The four protesters were found guilty of conspiracy to intentionally cause a public nuisance
Four Just Stop Oil protesters who were planning to glue themselves to the taxiway at Manchester Airport have been jailed.
Officers arrested Indigo Rumbelow, Margaret Reid, Leanorah Ward and Daniel Knorr as they were making their way to the airport on 4 August 2024.
They were equipped with heavy-duty bolt-cutters, angle grinders, glue, sand, Just Stop Oil high-visibility vests and a leaflet containing instructions to follow when interacting with police.
All four were found guilty of conspiracy to intentionally cause a public nuisance and jailed at Manchester Minshull Crown Court for between 18 and 30 months. Additionally, they were each fined £2,000.
Rising temperatures will increase the risk of extreme droughts like the one currently affecting Yemen. Photograph: Yahya Arhab/EPA
Data also shows small but ‘shocking’ likelihood of year 2C hotter than preindustrial era before 2030
There is an 80% chance that global temperatures will break at least one annual heat record in the next five years, raising the risk of extreme droughts, floods and forest fires, a new report by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has shown.
For the first time, the data also indicated a small likelihood that before 2030, the world could experience a year that is 2C hotter than the preindustrial era, a possibility scientists described as “shocking”.
Coming after the hottest 10 years ever measured, the latest medium-term global climate update highlights the growing threat to human health, national economies and natural landscapes unless people stop burning oil, gas, coal and trees.
The update, which synthesises short-term weather observations and long-term climate projections, said there was a 70% chance that five-year average warming for 2025-2029 will be more than 1.5C above preindustrial levels.
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The Met Office’s Leon Hermanson, who led the production of the report, said 2025 is likely to be one of the three warmest years on record.
Chris Hewitt, director of climate services at the WMO, described a “worrying picture” for heatwaves and human health. However, he said it was still not too late to limit warming if fossil fuel emissions are cut.
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He is calling for the scrapping of the two-child benefit cap and restoring the winter fuel payment to all pensioner
Nigel Farage’s tax and spend plans were slammed as “fantasy economics” as Reform UK claimed it could save a massive £225 billion over five years by scrapping net zero projects.
Mr Farage’s party also wants the threshold for paying the basic rate of income tax to be dramatically increased from £12,570 to £20,000.
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Reform sources said the £225 billion figure of savings from ditching net zero projects was based on a report by the Institute for Government.
But the IfG stressed that the bulk of this green investment, highlighted in the paper called “Paying for Net Zero” was due to come from the private sector, not public funds.
Jill Rutter, senior fellow at the IfG, told The Standard: “Cancelling private investment does not save the Government money.”
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A DeSmog collage. The Institute of Economic Affairs has its headquarters on Lord North Street, Westminster. Credit: Des Blenkinsopp(CC BY-SA 2.0)
The regulator has opened a case against the Tufton Street group.
The Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) pressure group, which campaigns against clean energy policies, is being investigated by the charities regulator.
The Good Law Project (GLP), a legal advocacy group, yesterday announced that it had been successful in forcing the Charity Commission to open a “regulatory compliance case” against the IEA.
A Charity Commission spokesperson told DeSmog: “We can confirm that, following an internal review, we have opened a regulatory compliance case to assess potential regulatory concerns about the Institute for Economic Affairs.
“Our case will examine the trustees’ management of perceptions of potential political bias, perceptions of a potential lack of transparency around funding, and perceptions that the charity may have pre-determined policy positions which would not be in keeping with its charitable purposes to advance education.”
The IEA is registered as a charity, and the regulator states that “political activity must not become the reason for the charity’s existence.”
In 2018, Greenpeace’s investigative journalism unit Unearthed revealed that the IEA had received funding from oil major BP every year since 1967. In response to the story, an IEA spokeswoman said: “It is surely uncontroversial that the IEA’s principles coincide with the interests of our donors.”
The IEA also received a £21,000 grant from U.S. oil major ExxonMobil in 2005.
However, the IEA does not publicly declare its donors, and it’s not known if the pressure group has received funding from BP or ExxonMobil in more recent years.
The IEA has extensive influence in politics and the media. It was pivotal to Liz Truss’s short-lived premiership as prime minister, and has boasted of its access to Conservative ministers and MPs.
The IEA is a prominent supporter of the continued and extended use of fossil fuels. The group has advocated for the ban to be lifted on fracking for shale gas, calling it the “moral and economic choice”. The IEA has also said that a ban on new North Sea oil and gas licences would be “madness”, has criticised the windfall tax imposed by the UK on fossil fuel firms, and said that the previous government’s commitment to “max out” the UK’s oil and gas reserves was a “welcome step”.
The IEA is part of the Tufton Street network – a cluster of libertarian think tanks and pressure groups that are in favour of more fossil fuel extraction and are opposed to state-led climate action. These groups are characterised by a lack of transparency over their sources of funding.
The Charity Commission initially rejected the GLP’s complaint about the IEA, which was lodged in March 2024 and backed by MPs from the Green Party, Liberal Democrats, and the Scottish National Party. The Charity Commission rejected the complaint after just 12 days.
However, after the GLP threatened formal legal action against the Charity Commission for failing to properly consider the evidence against the IEA, it has agreed to open a compliance case.
“We welcome this screeching u-turn from the Charity Commission who raced to clear the IEA last year,” said Good Law Project’s executive director Jolyon Maugham.
“It shouldn’t have taken the threat of legal action to force the regulator to do its job. The IEA’s activities are the polar opposite of public benefit and we’re now urging the Charity Commission to go further in its investigation.”
However, it’s unclear what action, if any, will be taken against the IEA if the regulator finds it in breach of charity rules. A previous case brought against the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) – the UK’s leading climate science denial group – didn’t lead to any meaningful sanctions against the Tufton Street group.
The GLP accused the GWPF of breaching charity law by spending hundreds of thousands of pounds on one-sided research attacking climate science, and by funding the lobbying activities of its campaign arm Net Zero Watch. However, the Charity Commission asked the GWPF to make only minor changes to its ownership structure and output.
An IEA spokesperson said: “We have received a letter from the Charity Commission and will be responding to them thoroughly in due course.”
Global yields of wheat are around 10% lower now than they would have been without the influence of climate change, according to a new study.
The research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, looks at data on climate change and growing conditions for wheat and other major crops around the world over the past 50 years.
It comes as heat and drought have this year been putting wheat supplies at risk in key grain-producing regions, including parts of Europe, China and Russia.
The study finds that increasingly hot and dry conditions negatively impacted yields of three of the five key crops examined.
Overall, global grain yields soared during the study period due to technological advancements, improved seeds and access to synthetic fertilisers.
But these yield setbacks have “important ramifications for prices and food security”, the study authors write.
Grain impacts
Most parts of the world have experienced “significant” yield increases in staple crops since the mid-20th century.
The new study notes that, in the past 50 years, yields increased by 69-123% for the five staple crops included in the research – wheat, maize, barley, soya beans and rice.
But crop production is increasingly threatened by climate change and extreme weather. A 2021 study projected “major shifts” in global crop productivity due to climate change within the next two decades.
Earlier this year, Carbon Brief mapped out news stories of crops being destroyed around the world by heat, drought, floods and other weather extremes in 2023-24. Maize and wheat were the crops that appeared most frequently in these reports.
The crops that appeared most frequently in media reports of extreme weather impacts analysed by Carbon Brief, ranked in order of most to least frequent: maize, wheat, rice, potatoes, soya beans, olives, bananas, grapes, sunflowers and coffee. Credit: Carbon Brief.
Hot and dry weather is currently threatening wheat crops in parts of China, the world’s largest wheat producer, Reuters reported this month.
In the UK, wheat crops are struggling amid the “driest start to spring in England for almost 70 years”, the Times recently reported. Farm groups say some crops are already failing, the Guardian said.
As a result, global wheat supplies are “tight”, according to Bloomberg, with price rises possible depending on weather conditions in parts of Europe, China and Russia.
Food security and prices
The study uses climate datasets, modelling and national crop statistics from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization to assess crop production and climate trends in key grain-producing countries over 1974-2023, including Argentina, Brazil, Canada, China, the EU, Russia and the US.
The researchers assess climate observations and then use crop models to calculate what yields would have been with and without these climate changes.
For example, “if it has warmed 1C over 50 years and the model says that 1C leads to 5% yield loss, we’d calculate that the warming trend caused a loss of 5%”, Prof David Lobell, the lead study author and a professor at Stanford University, tells Carbon Brief.
The study looks at two reanalysis climate datasets that include information on temperature and rainfall over the past 50 years: TerraClimate (TC) and ERA5-Land. (Reanalysis data combines observations with a modern forecasting model.)
The researchers find that yields of three of the five crops are lower than they would have been without warmer temperatures and other climate impacts in the past 50 years.
Yields were lower than they otherwise would have been by 12-14% for barley, 8-12% for wheat and 4% for maize.
The impacts on soya beans were less clear as there were “significant differences” between data sources. But both datasets show a negative impact on yields, ranging from 2% to 8%.
The effects on rice yields were inconclusive, with one dataset showing a positive effect of around 1% while the other showed a negative effect of about 3%.
The chart below shows the estimated yield impacts for each crop based on the calculations from the two climate datasets.
The estimated percentage impact of climate factors on yields of wheat (brown), maize (yellow), rice (blue), soya bean (green) and barley (purple) from 1974-2023, using two different historical climate datasets. Source: Lobell et al. (2025).
Given soaring overall crop yields during this time, impacts of 4-13% “may seem trivial”, the researchers write. But, they say, it can have “important ramifications for prices and food security” given growing food demand, noting:
“The overall picture of the past half-century is that climate trends have led to a deterioration of growing conditions for many of the main grain-producing regions of the world.”
Water stress and heat
The study also assesses the impacts that warming and vapour pressure deficit – a key driver of plant water stress – have on crop yields.
Vapour pressure deficit is the difference between the amount of water vapour in the air and the point at which water vapour in the air becomes saturated. As air becomes warmer, it can hold more water vapour.
A high deficit can reduce plant growth and increase water stress. The models show that these effects may be the main driver of losses in grain yield, with heat having a more “indirect effect”, as higher temperatures drive water stress.
Agricultural irrigation system watering dry soil on a crop field in the US. Credit: Andrii Biletskyi / Alamy Stock Photo.
The study finds that vapour pressure deficit increased in most temperate regions in the past 50 years.
The researchers compare their data to climate modelling simulations covering the past 50 years. They find largely similar results, but notice a “significant underestimation” of vapour pressure deficit increases in temperate regions in most climate models.
Many maize-growing areas in the EU, China, Argentina and much of Africa have vapour deficit trends that “exceed even the highest trend in models”, they write.
The researchers also find that most regions experienced “rapid warming” during the study period, with the average crop-growing season now warmer than more than 80% of growing seasons 50 years ago.
The findings indicate that, in some areas, “even the coolest growing season in the present day is warmer than the warmest season that would have occurred 50 years ago”.
An exception to this is in the US and Canada, they find, with most maize and soya bean crop areas in the US experiencing lower levels of warming than other parts of the world and a “slight cooling” in wheat-growing areas of the northern Great Plains and central Canada.
(The central US has experienced a cooling trend in summer daytime temperatures since the middle of the 20th century, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. There are many theories behind this “warming hole”, which has continued despite climate change.)
CO2 greening
Dr Corey Lesk, a postdoctoral researcher at Dartmouth College who studies the impacts of climate on crops, says these findings are in line with other recent estimates. He tells Carbon Brief:
“There are some uncertainties and sensitivity to model specification here – but it’s somewhat likely climate change has already reduced crop yields in the global mean.”
The study’s “main limitation” is that it is “behind” on including certain advances in understanding how soil moisture impacts crops, Lesk adds:
“Moisture changes and CO2 [carbon dioxide] effects are the largest present uncertainties in past and future crop impacts of climate change. This paper is somewhat limited in advancing understanding on those aspects, but it’s illuminating to pause and take stock.”
The research looks at whether the benefits of CO2 increases during the past 50 years exceed the negative effects of higher levels of the greenhouse gas.
Rising CO2 levels can boost plant growth in some areas in a process called “CO2 fertilisation”. However, a 2019 study found that this “global greening” could be stalled by growing water stress.
Yield losses for wheat, maize and barley “likely exceeded” any benefits of CO2 increases in the past 50 years, the study finds.
The opposite is true for soya beans and rice, they find, with a net-positive impact of more than 4% on yields.
Soya beans growing in a field. Credit: Volodymyr Shtun / Alamy Stock Photo.
Climate science has “done a remarkable job of anticipating global impacts on the main grains and we should continue to rely on this science to guide policy decisions”, Lobell, the lead study author, says in a press release.
He adds that there may be “blind spots” on specialised crops, such as coffee, cocoa, oranges and olives, which “don’t have as much modelling” as key commodity crops, noting:
“All these have been seeing supply challenges and price increases. These matter less for food security, but may be more eye-catching for consumers who might not otherwise care about climate change.”
Lobell et al. (2025), A half-century of climate change in major agricultural regions: Trends, impacts, and surprises, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, doi:10.1073/pnas.2502789122
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