The Mediterranean Sea potentially broke two temperature records last week, reports Agence France-Presse (AFP). According to Spanish researchers, on Thursday 15 August, the Mediterranean Sea recorded a maximum temperature of 31.96C and a median daily temperature of 28.90C, the newswire says. The latter breaks the previous record of 28.71C – set just last year on 24 July, the article says. The former was attained on the Egyptian coast at El-Arish, but “this value is preliminary until further human checks can be carried out”, it adds. The newswire continues: “The preliminary readings for 2024 come from satellite data from the European Copernicus Observatory, with records dating back to 1982. It means that, for two successive summers, the Mediterranean will have been warmer than during the exceptional summer heatwave of 2003, when a daily median was measured at 28.25C on 23 August, a record that had stood for 20 years.” Justino Martinez, researcher at the Institut de Ciencies del Mar in Barcelona and the Catalan Institute of Research for the Governance of the Sea, tells the outlet: “What is remarkable is not so much to reach a maximum on a given day, but to observe a long period of high temperatures, even without breaking a record…Since 2022, surface temperatures have been abnormally high for long periods, even in a climate-change environment.”

Back on land, the Guardian continues its “Hotter than ever” special series on extreme heat. New articles include those on how animals are suffering as heatwaves increase, a set of interviews with people “living in some of the places that have been hit the hardest”, and about a pilot project installing “mirror roofs” to cool homes in Freetown, Sierra Leone. In a separate article, the Guardian also explores how “heat inequality is causing thousands of unreported deaths in poor countries and communities across the world”.

Elsewhere, the Associated Press reports that more than 100 people were treated for heat-related illness – with 10 people hospitalised – at an airshow in Colorado, US on Saturday. The Colorado Springs fire department said those who fell ill at the Pike’s Peak regional airshow suffered conditions such as dehydration, heat exhaustion and heat stroke, reports the Guardian, quoting KRDO, a commercial radio station in Colorado Springs. In addition to high temperatures of 36C (96F), “there were few clouds in the sky, allowing sunlight to bear down on the concrete, making this heat feel even more intense for already overheated attendees”, the newspaper says. Finally, an article in the Conversation focuses on how to help those most vulnerable to extreme heat.

Europe is “spending tens of billions of euros a year to fight wildfires”, reports Bloomberg, “yet it hasn’t stopped blazes from flaring up across Greece and other parts of the continent this summer”. Tackling last week’s fires just outside Athens required “more than 700 firefighters, dozens of planes and helicopters and around 200 firefighting vehicles”, the outlet says: “[T]he herculean effort shows the uphill battle European firefighters face as climate change turbo-charges the threat posed by wildfires. Greece, which is suffering its worst season in two decades, now has 89 planes and helicopters available for firefighting, compared to 61 when the current government came to power in 2019. Still, there is increasing pressure on European governments to focus more on prevention as extreme heat and fires become more frequent due to global warming.” Wildfires last year cost Europe “at least €4.1bn in damages last year, charring about 500,000 hectares of land across the continent”, the outlet says, adding: “As the climate crisis has escalated, the European Union has increased its firefighting budget, which rose about 35% in five years to €37.8bn ($42bn) in 2022. This year the bloc has put dozens of planes and hundreds of firefighters on standby in anticipation of an intense wildfire season.”

Meanwhile, Bloomberg reports that Greece and Turkey are “fighting to contain wildfires as temperatures soar to 42C (108F) and gale force winds in the Aegean Sea fan outbreaks”. While the “huge blaze on the outskirts of the [Greek] capital was extinguished” last week, “firefighters are using aircraft to tackle fires near Loutraki in northern Greece and at Kryovrisi in the north-west”. The Guardian reports on how the victims of the fires near Athens are vowing “to adapt and stay put”. In Turkey, firefighters are “battling to contain” wildfires in five provinces, says Reuters. And BBC News reports on how scientists are researching the “firewaves” that hit London in 2022, contributing to the London Fire Brigade’s busiest day since the second world war.

Elsewhere, CNN reports on how wildfires in California are leaving the state’s housing market “in trouble” as “insurers are rushing to leave” to stop incurring high costs from natural disasters. The Financial Times reports on the comments of Aki Hussain, the chief executive of insurance firm Hiscox, who says that insurers and reinsurers ramping up their prices have been sending a “stark signal” to policymakers to limit the risks of new building projects. The FT notes that “the cost of insuring and reinsuring against natural disasters such as wildfires and floods has soared in recent years after the industry reacted to four years on the trot where global claims exceeded $100bn”. Prof Michael E Webber – professor of public affairs and engineering at the University of Texas – uses a New York Times guest essay to discuss the “wildfire hazard” that the US power grid poses and the solutions available. Finally, in her Sustainability by Numbers newsletter, data scientist Hannah Ritchie the cumulative total area of the world burned by wildfires “is trending high for this time of the year”. She notes that “at this point, global wildfire burn is the highest it has been since 2012”. 

With the next round of climate finance talks coming in next month, a “club of developed nations, vocally led by the European Union and the US…want other countries that have become wealthier – and more polluting – to pitch in”, reports Climate Home News. The new UN climate finance target – or post-2025 New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG) – is set to be agreed at the COP29 climate summit in Baku this November, the outlet explains: “But, as governments polish their arguments ahead of the next round of talks in mid-September, climate finance experts warn of an uphill battle to get everyone to agree to a fair and accurate way to broaden the donor base.” In a document submitted last week as part of the NCQG negotiations, the EU wrote that “the collective goal can only be reached if parties with high [greenhouse gas]-emissions and economic capabilities join the effort”, CHN reports, noting that the latest US submission “echoed that position”. The article explores the “precise criteria” proposed by Switzerland, which “set out two detailed metrics to expand the list of contributors beyond developed countries” earlier this month. These would expand the donor base to “include China and Gulf states”, it says. However, climate finance experts are “sceptical such strict criteria will work at the negotiating table and make it into a final decision”, CHN says. Laetitia Pettinotti, a research fellow at ODI, tells the outlet that  “discussing thresholds and indicators is a technical and politically charged issue, and it will be very difficult to get everyone to agree on them”.

Meanwhile, Business Standard – an Indian English-language daily newspaper – reports that, on Saturday, India “said the global south should collectively raise its voice for an ambitious new climate finance goal at the UN climate change conference in Azerbaijan’s Baku”.

In the first six months of 2024, China has added “as much new clean energy generation” as the entire UK produced “from all sources” in the same period, the Guardian reports. The newspaper cites analysis from Carbon Brief, saying that China’s “continuing boom in clean technology” means the country’s carbon emissions “may have already reached a peak”. China Energy Net says data from China’s National Bureau of Statistics shows that the “large-scale industrial power generation” reached 883 terawatt hours in July, a year-on-year increase of 2.5%. The outlet adds that thermal power generation decreased by 4.9% year-on-year, but wind and solar power increased by 0.9% and 16.4% year-on-year, respectively. 

Meanwhile, state broadcaster CCTV says China “has built the world’s largest and most complete new energy industry chain”. Industry news outlet BJX News says China has boosted the subsidy for purchasing electric vehicles (EVs) to 20,000 yuan ($2,800). Another CCTV article says that, by the end of July, China had installed more than 10m EV charging stations, a year-on-year increase of 53%. Wu Peng, Chinese ambassador to South Africa, tells the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post that the US and EU need to “step up production of affordable” EVs to “justify” their tariffs. The outlet adds that Wu’s comment came ahead of next month’s 2024 Forum on China–Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) summit where “green energy is expected to be high on the agenda”. Business news outlet Caixin reports the EU will release the “final conclusions from its anti-subsidy investigation” into Chinese EVs by the end of August. Asian News International reports that China has not been invited to the Voice of Global South Summit, where leaders are expected to discuss “climate change concerns, challenges of new technologies”. 

Separately, the Financial Times carries an opinion article by Chetan Ahya, chief Asia economist at Morgan Stanley, who says: “China will find it a challenge to sustain the 15-20% export growth needed to use its excess capacity…This means China’s deflation challenge will persist…We forecast that nominal GDP growth will remain subdued at 4.3% and 4.8% in 2024 and 2025, respectively, and that debt-to-GDP ratios will keep rising.” Former Trump White House press secretary Sean Spicer tells the climate-sceptic broadcaster Sky News Australia that “China doesn’t care about climate change otherwise they wouldn’t be doing what they are doing”.  

Finally, state-run newspaper China Daily reports that the Ministry of Water Resources has issued “tailored warnings to five provincial regions”, urging them to prepare for heavy rainfalls in the coming days. On Sunday, China Daily cited the National Meteorological Center (NMC) saying “torrential rain” is expected to hit many regions in China in the next three days.

“Doomerism” in the environmental advocacy community at the prospect of a second presidential term for Donald Trump “overstates how much President Joe Biden has accomplished – or a President Kamala Harris would accomplish – on cutting emissions”, without a change in approach, says the Washington Post in an editorial. The newspaper points to “flaws” in the Inflation Reduction Act, which “remain some of the biggest obstacles to deploying renewables”. It continues: “The president has allowed other goals to intrude on the climate agenda, raising the cost of the energy transition. He has slapped onerous tariffs on Chinese clean energy technology to serve the unrelated objective of cutting China’s access to US markets and giving a leg up to domestic manufacturers who might create some jobs. And, critically, while the incentives in Biden’s signature green energy legislation have helped make renewable electricity even more competitive with both coal and natural gas, they have been powerless to overcome the principal obstacle to rolling out new energy technology: the regulatory hoops developers have to jump through, forcing them to endure siting and permitting delays and interconnection backlogs to get their power on the grid.” The expansion of power grids is “regularly held back by lawsuits from environmental advocacy groups making often flimsy claims that developers failed to adequately assess the environmental impact of their projects”, the newspaper argues. Tackling this barrier “will be essential for the IRA to achieve its potential”, the newspaper says: “That would require Harris to confront the environmental lobby, a key Democratic ally.” Nonetheless, “it would no doubt be better for the climate if the US president acknowledged the reality of global warming – rather than calling it a scam, as Trump has”, the newspaper notes: “Global climate leadership from the White House could be a big factor in the world’s climate fight, an issue we will address soon in another editorial.” The editorial concludes: “But if the US is to decarbonise, Ms Harris would have to double down on the IRA’s potential – even if it means upsetting many environmentalists. That will be critical for the White House to exert the kind of climate leadership that is needed in the world’s climate fight.”

Elsewhere, Inside Climate News explores why a potential Kamala Harris presidency “stirs hope for a new chapter in climate action”.

Writing in the Independent, Lord Deben – Conservative peer and former chair of the Climate Change Committee – says that tackling climate change is “the fundamental challenge of the human condition” and it offers the choice to “rise to the heights or disappear in the depths”. Human-caused warming is “increasingly causing global disruption”, Deben continues: “Human beings naturally seek certainty and modern societies have long taken for granted the relative certainties of the weather. That assumption underpins everything, from insurance, to food security, to global trade, to mass tourism…However, as each year is hotter than the last; as wildfires rip through whole nations and are followed by floods and hurricanes of unparalleled force and extent; and as no part of the world is spared extreme weather events, the insurance model is fundamentally threatened and the ability to limit risk undermined.” Deben unpacks the impacts being seen today and those projected for the future, noting that “this is why scientists have sought to convince the world to keep warming below a 1.5C increase. Anything more and we really cannot tell what cataclysmic changes would occur.” He adds: “If this is what we get with 1.5C warming, do we still cling to business as usual until 3C warming produces results we hardly dare contemplate? Or does humankind rise to the occasion and meet the global threat with a global response, creating a new industrial revolution in which renewable energy powers a society that doesn’t cost the Earth, but builds a cleaner, greener, and fairer world?” 

Elsewhere in UK comment, an editorial in the Financial Times welcomes the “demise” of day return business air trips. It says: “It has taken 50 years, a global pandemic, looming climate catastrophe, tightening travel budgets and previously unimaginable technological and workplace advances to curb bosses’ belief that if the flight schedule says a there-and-back-in-a-day trip can be done, it should be done, if not by them then by their minions.” In a two–part commentary, the Grantham Research Institute’s Bob Ward and Pallavi Sethi explore how the “Daily Mail’s polemics on the new UK government’s plans for decarbonising power and reaching net-zero are ridiculously ignorant and ideological”. Ward and Sethi show “how recent grossly misleading articles amount to propaganda”. 

Finally, in climate-sceptic commentary, Dominic Lawson writes in the Sunday Times that the UK’s wood-burning Drax power station is “an affront to reason and nature” and Bjorn Lomborg writes in the Sunday Telegraph that “innovation…will save the planet”. [At the same time, Lomborg decries the advances made in wind and solar because they are only cheaper than fossil fuels “when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing”.]

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) should consider “a wider set of assumptions about future population” in their future warming scenarios, argues a new study. The authors analyse the population projections used by emission scenarios in the IPCC’s third working group reports, for the latest three IPCC cycles. They find that “emissions scenarios span smaller demographic uncertainties than alternative estimates both for the world and for critical regions, such as South-East Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and China”. They add that the range of demographic projections has “consistently shrunk over subsequent reports”, converging towards the SSP2 “middle” pathway.

A new review paper on the early warning systems used to detect climate tipping points finds that “in the majority of the case studies we reviewed, the performance of most early warnings was positive in detecting tipping points”. The authors note that over the last two decades, an “unprecedented” amount of data has become available from remote sensing, field measurements, surveys, simulated data, and models, which has allowed the development of new tools to detect tipping points. The authors reviewed the last 20 years of literature on early warning systems for climate tipping points, documenting metrics including which early warning systems have been used, their success, and the associated tipping point.