was over the past three decades. But the bigger effect would be felt between 2051 and 2080, when these kind of unprecedented heatwaves could become three to 21 times more likely – meaning they would occur every 6 to 37 years.

iNews 26th July 2021 read more »

Flash flooding of the type seen in London this weekend will become a more common occurrence as the climate crisis worsens, scientists have warned, and the UK government, businesses and householders must do much more to protect against future harm. Dr Jess Neumann, a hydrologist at the University of Reading, said: “Flooding from intense summer rainfall is going happen more frequently. No city, town or village is immune to flooding and we all need to take hard action right now if we are to prevent impacts from getting worse in the future.”

Guardian 26th July 2021 read more »

Every day the world fails to adequately address the climate emergency, the timeframe needed to drastically cut emissions shrinks and the likelihood of increasingly devastating climate impacts grows. No solution to this crisis will be possible without a wholesale change in the way corporations do business. The climate emergency is a planetary-scale problem and solving it requires sweeping action from all parts of society, not least governments. But companies, which bear so much historic responsibility for fueling climate change, are a critical lever that cannot be overlooked. The Guardian’s new series, Green light, will examine businesses’ accountability for the climate crisis and interrogate the promises, innovations and solutions they are offering to tackle it. It will explore what role companies must play in the world’s last chance push to transform the economy and keep warming within the 1.5C ambition laid out in the Paris climate agreement.

Guardian 26th July 2021 read more »

Green, empty promises? The truth behind corporate climate pledges.

Guardian 26th July 2021 read more »

Against a backdrop of fires and floods, researchers are meeting virtually to finalise a key climate science study. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is preparing the most comprehensive assessment on the state of global heating since 2013. Over the next two weeks, the scientists will go through their findings line by line with representatives of 195 governments. Experts say the report will be a “wake-up call” to governments. It is expected that the short, 40-page Summary for Policymakers will play an important role in guiding global leaders who will come to Glasgow in November to deal with critical climate questions.

BBC 26th July 2021 read more »

That the wars of the future will be fought over water rather than oil is an adage that feels like an increasingly terrifyingly reality as every year goes by. Especially across the Middle East and North Africa, regions that are on the frontline of the world’s climate crises. This year in particular, water has been become a worryingly scarce resource as wars, crumbling infrastructure and, in some instances, unprecedented economic collapse, have led to rolling power outrages that have become disastrous when coupled with record high temperatures. It has sparked unrest in countries from Sudan to Iran – and triggered cross-border conflict. It will only get worse as the summer and the miseries drag on.

Independent 25th July 2021 read more »

Record temperatures have plunged parts of the Middle East into an energy crisis marked by 23-hour power cuts, failing healthcare systems and fuel-related protests. Years of warnings being ignored, resource mismanagement, corruption and climate change – combined with destabilising economic crises – have led to collapsing power grids and fuel shortages that are leaving businesses, hospitals and citizens in despair. With climbing temperatures and years of over-extraction, severe water shortages have led to droughts in eastern Syria and Iran, with experts now claiming the latter is “water bankrupt”. Iraq’s marshes in the south of the country are also starting to dry out. Protests have spread across Iran over the last week with demonstrators taking to the streets to cry “I’m thirsty” over severe droughts that have caused electricity blackouts and devastated agriculture and farming.

Telegraph 26th July 2021 read more »

State of the climate: 2021 sees widespread climate extremes despite a cool start.

Carbon Brief 26th July 2021 read more »