Last month, the average global temperature was around 1.2C hotter than average, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and quoted in the Guardian. This makes it the hottest July ever recorded, adding another record to 15 consecutive months that have seen temperature highs, according to the article. The piece explains that NOAA’s rankings “differ slightly” from the EU’s Earth observation programme Copernicus, which last week announced that July was the second-hottest such month on record. The month saw new heatwaves “sweeping places such as southern Europe and large parts of the US”, it notes. CBS News also reports on the new assessment from NOAA, noting that the US scientists estimate that there is a 77% chance 2024 will be the warmest year, and nearly a 100% chance that it will make it into the top five. “Researchers tracking the extraordinary temperatures have said the burning of fossil fuels is the primary driver, so the trend will continue until humans get a handle on greenhouse gas emissions,” according to NBC News. However, it notes that during the recent record streak, the natural climate pattern El Niño has also contributed to boosting temperatures. The Conversation has a piece looking in depth at some of the underlying factors driving high temperatures. The Guardian has a piece asking whether the leap in temperatures in recent months, which has exceeded global warming forecasts, is “just a blip or a systemic shift”. It includes an interview with Gavin Schmidt, director of the Nasa Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, who wrote an essay for Nature in March stating that: “The 2023 temperature anomaly has come out of the blue, revealing an unprecedented knowledge gap.” In the Guardian piece, Schmidt says he is now “slightly less worried”, but “still humbled that we can’t explain” the 2023 leap in temperatures. 

According to Reuters, rising temperatures have led to a surge in demand for “coolcations” – with travellers flocking to relatively cool places for summer such as Canada, Alaska and Norway. Meanwhile, an emergency medicine physician at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School tells Bloomberg that “doctors are increasingly concerned about the impact heat can have on the body”. She emphasises the point that everyone is at risk from heat-related illnesses, even healthy people. The Guardian publishes an “analysis” piece on what cities can do to combat extreme heat. It stresses the importance of “ancient heat-management techniques” – such as cities built with “shady courtyards, arcades and narrow breezy streets”. However, the article says “urbanists fear that far too many cities are willingly walking into the trap of air conditioning, which is expensive, energy-intensive and actually raises outdoor temperatures”. 

Finally, Axios reports on a new paper that concludes the slowdown in the rate of emissions growth, due to government policies, “could help arrest the rate at which the planet is warming”. It notes that the authors make a simple, “yet perhaps underappreciated”, point about the impact of climate policies.

More than 1,000 survivors of wildfires, floods and hurricanes are calling for the US Department of Justice (DOJ) to investigate the oil and gas industry for its involvement in driving these climate change-related disasters, E&E News reports. Representatives of the group will deliver a letter to the US attorney general Merrick Garland “asking him to look at the fossil fuel industry’s role in accelerating climate change and worsening natural disasters”, the article explains. The Guardian says the letter “cites evidence that big oil has known for decades about the dangers of their products and has sought to cover up that evidence”. The letter comes “amid a wave” of pressure on the fossil fuel industry, with lawsuits from seven states, 35 cities and Washington DC seeking to hold it accountable for climate change, the Hill notes. It adds that House and Senate Democrats have also referred their own investigation to the DOJ, to look into decades of “disinformation” by oil and gas companies.

Meanwhile, the Hill reports that, with the election looming, US Democrats are ramping up their attacks on “Project 2025” – “the sweeping conservative strategy designed to guide the next Republican president”. The news outlet says one of the initiative’s proposals that has “rais[ed] eyebrows” is the adoption of a “whole-of-government unwinding” of federal efforts to combat climate change.

The world’s biggest offshore wind developer, Ørsted, has announced impairment losses of 3.2bn Danish kroner ($472m) in its second-quarter financial results, driven partly by the delay of a major US wind project, Reuters reports. This has sent the company’s shares down by as much as 9%, the newswire adds. Ørsted has pushed back the launch of its 704 megawatt (MW) Revolution Wind project off Rhode Island and Connecticut from 2025 to 2026, the article explains. It adds that this marks “the latest blow to the fledgling US offshore wind industry, which is a major part of President Joe Biden’s climate change agenda, but has been struggling with soaring costs”. The Guardian notes that Ørsted’s latest financial hit comes “amid surging costs facing the global wind power industry”, with additional costs  relating to last year’s decision to scrap two major windfarms off the New Jersey coast. The article notes that while the company is cutting jobs and pulling back from Spain, Portugal and Norway, it remains on track to build the major Hornsea 3 windfarm in the UK. According to the Financial Times’ Lex column: “The emergence of new problems highlights that building big wind projects remains a complex and fraught proposition.” 

The Financial Times also highlights Ørsted’s “scrapped plans” for a European plant to develop “green fuel” – specifically e-methanol – for use in industries such as shipping and aviation. The newspaper says work on a new factory in the Swedish town of Örnsköldsvik began just over a year ago, but the company has concluded that the “business case has deteriorated” due to high costs. Ørsted “joins companies including Shell and Fortescue in either abandoning, pausing or scaling back renewable energy projects”, the newspaper says. The Daily Telegraph also reports on this aspect of Ørsted’s portfolio, noting that the decision to scrap the new e-fuels plant was partly driven by “a lack of demand from customers”.

The “annual carbon-sink capacity” of China’s forests and grasslands has exceeded 1.2bn tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (GtCO2e​​), “ranking first in the world”, reports state news agency Xinhua, quoting Guo Qingjun, an official of the National Forestry and Grassland Administration. Guo said forests and grassland are able to absorb more than half of the country’s “unavoidable emissions”, which are predicted to reach about 2.5GtCO2e in 2060, the outlet adds. Another Xinhua report says the National Development and Reform Commission, the country’s top economic planner, has outlined key tasks “to advance reform in ecological conservation”, which includes setting “standards to support green and low-carbon development”. State-supporting newspaper Global Times publishes an editorial under the title: “China’s green transformation set to drive high-quality economic development.” (Read Carbon Brief’s Q&A: what China’s “new quality productive forces” means for climate action.)

Meanwhile, an article signed by President Xi Jinping and published in the Chinese Communist party’s official magazine, Qiushi, calls for reform of the country’s “ecology and environment governance”. Another “proposal” from the Ministry of Natural Resources and another three ministries asks “everywhere” (local governments) to study “Xi Jinping thought and experience” in “the ecological protection and restoration”, the Chinese state-owned Economic Daily reports. China’s Supreme People’s Court has told its judges to “continue handing down harsh punishments against those who destroy forest resources”, state-run newspaper China Daily reports. The top court has also said the number of environmental cases fell 5.8% year-on-year to 232,000 in 2023, another China Daily report says.

In other news, China’s coal output “rose 2.8% in July from a year earlier”, while thermal power generation fell 4.9% to 574.9 terawatt-hours (TWh), Reuters reports. Energy news outlet BJX News says the electricity generation from hydropower, wind as well as solar increased in July. Economic newspaper National Business Daily publishes an article by Lu Zongxiang, the executive vice-president of Tsinghua Sichuan Energy Internet Research Institute, citing a Carbon Brief analysis which shows “there is a 95% probability that 2024 will be hotter than 2023”. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) has issued “draft industry standards” for the batteries for electric vehicles (EV), Global Times reports. China customs says it is mulling export restrictions on “rare antimony metals” that are used in storage batteries due to “national security” concerns, according to Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post (SCMP). Bloomberg publishes an editorial titled: “EV war between China and Europe can still be avoided.”

Finally, Agence France-Presse says “climate change affects everyone”, but especially “elderly people… living in Hong Kong’s small, poorly ventilated units”. An opinion piece on SCMP suggests that Hong Kong can act as a “climate change superconnector” by “decarbonising domestically” and “helping finance the climate transition across Asia”. 

Letzte Generation (“Last Generation”) climate activists have broken into four German airport sites, temporarily suspending operations at Cologne/Bonn and Nuremberg, Deutsche Welle reports. At the airports in Berlin and Stuttgart, police said that activists were arrested without disrupting traffic, the news outlet adds. According to the Associated Press, the group is demanding that the German government negotiate and sign an agreement on a global exit from fossil fuel use by 2030. It notes that the activists have already disrupted air travel across the country this summer with previous protests, adding that the German cabinet approved legislation last month “that would impose tougher penalties on people who break through airport perimeters”. The Guardian reports that the interior minister, Nancy Faeser, said in a statement: “These criminal actions are dangerous and stupid. These anarchists are risking not only their own lives, but are also endangering others.”

In the UK, the Daily Telegraph reports that Extinction Rebellion is “encouraging elderly supporters” to participate in mass demonstrations in which the group occupies restricted areas of Windsor Castle’s grounds for three days. The information was revealed to the newspaper after private investigators, acting on behalf of a local business, reportedly infiltrated online discussions with Extinction Rebellion members, it says. Separately, two Just Stop Oil activists have denied criminal damage and interfering with national infrastructure after two private jets at Stansted Airport were sprayed with orange paint, according to the Independent. The Times has a comment piece by the lawyer Simon Spence KC, in the context of five imprisoned Just Stop Oil protesters appealing their sentences on the basis that they are longer than sentences handed down to people involved in recent far-right riots. The article argues that the climate protesters’ sentences were long “for a reason” – not least because they were tried by a jury whereas the rioters, so far, have pleaded guilty and been “rewarded” with shorter sentences.

A Los Angeles Times editorial celebrates the success of the Inflation Reduction Act in the US, which, it says, has seen households claim more than $8bn in tax credits last year for clean energy and energy efficiency upgrades, such as solar panels, heat pumps and home insulation – “exceeding expectations for the 2022 law”. However, the editorial adds that “we’re less thrilled that another incentive in the law, home-energy rebates, are still largely unavailable”. This programme would allow people whose appliances break to replace them with low-emission models, it explains. However, the editorial notes that the initiative has been slower to roll out because the rebates are distributed at the state level, and so far only a handful of states have launched their programmes. “Getting these rebate programs online quickly is not just a climate imperative, but a fairness issue…Tax credits are skewed toward homeowners and wealthier people, and less accessible to lower-income people who rent, can’t afford to pay for these projects upfront or don’t owe enough taxes to benefit,” the editorial explains.

Gillian Tett, columnist and member of the editorial board for the Financial Times, also has a piece about the Inflation Reduction Act, which, she says, is celebrating its second anniversary this week. She notes how the benefits of the act have been skewed towards “red” – or Republican – states, with almost 60% of the jobs it has created going to districts where Republican representatives voted against its passage through Congress. “This skew means that the residents of red districts in states such as South Carolina, Oklahoma and Texas now have a vested interest in protecting [President] Biden’s policy baby,” says Tett. Despite this, she adds that, with the presidential election approaching: “Policymakers close to [Republican candidate Donald] Trump tell me they really will repeal the bill, if they win, in the name of cutting the fiscal deficit. And this is already spooking investors.” Nevertheless, she adds that “I personally doubt whether Trump will be able to overturn these Republican vested interests”.

Around one-quarter of the world’s tropical seabirds nest on atolls, new research finds. Using seabird survey data, researchers model the distribution of seabird nesting sites across the atolls of the Indo-Pacific. They estimate that 31.2m seabirds nest on atolls, or about one-quarter of the world’s total, and find that for 14 of the species studied, more than half of their populations nest on atolls. They conclude: “Given global change, conservation will have to leverage atoll protection and restoration to preserve a relevant fraction of the tropical seabirds of the world.”

A new study finds that students in Johannesburg, South Africa, are at risk of heat stress during school-related physical activity, particularly pre-season practices. Using meteorological data recorded at a school in Johannesburg, researchers calculate four different heat stress indices, then determine the level of risk during the times that students would have been participating in physical activity. They find that across the 2,700 index scores they calculate, more than half “indicate some level of heat stress”. The authors recommend “that school stakeholders should consider the implications of heat stress when considering timetabling and policy-making in the interests of safeguarding their students”.

According to new research, increasing levels of atmospheric CO2 will widen the gap in rice yields between lower and higher income countries over the coming decades. Researchers use crop models, combined with an analysis of existing elevated-CO2 rice yield experiments, to project future yields for the world’s 14 highest rice producing countries. They find that overall global rice yield will increase by 7.6% by mid-century due to the CO2 fertilisation effect. However, they add, the higher temperatures experienced by lower-income countries mean that the yield gaps between lower- and higher-income countries will increase.