I love the way clouds billow above your head, drift lazily across blue skies and cast fleeting shadows on the ground below. These ever-shifting sculptures of vapor and light are among nature's least appreciated marvels. That's why 20 years ago, I started the Cloud Appreciation Society, to remind people to look up. Now climate science is catching up, revealing that clouds aren't just poetic; they're pivotal in helping to regulate Earth's temperature.
"I don't think that we've actually fully recovered from that moment. I know I haven't," playwright Julius Ernesto Rea said. Rea said coming together in a physical space and going back in time gives the actors and the audience the opportunity to release some of their bottled-up emotions, especially those surrounding the changing climate. "A lot of the play is trying to figure out how we grieve the future that we thought we had, so that we can invite new visions of the future," Rea said.
The guidance - updated in March of this year - explained how 2024 was the hottest year on record globally and how Ireland's temperature has increased by nearly 1.1C since 1900. It said: "Climate change is adding fuel to storms due to warmer waters and more moisture in the atmosphere." The document added that sea level rise was expected to increase surges during periods of severe weather and increase the risk of coastal flooding.
Large whites were the most common butterflies spotted in the UK this year with a record number of sightings, more than doubling from last year's Big Butterfly Count. Recognisable by their creamy white wings with black L-shaped markings, they are also commonly referred to as cabbage butterflies or cabbage whites due to their staple diet. Their numbers are up 47% over the past 15 years Photograph: Keith Warmington/Butterfly Conservation
NPR enlisted the band Bettis And 3rd Degree to sonify rising temperatures in New Orleans. As the temperature rises from 1980 to present, listen as the music tempo speeds up. Between 1980 and 2000, the average annual temperature in New Orleans goes up by more than a quarter of a degree, and it may not seem like much if you're just looking at the data in a spreadsheet, but it is significant.
From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging. At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.
Farmers and experts warn Iraq's historic rivers are vanishing, threatening survival, identity and stability. Iraq, once known as Mesopotamia, the Land of the Two Rivers, is facing its worst water crisis in living memory. The Tigris and Euphrates lifelines of agriculture and civilisation for millennia are running dry. Climate change, upstream dams and decades of mismanagement have turned fertile land into dust, forcing families from their homes and threatening national stability.
As I write these words, the No 1 trending story on the Guardian is titled: The history and future of societal collapse. It is an account of a study by a Cambridge expert who works at something ominously called the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk; he concludes that we can't put a date on Doomsday, but by looking at the 5,000 years of [civilisation], we can understand the trajectories we face today and self-termination is most likely.
The climate crisis will continue making lightning-sparked wildfires more frequent for decades to come, which could produce cascading effects and worsen public safety and public health, experts and new research suggest. Lightning-caused fires tend to burn in more remote areas and therefore usually grow into larger fires than human-caused fires. That means a trend toward more lightning-caused fires is also probably making wildfires more deadly by producing more wildfire smoke and helping to drive a surge in air quality issues from coast to coast,
For the second time in three years, catastrophic monsoon floods have carved a path of destruction across Pakistan's north and central regions, particularly in its Punjab province, submerging villages, drowning farmland, displacing millions and killing hundreds. This year, India Pakistan's archrival and a nuclear-armed neighbour is also reeling. Its northern states, including Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Indian Punjab, have seen widespread flooding as heavy monsoon rains swell rivers on both sides of the border.
Scientists are seeing "mega-drying" regions that are immense and expanding - one stretching from the western United States through Mexico to Central America, and another from Morocco to France, across the entire Middle East to northern China. There are two primary causes of the desiccation: rising temperatures unleashed by using oil and gas, and widespread overpumping of water that took millennia to accumulate underground.
My home is in the south of England, near beautiful woodlands. Since moving there in 2016, the number of ticks my family has picked up in the woods has increased each year, but this summer has been astonishing. For a few weeks, our four-year-old came home from nursery with a tick almost every day. I've had many: some tiny nymphal ones that could be easily missed.
Landslides are the most common geological event. That's a fact. They affect millions of people and cause many thousands of deaths. They often occur in countries with poor or inadequate infrastructure such as in Sudan's Marra Mountains region in late August 2025. Just the year before, in 2024, there were two major landslides in the same region. In Papua New Guinea, a reported 2,000 people were buried alive following a landslide in May 2024.
Residents in eastern Punjab have also experienced abnormal amounts of rain, as well as cross-border flooding after India released water from swollen rivers and its overflowing dams into Pakistan's low-lying regions. This is the biggest flood in the history of the Punjab. The flood has affected two million people. It's the first time that the three rivers Sutlej, Chenab, and Ravi have carried such high levels of water, the senior minister for the province, Marriyum Aurangzeb, told a press conference on Sunday.
I was immediately seduced by the silence and the immense landscape. There's something beautiful about it: You feel like a very small person, you're made vulnerable, and you realize you don't mean that much in the world. It was the start of winter and the temperature was 20 degrees below zero, but I couldn't really feel the cold because I was so excited to be part of this journey that I forgot about everything else.
At issue was whether oil companies could be held liable for damage from future wildfires caused at least in part by climate change. The state Senate Judiciary Committee vote on the measure came just two days after a Louisiana jury held oil giant Chevron liable by for $744.6 million to restore damage to Louisiana's coastal wetlands. The case was the first of many pending against oil companies that have supposedly lied about whether their policies
On July 8, New Mexico's Rio Ruidoso unbound from its banks for the second year in a row and swelled to 20 times its typical knee-high depth. The cascade of water roared like a train, Kathy Papasan, a longtime resident on the river's edge, told me, and dark waves battered her porch. She and her husband had to flee uphill to a neighbor's house.
From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.
As is the case for many people, my home cannot be retrofitted with central air. My 100-plus-year-old Brooklyn apartment, which features prominently in my seven years of air quality reporting for WIRED, relies on window air conditioning units to keep cool on our warming planet. While there is the obvious paradox that air conditioners are players in climate change, AC units are evolving with more environmentally safe refrigerants, eco modes, smart apps, modern design, and energy-efficient consumption.
