The Guardian

People are urging the government to take further and faster action but those who think it’s too costly must first be defeated

It’s easy to feel despair reading the stark warnings in the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: the window in which warming can be limited to 1.5C is rapidly closing. The forest fires and flooding on our TV screens, and closer to home, are a wake-up call to the realities of a rapidly warming climate.

The IPCC, the UN body responsible for climate science, described the report as a “code red for humanity”, but 30 years of warnings have not brought about action on a meaningful scale.

Communities on the frontline of the climate crisis say radical solutions must be on the table – before it’s too late

Ayisha Siddiqa doesn’t want fossil fuel companies to determine her future anymore. The industry has promoted climate denial for longer than the 22-year-old has been alive. Rather than watch companies pad their profits as the world burns, Siddiqa has a radical solution in mind.

“Abolish these oil companies, finish them, get rid of them, no more,” she said.

Revealed: investigation shows how Tyson’s near monopoly in its home state of Arkansas gives it huge power, at a cost to farmers and the environment

The lockhold that America’s largest meat processing company has on the chicken industry has generated dire consequences for its workers, farmers and the environment in one of the US’s leading poultry-producing states, an investigation has found.

Tyson Foods is ranked 73rd on the Fortune 500 list, with a revenue of $43bn in the last fiscal year.

Critics baulk at the cost of getting Britain to net zero, but the alternative is so much worse

Ruinous, eye-watering, crippling, stratospheric, massive. That’s the cost to the UK of beating the climate crisis, according to those who portray getting to net zero emissions as economic suicide that is being thrust on an unwilling population by posh eco-fundamentalists and zealots.

This is not just wrong, it is the exact opposite of reality. The delusions come from those with histories of climate change scepticism and could be dismissed as the latest mutant variant thrown up by the death throes of denial. But they are having a real-world impact, slowing action at the precise moment acceleration is needed.

Organic farming methods, which use fewer pesticides and store more carbon in soil, are becoming more popular

There is growing momentum behind a shift to ‘regenerative’ agriculture in the UK, which can help to mitigate the climate crisis, say leading experts in the sector.

“More and more people are seeing other farmers doing it [regenerative farming] and are happier for it,” said John Cherry, who founded Groundswell, the UK’s flagship event for regenerative agriculture, on his farm in Hertfordshire. “People may be getting a higher yield with conventional approaches, but it is costing them more too with all the inputs, so they are not making more money.”

Climate campaigners say dire landmark findings mean the federal government must abandon gas basin and coalmine expansions

Australian politicians are facing calls to accept the era of new fossil fuel investments should end immediately after a major report on the climate crisis confirmed it was already causing havoc across the planet, with worse to come.

The prime minister, Scott Morrison, said on Tuesday the sixth assessment report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world’s leading authority on climate science, confirmed the “serious implications for Australia of what’s happening globally”.

Politicians around world continue to respond to report from Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

Food production around the world will suffer as global heating reaches 1.5C, with serious effects on the food supply in the next two decades, scientists have warned, following the biggest scientific report yet on the climate crisis.

Rising temperatures will mean there will be more times of year when temperatures exceed what crops can stand, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in its sixth assessment report published on Monday.

The world seems to be on the verge of collapse – yet I have just brought a baby into it

“Babe, look!” my wife said excitedly, as we sprawled on the grass reading on one baking hot afternoon. She passed me her book: “Read this – this person is just like you!” I read the paragraph she was pointing to. A clearly distraught character was fulminating about poorly designed roundabouts; she kept going on and on and on about them. To be clear, I don’t have any opinions about roundabouts. Not a single one. I curtly informed my wife of this. “Yeah,” she said. “But you do have, you know, certain rants you keep coming back to. Like, incessantly.”

I couldn’t argue. While I have always been a committed pessimist, recently I’ve gone into full-blown Chicken Little mode with existential obsessions. I’ll wake up, look at the latest terrifying news on my phone and immediately launch a diatribe about how we are almost certainly going to experience climate emergency-induced societal collapse in our lifetimes. “Have you seen what’s happening in Greece/northern California/Turkey?” I’ll screech. “Have you seen how many billionaires are fleeing to New Zealand to avoid the imminent apocalypse? The weather is out of control! Joe Biden and his woefully inadequate infrastructure bill aren’t going to fix anything! We are all doomed! DOOMED!”

Following the unequivocal IPCC climate report, we must all put pressure on governments to end the fossil fuel era

The sixth assessment report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is no ordinary publication. Its 4,000 pages were written by hundreds of independent scientists from 66 countries. It was commissioned by 195 governments and all of them signed off on the conclusions after reviewing them line by line and word by word. These governments, whether supportive, ambivalent or hostile to climate action, now own the messages in the report. So what does it say?

The report concludes that there is now “unequivocal” evidence that human actions are changing our climate. Behind this are alarming findings. The burning of fossil fuels and deforestation has led to levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that are higher today than at any time in the past 2 million years. Alongside methane and other greenhouse gases, this has driven Earth to be warmer than at any point in the past 125,000 years. The impacts of this can be seen in the loss of Arctic sea ice, accelerating sea level rise, hotter and more frequent heatwaves, increased and more frequent extreme rainfall events and, in some regions, more intense droughts and fires.

If the Evia fire ferry video seems extraordinary, it’s not only because of what it shows but because of how it shows it

To have lived through the last few decades is to have, in our minds, an all too accessible video library of historical nightmares. The assassinations of JFK, MLK, RFK. The collapse of the Twin Towers. Derek Chauvin’s knee on George Floyd’s neck. The 6 January insurrectionists swarming the Capitol building. We can call up these scenes whenever we choose. They haunt us, uninvited.

The latest grim addition to that ineradicable collection is a video that surfaced, days ago, of a tourist ferry sailing across the water from the raging fire incinerating the Greek island of Evia.

Newcomer on dairy alternative scene is vegan, sequesters carbon and increases biodiversity

I’m sitting in my kitchen, about to try my first sip of a milk that is vegan, sequesters carbon and increases biodiversity. Dairy milk has a high carbon footprint. Soy is linked to deforestation, almond to high water use. But how does the new kid on the scene – hemp seed milk – measure up for taste?

An Innovative Farmers project coordinated by the Soil Association is investigating how industrial hemp production could aid the transition to a low-carbon economy. In collaboration with scientists at Cranfield University and the British Hemp Alliance, research will quantify the environmental benefits of growing hemp. In farm trials that launched last month, five farmers are helping to investigate this plant’s ability to sequester or store carbon, improve soil health and increase biodiversity.

Obama campaigned in climate poetry and then governed in fossil fuel prose. Joe Biden may well follow in his footsteps

If after Monday’s news you didn’t feel a pang of doom, you’re either a zen master, a recluse living in a news vacuum, or a nihilist. The new United Nations report on climate change predicts an actual bona fide apocalypse unless our civilization discards our fetish for incrementalism, rejects nothing-will-fundamentally-change fatalism and instead finally takes the crisis seriously.

The bad news is that we’ve been here before during the last era of Democratic supremacy, and if the Obama era we sleepwalked through now repeats itself, we’re done. It’s that simple.

Prime minister challenged on his government’s record on climate action after IPCC’s landmark report on global heating

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Scott Morrison says when he declared incorrectly in 2019 that Labor policies to reduce vehicle emissions would “end the weekend” he wasn’t opposed to electric vehicles, even though he told voters they were expensive, would not tow trailers or boats, or get Australians to their favourite camping spots.

The prime minister faced sustained questioning over his government’s heavily criticised record on climate action on Tuesday after a landmark assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found human activities were unequivocally heating the planet and causing changes not seen for centuries and, in some cases, thousands of years.

Andrew Constance says the second-hand market for EVs could be driven by state and federal government adoption of the new technology

New South Wales transport minister, Andrew Constance, has urged the Morrison government to accelerate the uptake of electric vehicles in Australia by using them for federal government fleets.

Speaking at a Smart Energy Council summit, Constance said state and federal governments should “drive the second-hand market” by buying up electric vehicles in order to lower the price.

Project will pipe the ‘dirtiest fuel left on the planet’ across Minnesota’s pristine lakes and wetlands

More than 600 people have now been arrested or received citations over protests amid growing opposition to the Line 3 oil sands pipeline currently under construction through Minnesota.

Native American tribes including the Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians, the White Earth Band of Ojibwe and indigenous-led environmental organisations such as Honor the Earth are leading opposition efforts in court and on the ground, mobilizing ‘water protectors’ to try to halt the project.

Two soldiers are recovering from ‘horrific injuries’ after 700km rescue mission from remote bay in state’s north

Wildlife officers have killed a crocodile that mauled two soldiers who went swimming in a remote Queensland bay where the reptiles were known to live.

The officers had no trouble identifying their target, with the reptile becoming highly aggressive as they approached it in their vessel north of Lockhart River on Tuesday.

The president of the upcoming Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow on Monday described the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report as a 'wake-up call' for the world. Alok Sharma urged leaders to do more so they can 'credibly say that we have kept 1.5 degrees alive'.

The report, which calls climate change clearly human-caused and 'unequivocal' and 'an established fact,' makes more precise and warmer forecasts for the 21st century than were made in the last report in 2013.

Exclusive: Analysis reveals more than 1.2 million people are currently employed in low carbon industry

• Green revolution brings fresh hope to north-east England
• Abandoned pits of former mining town fuel green jobs

The UK’s low carbon economy is now worth more than £200bn, four times the size of the country’s manufacturing sector, with growth expected to accelerate in the coming years, according to new analysis.

Despite what experts say has been lacklustre and patchy support from central government, the analysis found more than 75,000 businesses from wind turbine manufacturers to recycling plants employ more than 1.2 million people in the green economy.

Dire warnings about ‘irreversible’ damage to our climate fill the front pages of newspapers in Britain and around the world

The front pages are filled with alarm in the wake of the release of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s global climate change report – the first since 2013 – which finds that human activity is changing the Earth’s climate in “unprecedented” ways, with some of the changes now inevitable and “irreversible”.

An image of an elderly woman reacting to unprecedented wildfires on the island of Evia in Greece so perfectly encapsulates the global feeling of distress and fear that it appears on the front pages of the Guardian, Financial Times, Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph.

Delegates from 196 countries attending talks offered jabs before event, with rules on self-isolating eased for many

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The government is planning to relax key Covid-19 restrictions for delegates to the UN Cop26 climate conference to be held in Glasgow for two weeks this November.

Delegates from 196 countries are expected to attend the talks, viewed as one of the last chances for the world to agree limits on greenhouse gas emissions that would avoid the worst ravages of climate breakdown.