There is continuing media coverage of the record-breaking heatwave that has hit Canada and parts of the US. “The most severe heat wave in the history of the Pacific Northwest has climaxed, obliterating scores of long-standing records,” the Washington Post reports. According to the newspaper, many regions have broken all-time temperature records that are “exceptionally rare and difficult to break” by 2-3C. The New York Times reports that Western Canada has “shattered” its national temperature record, reaching highs of nearly 46.7C. A further piece in the Washington Post says: “We can’t overstate how exceptional the heat is that’s blanketing the Pacific Northwest”. Reuters reports that schools and universities in Western Canada have been forced to close and a separate Reuters piece adds that the heatwave “has shut down much of daily life” for residents of Portland, Salem and Seattle in the US. Associated Press adds that many Covid-19 testing centres and mobile vaccination centres in Seattle have also closed, while the Washington Post reports that in Vancouver, “parks, beaches and pools have been flooded with residents eager to cool off ”. Meanwhile, SFGate reports that roads are “buckling” under the heat and the Boston Globe shows maps indicating how high temperatures are expected to rise over the next few days. “The US and Canada have both warned citizens of ‘dangerous’ heat levels that could persist this week,” BBC News reports.

The heatwave is being referred to as a “heat dome”, according to the Guardian, because “warmth extends high into the atmosphere and isn’t just a thin layer”. The Washington Post reports: “Meteorologists estimated that a heat dome of this size and scope is so rare it should be expected only once every several thousand years. But human-caused warming make extremes like this more common, scientists say”. Meanwhile, Scientific American covers the heatwave under the headline: “Unprecedented heat wave in pacific northwest driven by climate change.” A separate piece by Washington Post‘s weather editor says the heatwave “is shocking but shouldn’t be a surprise”. The piece continues: “Since the 1970s and 1980s, climate scientists have warned that global warming would make heat waves more frequent, long-lasting and intense. Maybe it’s only now that the reality is hitting home.” Meanwhile, the Hill reports that the Environmental Protection Agency “said the intensity of the heatwaves is a sign of climate change”. The Los Angeles Times carries an editorial entitled ,“Record-setting heat wave shows that climate change is creating hell on Earth”, and the Independent reports under the headline, “Once-in-a-millennium heat dome lodges over US and Canada in preview of future climate disaster”. And MailOnline reports that temperatures in Yellowstone could increase by 5C by 2100 due to climate change.

Meanwhile, the Daily Telegraph reports that Jacobabad in Pakistan is experiencing the “world’s highest temperatures”, with temperatures topping 52C (126F). “Its mixture of heat and humidity has made it one of only two places on earth to have now officially passed, albeit briefly, a threshold hotter than the human body can withstand,” the newspaper continues. It notes that few people in the city have air conditioning and blackouts often mean that electricity is lost. “The hospital fills with heatstroke cases from those whose livelihoods mean they must venture out,” the paper adds.

Japanese carmaker Nissan has announced plans to build the UK’s first battery gigafactory, the Daily Telegraph reports on the frontpage of its business section. The factory will open in Sunderland in 2024 and it expected to produce enough batteries for 200,000 cars every year, according to the newspaper. The Guardian reports that this equates to 6Gwh of battery capacity per year – “far more than the 1.9Gwh at its existing Sunderland plant, but dwarfed by Tesla’s 35GWh gigafactory in Nevada”. According to BBC News, the expansion will create thousands of new jobs. It adds that the government will help to finance the project, which is expected to cost hundreds of millions of pounds. It adds that by 2024 the level of UK-made components in UK-made cars is “required to start increasing in line with the terms of the UK’s trade deal with the European Union – where most of Nissan’s Sunderland-assembled cars are sold”. Nissan already makes the Leaf electric car in Sunderland, the Times notes. Meanwhile, BusinessGreen covers new analysis which finds that electric vehicles will account for 56% of all vehicle sales by mid-century. However, the Independent warns that the UK currently has “just 15% of electric vehicle charging points needed to hit climate targets”. And Reuters “analysed data generated by an Argonne National Laboratory model to determine at what point a typical electric vehicle becomes cleaner than an equivalent gasoline car in terms of its lifetime carbon footprint”.

In other UK news, the Guardian reports that Norway’s state oil company Equinor plans to triple its UK hydrogen output by building a new 1,200MW blue hydrogen power plant near Hull. BusinessGreen adds that the government has a launched a £60m competition for “innovative hydrogen production, storage and transport solutions”, while Energy Monitor carries a piece entitled, “How green hydrogen will grow up into a global market”.

Meanwhile, Reuters reports that the UK has “published a list of the number of free UK carbon permits each aircraft operator will receive from 2021-2025 under the country’s domestic emissions trading system”. And the i newspaper carries an “exclusive” entitled, “Cost of green home measures such as insulation and heat pumps ‘putting homeowners off’ amid calls to scrap VAT”. In other news, the Guardian reports that the number of new solar farms planned in the eastern England has more than doubled in recent months, as farmers are swapping crops for solar panels. And a separate piece in the Guardian notes that, according to a new report, nearly 2m people in Glasgow will face “severe disruption” from rising temperatures “unless billions of pounds are invested in protecting homes, businesses and transport links”.

Lawsuits brought against polluting governments and companies would have a greater change of succeeding if they were to use up-to-date climate science, DeSmog reports. This is according to a new study, which analyses 73 climate litigation cases against polluters and finds that “most did not quantify the extent to which climate change was responsible for the climate-related events affecting the plaintiffs”. The study finds that “better use of the latest attribution science could improve the chances of lawsuits seeking compensation for losses, regulatory action and emission cuts. It could also help lawyers decide when a case is weak and not worth pursuing.” BBC News notes that, so far, there have been “few successes in cases where the plaintiffs have sought compensation for damages caused by climate change linked to human activity”. However, the Guardian reports that attribution science has “moved on considerably ” in the past 15 years, making it easier to link increasing temperatures to emissions from companies. So far, around 1,500 climate-related lawsuits have been brought against fossil fuel companies, according to the outlet, and “a significant increase in the number of lawsuits brought against fossil fuel companies in the coming years” is likely. All three outlets highlight last month’s ruling by a court in the Netherlands that Shell must cut its emissions by 45% in the next decade. The authors of the study have written a guest post for Carbon Brief about their study.

China’s national emissions trading scheme (ETS) is set to miss its launch deadline of “the end of June”, reports Bloomberg, citing “a person familiar with its development”. The source told the publication that trading “won’t now happen until after July 1” because of “a lack of organisation”. Meanwhile, China Times reports that “staff” at the Shanghai Environment Energy Exchange (SEEE) have said that the scheme’s launch date “has not been confirmed”. The source stated that the SEEE, which is in charge of the trading platform, was “waiting for instructions from higher-ups”. They did not mention if the launch would be delayed. Carbon Brief’s in-depth Q&A explains how the scheme will help China tackle climate change.

Separately, China’s National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) has predicted that the nation’s surging coal price will “enter a downward channel” and have a “relatively big dip” in July, reports Xinhua. A spokesperson from NDRC tells the state newswire the fuel’s demand and supply will “tend to ease” due to the increase in domestic production and import, as well as the growth of hydropower and solar power in summer. Meanwhile, Caixin reports that China’s “relatively low” household electricity price could be raised to “better reflect the power supply cost”. In a statement, the NDRC says that it plans to establish a “tiered pricing system” for residential electricity to “further deepen the market reform for electricity prices”, Caixin writes.

Elsewhere, China’s president Xi Jinping has “expressed warm congratulations” on the start of the operation of Baihetan hydropower station – the second-largest hydropower station in China after the Three Gorges dam – reports Xinhua. In a congratulatory letter, Xi calls on the project’s constructors and planners to make “even bigger contributions” to China’s 2030 and 2060 emission goals, as well as its “green” transition. Reuters adds that the hydro project began generating electricity for the first time on Monday.

William Russell, the lord mayor of London , has penned an opinion piece in CityAM celebrating London Climate Action week, which runs this week. He says: “Here in the City we are tackling [climate change] through our radical climate action strategy which will make the Square Mile an international leader in the fight against carbon emissions. This work will make the City net zero carbon-emissions by 2040, 10 years earlier than government goals.” Russell adds that action has already been taken to reduce emissions: “We already protect 11,000 acres of green space in London and south-east England, we purchase only renewable electricity and we’ve banned new diesel vehicles from our own fleet where there is a clean market alternative.” He concludes: “We do not need to compromise the economy to fix the environment – our climate action plans will drive both growth and jobs. London must build back better from the pandemic and taking a leadership role on climate change is vital in order to address the issues that we face across the globe.”

The New York Times carries a piece by journalist Giovanni Russonello on President Biden’s proposed climate legislature. Russonello notes that Biden has “reached a deal with centrist senators on an infrastructure package that would significantly trim what had been his main vehicle for confronting climate change”, but that the $2tn American Jobs Plan – the “biggest climate-related proposals in the initial bill” – was not included in the compromise proposal. Biden plans to follow up with another bill, which would be more likely to pass with Democrat-only votes, he continues. However, Russonello says that Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia – “the most conservative Democratic senator — who represents one of the states that are most heavily reliant on the carbon energy industry, and who himself has close ties to it”, will ultimately decide what is included in the second bill. “It was Mr Manchin’s insistence on finding bipartisan compromise that scuttled the White House’s hopes of passing the American Jobs Plan through the process of budgetary reconciliation, which would remove the need for Republican votes,” Russonello writes. He adds that it would “go against many of the patterns he has established as a legislator” for Manchin to support the Democrat-only proposal to reduce fossil fuel use. The Wall Street Journal reports that this second bill “aims to eliminate greenhouse-gas emissions from electric power generation by 2035”. However, the Los Angeles Times includes comments from Mary Creasman, the chief executive of the California League of Conservation Voters, who says that “the bipartisan bill doesn’t do enough to address climate change”. And Bloomberg runs a piece by Princeton University professor Jesse Jenkins, who says that Democrats “need to look beyond the framework of the bipartisan infrastructure bill”.

Two “Matters Arising” papers respond to a study, published in 2019, which estimated that northern peatlands store more that 1,000bn tonnes of carbon (GtC) – approximately double that of previous estimates. Here, a group of researchers argue that “such a large figure is inconsistent with measured peat depth and physical properties”. They explain: “The 1,055 GtC estimate was produced using an incorrect assumption of how peatlands expand, a methodology that is vulnerable to outliers, and using a dataset that lacks the necessary reproducibility and context for quality control.” The second paper adds that the large estimate “is difficult to reconcile within the top-down constraints imposed by ice-core and marine records”. In a reply, the authors of the original study “provide additional clarification” on how their data is used and repeat their analysis, finding that “our conclusions are unchanged”.

The loss of tropical mountain forests in south-east Asia – and the carbon they store – has accelerated over the past 20 years, a new study finds. Using high-resolution satellite datasets, the researchers find that the “frontier of forest loss” has moved to higher elevations and steeper slopes since 2009. These shifts have led to an “unprecedented annual forest carbon loss” of 424m tonnes of carbon per year, the study says, which has accelerated between 2001 and 2019. The results “underscore the immediate threat of carbon stock losses associated with accelerating forest clearance in south-east Asian mountains”, the study concludes.

New research assesses the damage caused to mangrove forests in south-west Florida caused by Hurricane Irma in September 2017. Using airborne and satellite data, the researchers “estimated that 62% of mangroves in southwest Florida suffered canopy damage, with largest impacts in tall forests (>10 m)”. While mangroves in well-drained sites “resprouted new leaves within one year after the storm”, in poorly-drained sites, the researchers “detected one of the largest mangrove diebacks on record (10,760 ha)”. The results indicate that “storm surge and ponding caused dieback, not wind”. For more on Hurricane Irma, see Carbon Brief’s media summary, published at the time.