Below is a message I received on Saturday from Katharine Viner, editor-in-chief of The Guardian.

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On 21 July, Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race was the biggest story in the world. But something else happened that Sunday. It was the hottest day in recorded history, though not for long. The record was broken again just 24 hours later.

Fuelled by the climate crisis and El Niño, this has been a year of global extreme temperatures. Australia suffered a string of heatwaves through its summer months and, in February, parts of west Africa reported 50C temperatures that made “time stand still”, as a local carpenter in Burkina Faso told environment editor Damian Carrington. From March heatwaves hit Mexico, the southern United States and central America, then India, southern Europe, Japan and Saudi Arabia, where 1,300 people died during the hajj pilgrimage. Last week we reported that temperatures in Antarctica were 28C higher than usual on some days in July.

Our coverage of this run of extreme heat has placed the human impact front and centre. Just this week we’ve covered Italian fishers adapting to a warmer sea, prisoners being broiled in Texas jails, 33C temperatures in Canada’s Arctic region and shared readers’ tips for how to stay cool. On Monday’s episode of Today in Focus Samira Shackle told the story of David Azevedo, a construction worker who died in 2022 during a heatwave in France. And as George Monbiot put it in a stirring piece about the heat divide: “the inner sanctum is always air-conditioned”. Next week our environment team will launch an important series exploring the full global impact of this year of record temperatures.

One of our most-read pieces this week features images that encapsulate the threat of a warmer planet as well as any words: holiday snaps taken by a couple in the same spot next to a Swiss glacier 15 years apart. In less than two decades this melting glacier has become a lake.

It’s alarming, for sure, but it’s important to talk about the actions we can take. Climate scientists tell us that one of the most important things we can do is to elect leaders who can enact the major systemic changes we need, and there’s certainly been hope on that front this year. In June, Mexico elected climate scientist Claudia Sheinbaum as its next president and on Tuesday Kamala Harris chose Tim Walz, a noted climate champion, as her running mate. Next up, just the small matter of her winning the US election.
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