A firefighter gestures next to burning trees as a wildfire rages near Marcheprime, outside, Bordeaux, France, July 26, 2026
FRANCE holds emergency meetings on the evacuation of Bordeaux, a city of a million, as wildfires sweep ever closer. In Spain families are fleeing the capital, Madrid.
The reality of the climate emergency has come to Europe. There were plenty of warning signs — more severe heatwaves by the year, droughts and floods devastating harvests — including in Britain, where three of the five worst harvests on record have been since 2020 — and worsening wildfires.
In Britain this summer fires have burnt swathes of the Cairngorms and Eryri (Snowdonia), as well as Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh for the second year running. As summer heatwaves grow longer and drier, we should not imagine our towns and cities are safe. As Fire Brigades Union leader Steve Wright told the Morning Star in May, “In London a suburban street burnt to the ground last year” (in Rainham) “and we had wildfires in Dorset and Wiltshire.”
Computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, argues that addressing the climate crisis requires “World War II-scale mobilisation.”
…
Addressing the climate crisis involves radical restructuring — one reason climate activists were, even before Palestine solidarity campaigners, the victims of repressive new anti-protest laws.
That, in turn, means getting real about the class power of the forces blocking change. Proposed mechanisms for delivering action like citizens’ assemblies are a response to the sluggishness of existing institutions, but do not address its cause — the power of the capitalist class.
Agreeing what we ought to do doesn’t guarantee that it will happen: the climate movement needs to be one with the labour and peace movements, and recognise that this is fundamentally a class struggle and a battle against capitalism itself.
That dividing line becomes ever clearer, domestically and internationally.
The far right are the climate deniers at home; globally the denier-in-chief is the main imperialist power, the United States, whose agenda is to stop the rise of China, the world leader in renewables and green tech. The only existential threat as grave as climate change is world war — and the push towards that is also the biggest obstacle to climate action.
The cry on climate demos — “system change, not climate change” — rings true. We need to follow through on the implications.
Donald Trump urges you to be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.Nigel Farage urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him and his Deputy Richard Tice. He says that Reform UK has received £Millions and £Millions from the fossil fuel industry to promote climate denial and destroy the planet.Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
Barren, salt-damaged soil in a sunflower field in Scardovari, north-east Italy. Low water levels and prolonged hot, dry conditions in the Po delta are threatening irrigation supplies and crops. Photograph: Piero Cruciatti/Anadolu/Getty Images
Analysis shows how heatwaves are making atmosphere thirstier, damaging water supplies, food production and power generation
Extreme heat supercharged by the climate crisis is sucking Europe dry in summer and intensifying the drought hitting the continent, a scientific analysis has found.
Record-breaking heatwaves meant the hot atmosphere strongly evaporated water from rivers, lakes, soils and plants – conditions made 80 times more likely by global heating in western Europe and 40 times more likely in eastern Europe, the study showed. The level of soil dryness in the west was made five times more likely by the pollution from fossil fuels in the west, and 11 times more likely in the east.
Droughts have usually been linked to low rainfall, but western Europe’s most recent winter was a wet one. The scientists said the climate crisis was redefining drought in Europe, with high temperatures the key factor this summer. Today’s drought in western Europe is classified as “extreme” but would have been “moderate” in the world before the climate crisis, according to the analysis.
…
Deadly wildfires have raged through Spain and France and farmers have been hit hard, facing some of the driest soils on record. About 9m tonnes of grain are expected to be lost across Europe, with the worst maize harvest in 50 years expected in France, and Romanian farmers losing over a million hectares of crops.
Rivers are running low across Europe, cutting the generation of clean hydropower and restricting cargo ships. The Rhine at Lobith in the Netherlands is now lower than the minimum level seen in the hot summer of 1976. The scientists warned that this disruption could push up the price of food and energy, hitting low-income households hardest.
Neo-Fascist Climate Science Denier Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.Nigel Farage urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him and his Deputy Richard Tice. He says that Reform UK has received £Millions and £Millions from the fossil fuel industry to promote climate denial and destroy the planet.Donald Trump urges you to be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.
A woman uses an umbrella to try to cope with the scorching heat in London on 8 July. Rasid Necati Aslim/Anadolu via Getty Images
For months, ministers have refused to publish a report on how climate crisis will affect the UK. Burnham must release it
The past two months have seen exceptionally hot weather across much of Western Europe, with even the UK witnessing record temperatures. Even now, England and Wales are well into their third heatwave this year, with some areas on their 13th consecutive day of temperatures above 30°C.
More than 2,700 people are thought to have died as a result of the extreme heat in England and Wales, with scientists estimating that 440 people died during each of the three peak days of June’s record-breaking heatwave, when temperatures reached 37.7°C.
The situation was perhaps best summarised by the Met Office’s State of the UK Climate report for 2025, published last week: “What we used to think of as extreme, we increasingly see as normal.”
Introducing the report, its lead author, climate information scientist Mike Kendon, notes that “2025 was the UK’s warmest year on record, the sixth time this record has been broken in the 21st century so far”. He adds: “The latest 10-year period (2016-2025) is 1.33°C warmer than the period from 1961-1990”.
In these elevated temperatures, wildfires are a particular concern. This week, local authorities across France cancelled many Bastille Day events to minimise fire risks, not least from firework displays, and in the UK there were fears about what are becoming known as “firewaves”. Less cold winters mean more vegetation earlier in the spring, which, when dried out by heatwaves like those seen this year, increases the risk of wildfires. Last Tuesday, emergency services dealt with 19 such fires, including two major incidents, according to the National Fire Chiefs Council.
Speaking to the Guardian, Maria Barbosa of the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology said: “What we are witnessing is climate change actively rewriting the vulnerability of the British landscape.” Perhaps the key element to draw out here is that this is not a change likely to affect us in the future; it is happening now.
Moreover, it relates to one of the surprising elements of the June heat: a public disconnect in the UK between acceptance of climate breakdown and relating this to carbon dioxide emissions from burning coal, oil or gas. People seemed unwilling or unable to make this link, even with the widespread personal experience of heat, the risk of wildfires and those reports of thousands of deaths.
One explanation is that many of our biggest media outlets often fail to point to the connection.
Researchers at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit reviewed 2,500 news reports on the heatwaves from the nine main national daily newspapers, finding that nearly three-quarters made no mention of climate breakdown. The Financial Times was most likely to mention the climate crisis, doing so in 50 of its 78 articles on the heatwaves, while The Sun was least likely to do so – making the link in only four of its 69 articles.
All too often, the reports gave the impression that the main challenge regarding the heatwaves will be adapting to the “new normal” of a hotter world, with plenty of coverage on changing our behaviour, converting buildings and being prepared for new health concerns.
But the challenge we face goes way beyond that. Adapting to a world where average temperatures are 2.5°C above current levels might be possible at considerable cost and human suffering, but unless we also cut carbon dioxide emissions, then we will have to keep on adapting to ever-higher temperatures. Concentrating on current adaptation alone is barely half the answer.
This is a known issue within government and is causing such concern that publicity is unwelcome, as shown by events relating to a study prepared by the Joint Intelligence Committee, which was officially described as a “national security assessment” and titled somewhat ominously: Global biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and national security.
The study was supposed to be launched at a landmark event on 9 October last year, but was held back, with one source telling The Guardian that insiders “feared it was being suppressed because the government was unwilling to face the issues raised.”
After pressure from MPs, including the official environmental audit committee, and Freedom of Information requests to publish the report, the government eventually released a redacted 14-page version in January this year. It warns of a high probability that the UK’s national security, financial prosperity and food security will come under threat from the climate crisis and the subsequent collapse of vital ecosystems that support food production.
Even that makes for very sober reading. The report identifies nine “planetary boundaries” as the safe limits identified for human pressure on nine Earth system processes crucial to maintaining a stable planet, such as climate change, biosphere integrity and oceanic acidification. Six have already been crossed.
The report concludes that ecosystem degradation is occurring across all global regions and every critical ecosystem is on a “pathway to collapse”, which it helpfully defines as “irreversible loss of function beyond repair”.
The implications are huge. This is an official government study by the combined intelligence agencies, and even if redacted, it is unable to hide the crisis ahead. One conclusion is obvious: if this is the greatest threat to our security and the integrity of the global ecosystem, we should be redirecting money away from conventional military spending and towards human and environmental security.
A key requirement of Andy Burnham as incoming prime minister should be the immediate release of the full report, followed by a vigorous public debate on where we go from here.
Donald Trump urges you to be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.Nigel Farage urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him and his Deputy Richard Tice. He says that Reform UK has received £Millions and £Millions from the fossil fuel industry to promote climate denial and destroy the planet.Orcas comment on killer apes destroying the planet by continuing to burn fossil fuels.
Volunteers and firefighters work to extinguish a forest fire burning in the Patagonian region of Chubut province, Argentina, on February 1, 2026. (Photo by Gonzalo Keogan/AFP via Getty Images)
“Existing climate mitigation approaches, including scaling up renewable energy and protecting carbon-storing ecosystems, are critical to limit the increase in global temperatures,” said the lead author.
In the lead-up to the Trump administration effectively destroying the US Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to combat the fossil fuel-driven climate emergency, an international team of scientists warned Wednesday that “Earth’s climate is now departing from the stable conditions that supported human civilization for millennia.”
Various institutions, including in the United States, have confirmed that 2025 was among the hottest years on record, and January continued that trend. Meanwhile, governments and polluting industries have repeatedly refused to impose policies that adequately heed experts’ calls for action.
“In an effort to mitigate dangerous levels of warming, the Paris Agreement formalized the aim of limiting warming to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels, yet global temperatures have recently breached this limit for 12 consecutive months, coinciding with record-breaking heat, wildfires, floods, and other extremes,” the scientists noted Wednesday in the journal One Earth.
They wrote that “crossing critical temperature thresholds may trigger self-reinforcing feedbacks and tipping dynamics that amplify warming and destabilize distant Earth system components. Uncertain tipping thresholds make precaution essential, as crossing them could commit the planet to a hothouse trajectory with long-lasting and potentially irreversible consequences.”
A “hothouse trajectory,” they wrote, is “a pathway in which self-reinforcing feedbacks push the climate system past a point of no return, committing the planet to substantially higher long-term temperatures, even if emissions are later reduced.”
“Sixteen major tipping elements have been identified, 10 of which could add to global temperature if triggered,” the experts detailed. “Tipping may already be underway or could occur soon for the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, boreal permafrost, mountain glaciers, and parts of the Amazon rainforest.”
As an example, they pointed to ice melt in the Arctic, explaining that the resulting water “could perturb the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), which is already showing signs of weakening. A weakened AMOC could alter global atmospheric circulation, shifting tropical rain belts and drying parts of the Amazon. This cascade of events could trigger large-scale Amazon forest dieback, with major consequences for the region’s carbon storage and biodiversity.”
Concerned about the Point of No Return? Today we published a paper on the risk of a hothouse Earth trajectory. You can read it here: authors.elsevier.com/c/1mbW49C~Iu…
Ripple, distinguished professor of ecology at Oregon State University (OSU), said in a Wednesday statement that “after a million years of oscillating between ice ages separated by warmer periods, the Earth’s climate stabilized more than 11,000 years ago, enabling agriculture and complex societies.”
“We’re now moving away from that stability and could be entering a period of unprecedented climate change,” he stressed. “Existing climate mitigation approaches, including scaling up renewable energy and protecting carbon-storing ecosystems, are critical to limit the increase in global temperatures.”
Study co-author Christopher Wolf, a former OSU postdoctoral researcher who is now a scientist with Terrestrial Ecosystems Research Associates (TERA), noted that already, “climate model simulations suggest the recent 12-month breach indicates the long-term average temperature increase is at or near 1.5°C.”
“It’s likely that global temperatures are as warm as, or warmer than, at any point in the last 125,000 years and that climate change is advancing faster than many scientists predicted,” he said.
“Policymakers and the public remain largely unaware of the risks posed by what would effectively be a point-of-no-return transition,” Wolf added. “And while averting the hothouse trajectory won’t be easy, it’s much more achievable than trying to backtrack once we’re on it.”
🆕 Several Earth system components may be closer to destabilisation than previously thought. Crossing key temperature thresholds could trigger feedback loops, pushing the planet toward a “Hothouse Earth” trajectory. Study by @oregonstate.edu, @iiasa.ac.at & PIK: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti…
The team’s warnings came in the wake of Big Oil-backed President Donald Trumpclaiming in a United Nations speech last year that climate change is “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world,” and ditching dozens of relevant organizations and treaties, including the Paris Agreement.
On Thursday, the Trump administration continued its war on the climate, revoking the “endangerment finding” that allowed the EPA to pass regulations fighting the global emergency—which was forcefully condemned by scientists and activists.
“In case there was any remaining doubt, the truth is very clear: Trump cares nothing for the health and well-being of our communities or our climate,” said Erin Doran, senior staff attorney at the advocacy group Food & Water Watch. “He is concerned only with making more money for the billionaire fossil fuel polluters that help to fund his dangerous political agenda.”
“The notion that the EPA shouldn’t regulate climate emissions is inconsistent with the law, the science, and the realities of the climate crisis,” Doran added. “EPA is charged with protecting human health and the environment, yet this rule does neither, benefiting only the fossil fuel industry at our expense. It’s absurd, and we’ll be fighting back.”
Power-mad orange gasbag Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.Nigel Farage urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him and his Deputy Richard Tice. He says that Reform UK has received £Millions and £Millions from the fossil fuel industry to promote climate denial and destroy the planet.Orcas comment on killer apes destroying the planet by continuing to burn fossil fuels. [This was the first appearance of the Orcas.]
Fossil fuel giant BP is profiteering at the expense of people and planet, say the Scottish Greens. The comments from the party’s climate spokesperson, Patrick Harvie, come as BP has published its profits for Q3 2025.
Earlier this year BP announced that it would cut its renewable energy investments and instead focus on increasing oil and gas production.
Patrick said:
“It has been yet another year of climate chaos around the world, with wildfires and flooding taking a deadly toll.
“Yet times have rarely been better for the polluters and fossil fuel giants who are raking in eye-watering profits while our planet burns and households and families are hammered with escalating bills.
“What makes BP’s profiteering particularly obscene is that they know the damage they are doing and are doubling down on it by rolling back on the few climate commitments that they had made.
“Our energy market will never be fit for purpose as long as it is run by and for multibillion pound corporations like BP and those who are determined to exploit every last drop of oil at the expense of people and planet.”
Patrick added:
“The UK government has a major decision on its hands when it comes to Rosebank. Will they keep the ban in place, or will they cave-in to pressure from the polluter lobby?
“Scotland has a huge renewables potential, but we need our governments to step up, do the work and make the investment that is needed in workers and green jobs.”
Nigel Farage urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him and his Deputy Richard Tice. He says that Reform UK has received £Millions and £Millions from the fossil fuel industry to promote climate denial and destroy the planet.Neo-Fascist Climate Science Denier Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.Orcas comment on killer apes destroying the planet by continuing to burn fossil fuels.
A firefighter gestures next to burning trees as a wildfire rages near Marcheprime, outside, Bordeaux, France, July 26, 2026
