It’s Election Day in Denmark today and over the past week or so I’ve been back behind the camera to film the Prime Minister and other top candidates for AFP News.

nothin to report but the weather 🙃

The last 12 months have been hot. Record breaking. 1.64 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial average (ie: before we started burning fossil fuels) which is alarming, given that the Paris target is to hold to 1.5C (no, this doesn’t mean we’ve crossed it yet… but we will, and much worse, with current government policies). A warmer climate means hotter heatwaves, more frequently, and lasting longer. In many places, heat is killing people. Here are some of the ways Reuters photographers are trying to capture that heat. 1 / A woman cools herself with a donated fan amidst a heatwave, in an area with intermittent or no access to electricity and running water, in the outskirts of Madrid, Spain, August 23, 2023. REUTERS/Violeta Santos Moura 2 / An Iraqi man sits on his motorbike under a water sprinkler to cool off during high temperatures, in Baghdad, Iraq, June 27, 2024. REUTERS/Ahmed Saad

3 / A nurse treats a patient inside a Heat Illness ward during a heatwave in Ahmedabad, India, May 25, 2024. REUTERS/Amit Dave

4 / Elderly people visit a municipal cooling center as a heatwave hits Athens, Greece, June 13, 2024. REUTERS/Stelios Misinas

5 / Kids hold their mobile phones during a blackout that the government applied to overcome the overload amid a heatwave, in Cairo, Egypt, June 25, 2024. REUTERS/Mohamed Abd El Ghany

6 / Khilona, 50, a farm labourer, on a field at the Yamuna floodplains during a heatwave in New Delhi, India, May 30, 2024. REUTERS/Anushree Fadnavis
 7 / Men cover their heads with a wet cloth to cool off and to avoid sunlight, during a 52C day, as the heatwave continues in Jacobabad, Pakistan May 26. REUTERS/Akhtar Soomro 
8 / An empty classroom of a school is pictured as all schools are closed due to on going heatwave in Dhaka, Bangladesh, April 25, 2024. REUTERS/Mohammad Ponir Hossain


9 / An EMT lifts a migrant woman suffering from heat exhaustion onto a stretcher in the border community of Eagle Pass, Texas, U.S. June 26, 2023. REUTERS/Kaylee Greenlee Beal

10 / A person cools off at the Piazza del Popolo, during a heatwave in Rome, Italy July 18, 2023. REUTERS/Remo Casilli

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For months, coral scientists have been sending me footage of what they’re seeing in the oceans: a global mass bleaching of coral reefs, the fourth ever — and the fourth in my lifetime. Bleaching is a stress response. “Like a fever,” one scientist told us. But if the oceans either get too hot, or stay too hot for too long, corals die. In the Caribbean and Flordia, that’s what’s happening - scientists were still documenting mortality this February once the oceans cooled off. “We will not be able to recover what we lost,” we heard from a scientist working near Cancun. Then over the following decades, those calcium carbonate structures slowly degrade, which can reduce how well a coastline can slow down an oncoming storm. We have basically passed the tipping point for corals. This was once thought to be 1.5C, but a recent IPCC update suggested it’s lower — likely 1.2C warming, which we’ve already hit! They expect we’ll lose 90% of corals. Oceans have been absorbing greenhouse gas emissions from oil, coal, gas, but now sea surface temps are hotter than ever recorded globally. Even an active El Niño which drove in big rainy cyclones that should’ve protected part of Australia’s oceans didn’t stop them from reporting the worst-ever bleaching on record today. Literally every interview ended with people saying that we need to lower global emissions. We’re currently on track for 2.5-3C of warming this century, which is going to be fatalistic for so many ecosystems, but corals were one of the first. For @reuters with @gloriadickie Images: 1. Bleached corals in Great Barrier Reef / Australia Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) 2. Mortality off of Puerto Morelos, Mexico / Lorenzo Alvarez-Filip 3. Bleaching off of Mombasa, Kenya / CORDIO East Africa 4. Partial bleaching deeper in Great Barrier Reef / AIMS 5. Aerial surveys of bleaching — all that is bleach / AIMS 6. Kenyan surveying teams / CORDIO East Africa

Greta Thunberg + team for @nationmag as their strike enters its fourth year. That’s 212 weeks today if you wanna be exact. Was struck by the friendships and closeness in this group of teen organizers who are really, really, really trying to get politicians to listen properly to the science, all the while navigating the climate anxiety inherent to keeping tabs on it all. Thanks @ludwighurtado for the assign.

Two summers ago I moved to 55° and started going on night walks to look for noctilucent clouds. They’re the highest clouds in Earth’s atmosphere — ice crystals that shimmer around midnight during the Scandinavian summer. This year I’ve seen them a dozen times. They were once so rare that they only first appeared in cloud atlases in the mid 20th century. Now, because of increased emissions, it’s almost commonplace. Scientists link this to increased methane in our atmosphere and space traffic. You might still catch them in August, though the season is winding down. Highly recommend taking a walk and thinking about our altered atmosphere.

In 1784, James Watt invented the coal-fed steam engine. This is widely identified as the birth of the fossil economy and the fatal breakthrough to a warmer world. On June 30, 2021, one day after setting a Canadian temperature record of 49.6°C, Lytton BC — three hours north of Vancouver — burned down. For the BBC series “Life at 50 °C” we followed Lyttonites who are homeless and displaced by the effects of extreme heat. Many say the fire was started by a spark from the train that rolled through town in tinder-box conditions. But Canada’s Transport Safety Board found “insufficient evidence that the train causes the fire.” Patrick Michell, Chief of Kanaka Bar (just south) and a Lytton evacuee who lost his house and features in our story put it this way: “It wasn’t a train that burnt my house down. It was a by-product of climate change. Heat, drought and wind created conditions in our town that required *one spark*” Andreas Malm in his research into the origins of global warming argues that Watt’s invention cannot itself explain our fossil fuel economy [tl;dr capitalism — can recommend his book “fossil capital”] For more, our segment is posted above. Can recommend looking up the series, too. [images 1-4: an empty coal train and fuel cars roll north above Lytton, BC through incinerated forests of ponderosa pine.] dir/dp: @edouphoto prod: me

“There’s no sacrifice too great right now to save our planet” says @aunty_rainboweyez of the indigenous-led actions to protect ancient rainforest on Vancouver Island. Old forests sequester more carbon than replanted forests and foster greater biodiversity. As 2022 begins, I’m sharing a story that published over the holidays. Summer feels very distant, but the last one in British Columbia still haunts: record-shattering temperatures, extreme fire, heavy smoke. Meanwhile deep in the rainforest, a community formed at @fairycreekblockade to stop logging of a pristine ancient forest, met with police brutality. Yet in both stories, what shines is love for place and the communities that root there. [image 1: @aunty_rainboweyez touches an 800 year+ cedar at Cathedral Grove, a provincial park she calls a “big tree museum.” She was arrested four times by the RCMP at Fairy Creek. The police have had a heavy presence in the watershed, per court order. Over 1,100 arrests have been made] [image 2: Big Lonely Doug, one of Canada’s largest trees, stands alone in a cutblock on Vancouver Island] [image 3: roadside signage beside the RCMP checkpoint] [image 4: old-growth clearcut logging near Fairy Creek] dir/dp: @edouphoto prod: me link: bio

This is not the BC summer I grew up with. Heat record of 49C. 1500+ fires already. Lytton and Monte Creek lost in out of control blazes. Thousands displaced, evacuated living in motels or camping, thousands more on alert and constantly refreshing the government’s wildfire map. I was in the interior to cover how fossil fuel-driven climate change is reshaping BC summers with @edouphoto . Shortly after we left, many of the highways closed as the fires grew again. The province has issued a do-not-travel alert to the Interior for clear reasons. Sound on for this unsettling road just outside Merritt. Video coming for the BBC later this fall.

B-Sides from a delve into America’s hesitancy towards the Covid-19 vaccine. As the first doses are administered in the US today, I’m thinking of the doctors, high risk patients, organizers in Alabama’s Black Belt near Tuskegee, hardcore skeptics from the Cosmic Right, wellness fanatics and many more who, all for their own reasons, told me they weren’t ready or may never be ready to get a vaccine from President Trump’s Operation Warp Speed.

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