Friday, 17 July 2026

Philadelphia recorded its first-ever three-day stretch of temperatures of at least 101 degrees during the World Cup weekend, according to Inside Climate News.

Medics treated 18 people at the France-Paraguay match and at the FIFA Fan Festival in Fairmount Park on July 4, the city reported, with five more transported to nearby hospitals. More than 68,000 spectators attended the France-Paraguay game at Lincoln Financial Field, according to Inside Climate News.

Seven people died from heat-related causes in the city during the first week of July, according to the Philadelphia Health Department.

The city declared a heat health emergency on July 1, deploying sprinklers, water stations, cooling centers and a hotline for heat-related concerns. It opened more than 50 cooling centers for the emergency, many staying open through the evening.

The broader heat dome over the Northeast that caused the streak would have been "virtually impossible" without global warming, according to the scientific group World Weather Attribution.

Antarctica's west coast was missing a chunk of sea ice the size of France in June, according to Inside Climate News, which cited scientists' findings.

Ted Scambos attributed the shortfall to a strong wind pattern pushing warm air from the South Pacific into the western peninsula area of Antarctica, which is preventing ice from forming. He said the lack of ice along the coast is extremely unusual in the last 50 years or so of Antarctic record-keeping.

Despite the coastal loss, Scambos said Antarctica's total ice mass has stayed close to balanced for the last few years. He said extra accumulation south of South Africa has mostly offset losses elsewhere on the continent.

On the Thwaites Glacier, Scambos said ice loss is already underway and that models show a commitment to losing the ice. He characterized the situation as a doomed century or two rather than a doomsday.

A 2025 study estimates that more than 3 percent of the world's cropland, roughly 87 million hectares or 215 million acres, could be affected by saltwater intrusion, according to Inside Climate News.

Kate Tully, an associate professor of agroecology at the University of Maryland, described saltwater intrusion as the leading edge of climate change.

Tully and other researchers found that saltwater intrusion turned 20,000 acres of coastal farmland in Delaware, Maryland and Virginia into salt marshes between 2011 and 2017, according to Inside Climate News. The researchers put the estimated loss at $107.5 million per year in corn and $39.4 million in soybeans.

Researchers have recently counted more than 10 million dead trees in ghost forests along the U.S. Atlantic coast, where seawater intrusion has killed off woodlands, Inside Climate News reported.

The damage carries particular weight in Gambia, where agriculture accounts for a quarter of gross domestic product and 70 percent of employment, according to Inside Climate News.

Sixty-seven people who survived Super Typhoon Rai filed suit against Shell at the Royal Courts of Justice in December 2025, telling the court that decades of the company's emissions deepened the disaster and seeking compensation for the harm, according to Grist.

The storm, called Odette where it made landfall, reached 10.6 million people across the Philippines, left more than 400 dead, and pushed 1.4 million out of their homes, Grist reported.

According to the plaintiffs, Shell understood as far back as the 1960s that a warming climate threatened exposed communities, and understood how its own operations sharpened that threat.

The Sabin Center for Climate Change Law counted 3,099 climate cases filed as of mid-2025, with close to two-thirds originating in the United States. Setting the United States aside, Europe holds the largest slice at 32%, while Asia and Africa trail at 6% and 2% respectively.

South Korea's Constitutional Court struck down parts of the country's Carbon Neutrality Act in 2024, finding they did not safeguard the rights of future generations, Grist reported.

Malaysian youths brought their own suit in April against the government over deforestation, pressing the court to hold the country to its promise of keeping forest cover at 50% or above.