Yesterday at the 2020 World Economic Forum, held in Davos, Switzerland, US President Donald Trump addressed delegates with a speech which did its best to ignore climate change. In his view, "We must reject the perennial prophets of doom", while he called for a rejection of "predictions of the apocalypse." In his view, today's climate activists are "the heirs of yesterday's foolish fortune tellers".
Data provided by the UK Met Office, NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in the USA and the Copernicus Climate Change Service in Europe all agrees that the past five years have been the hottest since global temperature recording began in 1850. The average temperature for 2019 was around 1.1C above the average for 1850 to 1900.
More energy was produced in the UK from renewables than fossil fuels on 137 days during 2019. That makes it he UK's greenest year yet for energy production, but only just!
On Sunday afternoon, two weeks of talks at the UN COP25 climate conference in Madrid ended with a recognition of the need for much deeper cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, but few concrete commitments made towards reductions.
At the United Nations COP25 climate conference in Madrid, the United Nations has said that young people are central to dealing with the climate crisis.
The World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) has said in the preliminary findings of its annual State of the Global Climate report that the last decade has been one of high heat around the world, meaning it will almost certainly become the hottest on record.
The environment is very much in the news today. First, new research from Greenpeace and the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) has shown that the amount of plastic packaging used in supermarkets actually increased from 2017 to 2018, going from 886,000 tonnes to 903,000 tonnes. A lot of the additional weight comes from 10p 'bags for life', which are made of thicker plastic than the flimsier and 'throwaway' 5p bags used previously. The report has found that each household buys an average of 54 'bags for life' a year, making them more 'bag a week' than 'bag for life', with sales up 26% to 1.5 billion bags in 2018.
The European Parliament has today declared a "global climate and environmental emergency' and has urged all member states to commit to net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. This is in line with the UK government's current ambitions for reducing emissions.