In a straight choice between a new petrol car and a new electric car, on climate grounds the electric car wins easily.

But what if your existing petrol car is still working fine – or is even only a year or two old? Contrary to popular belief, the overall climate impact is lower if a new petrol car is scrapped in favour of an electric vehicle (EV), new research reveals.

Studies show that although EVs produce more carbon emissions when they are manufactured, they are responsible for much lower emissions when they are being driven compared with a petrol or diesel car. Overall, the whole-life emissions for an electric car than for combustion engine vehicles.

at the University of California, Santa Cruz and at UC Santa Barbara wanted to find out whether drivers should wait until their current combustion engine car is ready for the scrapheap before moving to electric.

Using US data, they analysed the emissions impact of scrapping a fossil fuel car and replacing it with an EV at different points, from scrapping a car that is just a year or two old to one at the end of its life. Their modelling accounts for the emissions associated with producing and running a new electric car, and other factors including variability in the grid electricity mix, vehicle efficiency, manufacturing emissions and mileage.

“We found that in the vast majority of cases, and even for a brand new gas vehicle, you would be far better off scrapping the gas vehicle and switching to electric,” says Campbell. “It takes more energy to build an electric vehicle, but the savings from driving the vehicle swamp all the upfront costs.”

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Campbell stresses he doesn’t expect people to immediately scrap their brand new cars. Instead, the study aims to show that there is zero environmental benefit in keeping a fossil fuel car on the road until the end of its life.

The findings hold true for almost any scenario, except where an electricity grid is very reliant on coal power, or when a fossil fuel car is driven less than about 7000 km per year.

“The idea here is just to simply show what a huge advantage electric vehicles offer, so that when the opportunity to make the transition [is] something that people are ready and excited to do, by all means go for it,” says Campbell. “There’s no environmental concern to hold you back.”

at the Yale University says the paper takes a “clever angle”. “I think what they’re talking about makes perfect sense. I’ve thought about this before [but] I’ve never thought to write a science paper on it, and ��’m impressed.”

Electric cars now last as long as petrol and diesel counterparts

Records from UK vehicle safety tests show that the average lifespan of an electric vehicle is 18 years, and the reliability is still improving considerably from year to year

But at the University of Michigan points out that the study is considering an “extreme case”. “It’s unlikely somebody’s going to purchase a combustion engine vehicle and retire it after a year,” he says.

Instead, those cars will likely hit the second-hand market, which could have knock-on economic and behavioural impacts, such as lowering the price of second-hand cars so dramatically that it convinces more people to switch from public transport to car use. More research is needed to model those potential impacts, says Campbell.

But the study’s authors say their findings lend support to the idea of subsidised scrappage schemes, to encourage people to scrap older fossil-fuel cars in favour of electric vehicles. Such policies could accelerate the EV transition in the US and help to cut transportation emissions, which are now the single largest source of carbon emissions in the country.

When your house is on fire, should you call a firefighter, an architect or a politician? OK, that’s an easy one – but what about when the world is on fire? That is a question many of us will be wrestling with as dangerous blazes spring up across much of the world.

Calling a firefighter fixes your immediate problem, which is that your house is burning down. What it doesn’t address is why your house is burning, or the steps you could have taken to reduce the risk of disaster.

As we report this week, the question of how to prevent wildfires in Europe is now at the top of many minds on the continent. This means changing the way that land is used in order to build in resilience, much as an architect might design a home with fire doors or other safety features.

Learning to live with wildfires in this way is a form of climate adaptation. It is essential that we redesign our way of life to ease the burden of the warmer world we have created, but that doesn’t mean we should ignore the underlying cause: burning fossil fuels and greenhouse gas emissions.

As long as our society is dependent on fossil fuels, Earth’s climate will continue to warm

And yet, in responding to Europe’s extraordinary summer, some people seem to want to do just that. “We’ve lost the war against global warming – so we should ditch net zero and learn to handle hot weather” was the view of one columnist in The Telegraph, a UK newspaper known for publishing climate-sceptic views.

This is entirely wrong, and it is where our politicians must step in. If society is organised in such a way that your house keeps getting set on fire, there is only so much an architect can do – eventually, it will burn down. Similarly, as long as our society is organised around burning fossil fuels, Earth’s climate will continue to warm and the wildfires will continue to get worse. Achieving net zero, meaning we no longer emit a meaningful amount of greenhouse gases, is the only way to do that. Politicians who say otherwise might as well hand out matches.

Parts of the UK have seen zero rainfall for the entire month of July for the first time in their history, underscoring the scale and severity of the ongoing drought gripping the country.

The Met Office, the UK’s national weather service, said July’s weather had been “truly exceptional”, with both England and Wales enduring their driest July in 190 years, coupled with extreme heat and almost unbroken sunshine. Rainfall across southern England averaged just 1.5 mm for July 2026, just 2 per cent of the 1991-2020 average, while mean temperatures were 3.2°C above average for the time of year.

At London’s Kew Gardens, which hosts a Met Office weather station, there has been no measurable rainfall at all in July, the first time that has happened at the site since records began in 1871.

Meanwhile, Heathrow Airport in London has seen 42 consecutive days and counting without any rain, a new record for the site, which has been monitored since 1948.

And in Stratfield Mortimer, a village outside the city of Reading, zero rainfall was recorded in July for the first time in its history. The nearby market town of Wokingham recorded just 0.1 millimetres of rainfall over the same period, according to data released by the University of Reading.

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“Some parts of the Reading area remained without measurable rainfall throughout the calendar month, the only time this has happened since continuous local rainfall records began in 1858, almost 170 years ago,” said at the University of Reading in a statement.

The story is similar across southern England, with at least 20 Met Office weather stations seeing zero rainfall for July for the first time in their recorded history, according to provisional data seen by New Scientist. They include stations in Lincolnshire, Dorset, Kent, Greater London, Essex, Monmouthshire, Surrey, the Isle of Wight, East Sussex, Hereford & Worcester and Hampshire.

In north London, software engineer has been operating a private weather station since 2009 near Hampstead Heath. He says July 2026 was the first calendar month without any measurable rain in the local area, based on both his own 17-year time series and Met Office records for the area dating back to 1871.

More than half of England and all of Wales is now officially in drought, causing landscapes to turn yellow, wildfires to burn and farmers to warn of looming crop shortages. In Europe, the prolonged hot, dry weather has sparked huge wildfires and driven river levels to historic lows. Low river levels on the Danube have forced operators to shut down nuclear power reactors in Hungary and Romania, while in Germany low water levels on the Rhine have curtailed shipping.

But even though rain will bring relief, it also carries risks. , also at the University of Reading, says there is now a “really substantial” risk of severe flash flooding in the UK, when rain finally falls on sun-baked soils. “Most of the soils are crusted; reservoirs are stressed,” he says. “It’s not a day or two of rainfall that will solve it all. It might actually pose the greatest hazard of them all.”

A pyrocumulonimbus cloud, a looming thunderstorm generated by an intensely hot wildfire, has been observed with radar in France for the first time. These deadly “fire clouds” of rising hot air, smoke and moisture, which accelerate blazes with strong winds and soaring embers, are expected to become more common in Europe as wildfires there get bigger.  

“You have this tilted column that is sucking air and then propagating embers in front, and it also creates lightning. That’s another way of lighting up fuels in front of the fire, so these cells are unstoppable,” says at the University of Corsica, France. “You cannot stop a thunderstorm, and neither can you stop a firestorm, a strong pyrocumulonimbus.”

Alongside huge blazes in Spain, France has been suffering a wildfire in the Gironde region, which President Emmanuel Macron has called the country’s most severe crisis since the second world war. The fire has burned more than 420 square kilometres since last week, coming within 15 kilometres of the city of Bordeaux and forcing around 220,000 people to evacuate. It generated a pyrocumulonimbus cloud on 24 July and another on 25 July, according to regional officials. Embers and lightning ignited new fires around the original inferno.

“We faced another firestorm, the same incredible, unprecedented, unknown phenomenon as the one we saw on Friday, when we realised we were entering a new dimension,” Gironde prefect Sophie Brocas told journalists.

It is a miracle this pyrocumulonimbus-fuelled fire hasn’t claimed any casualties, Filippi says.

Sometimes the “fire-breathing dragon of clouds”, pyrocumulonimbus are typically generated by massive wildfires in the forests of North America, Siberia and Australia. They’ve spurred on infamous fires like the that killed 173 people in Australia in 2009 and the conflagration that in 2016. Canada’s record-breaking wildfires in 2023 142 of these storms.

In Europe, however, there have been only a handful of confirmed pyrocumulonimbus in Spain and Portugal, including one during Portugal’s devastating Pedrógão Grande fire in 2017, which destroyed hundreds of homes and killed 66 people. But that appears to be changing.

“You have to have two things happening at the same time: an extreme heat source and an unstable atmosphere that interacts with the fire,” says at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. “If… the heat from the fire increases, like it’s projected to increase from our studies, then yes, you should see more of these events.”

This firestorm begins to take shape when temperatures as high as 800°C send a plume of smoke into the sky. As the hot air rises and cools, water vapour condenses onto the ash to form pyrocumulus clouds, like the fluffy white clouds you might see on a summer day, only brown or grey.  

If the plume is hot enough and the atmosphere is unstable enough, the cloud can keep rising to reach the upper troposphere at 10,000 metres, the cruising altitude of a passenger plane. It sometimes reaches the stratosphere, as much smoke as a moderate volcano. It becomes a pyrocumulonimbus when the static electricity from colliding ice particles sparks thunder and lightning.

Although rain from the cloud often evaporates in the hot air, this kind of thunderstorm nonetheless creates its own weather system. The cloud’s updraft pulls in air, fanning the flames with winds reaching 160 kilometres per hour and accelerating the fire’s spread by up to five times, according to Filippi.

Meanwhile, strong downdrafts create erratic gusts that carry embers off to start new fires. Dozens of lightning strikes can blazes as far as 100 kilometres ahead of the main fire. It can also create fire tornadoes of twisting flames. As the winds, embers and lightning strengthen and expand the wildfire, it releases more heat and smoke, a feedback loop that can amplify the rising cloud for many hours.

Both wind shear higher in the atmosphere and erratic gusts at the ground can take the fire in unpredictable directions, making it nearly impossible to contain its acceleration or plan targeted evacuations.

“The fire front is constantly shifting. We cannot fight it directly. It’s a David-versus-Goliath scenario,” Eric Brocardi of the National Firefighters Federation of France local media about the Gironde fire on 2 August.  

Wildfire plumes have expanded in height since 2003 in the western US, creating more pyrocumulonimbus clouds, an increase that’s projected to continue.

Pyrocumulonimbus will have more chances to occur in Europe as well, as the fastest-warming continent experiences more extreme heat, such as the record-breaking heatwave in June, and wildfires. could also contribute, such as when a wet spring last year boosted vegetation growth on the Iberian peninsula, only for record summer heat to dry it out. This led to Europe’s worst-ever wildfires, including a in Spain.

“We need to adapt, so get prepared,” Filippi says. “Burn-proof and reduce the amount of fuel around your house.”

��’m terrified by how fast weather extremes are ramping up as the world heats up, and there’s much, much worse to come unless we leave fossil fuels in the ground. The only way to do that is to end our dependency on oil and gas – and all the fuss about whether the UK will allow more drilling in the North Sea is a distraction from this.

Some people talk about the UK government’s current policy of not approving more licences for exploration in the North Sea as if it will reduce the amount of oil and gas that is burned, and thus help limit how much more carbon dioxide ends up in the atmosphere. But it won’t. All it will do is change where the oil and gas that gets burned comes from.

What does matter is burning less fossil fuel. That means things such as getting more electricity from renewable sources, and more vehicles and heat pumps running on that electricity.

So I won’t be judging the climate credentials of the UK’s new prime minister, Andy Burnham, on whether or not his government decides to in the North Sea. It’s what is done to further reduce our use of fossil fuels that’s crucial in climate terms. And here Burnham has already made a good start by cutting the value-added tax (VAT) on electricity, which will make .

��’m not saying bans on drilling are a complete waste of time – they have a part to play in protecting vulnerable environments, such as the Amazon rainforest. But I don’t see how they will ever help limit emissions.

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At this point, you might be thinking, “but if enough countries ban drilling, it will make a difference”. There are already nearly 60 restrictions on fossil fuel production in 25 countries, . But many of these are regional restrictions to protect places such as the Arctic, or bans on production methods such as fracking. And 15 have already been repealed. No major producers are planning to completely stop producing oil and gas, and the known reserves of fossil fuels are way more than enough to trash the climate. The bottom line is that some countries will keep on churning out fossil fuels as long as they can sell them, so the key is to reduce demand, not supply.

That said, most of the arguments used by supporters of further North Sea gas and oil exploration . For starters, more drilling is not going to bring down energy prices in the UK. North Sea oil and gas is sold at global market prices, and there’s not enough oil or gas left in the North Sea to make a dent in those prices.

Going all out on renewables, by contrast, would break , and help bring down energy bills. This is what is Spain .

Another dubious claim is that more drilling is going to make oodles of money for the UK. But production in the North Sea already has to be supported by tax breaks and subsidies, and is declining year on year. of the oil and gas has already been extracted, so further drilling will, at most, slow the rate of decline. And what remains is harder to get out, so costs are higher. If the wars pushing up oil prices come to an end, it might not even be profitable – until recently, the world was building up .

Then there’s the exaggerated claim that North Sea gas is “four times cleaner” than imported liquid natural gas, or LNG. The emissions associated with producing LNG are around four times higher than those for North Sea gas, because of the energy required to liquefy it. But what matters are the total emissions, including those from burning the gas, and on this count .

LNG now accounts for . If that could be reduced by more North Sea gas production, there should be a little less CO2 emitted. It would also mean less money going to countries that obstruct climate action – the UK now gets 37 per cent of its gas from the US, for instance.

But the UK also gets gas from Norway via pipelines, and the production emissions of this are even lower than those of North Sea gas. So in climate terms, buying more Norwegian pipeline gas would be better than increasing North Sea production.

Overall, then, what happens in the North Sea just doesn’t matter much in the grand scheme of things – more drilling is neither a climate catastrophe, nor an economic panacea. Instead, the UK and other countries need to focus on what really matters – much more drastic action to replace fossil fuels or discourage their use. You only need to look at to see why it’s so vital.