The commercial race to get tourists to space is heating up between Virgin Group founder Sir Richard Branson and former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. On July 11, Branson ascended 80 km (49 miles) to reach the edge of space in his piloted Virgin Galactic VSS Unity spaceplane, while Bezos’ autonomous Blue Origin rocket launched today on July 20, coinciding with the anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing. Although Bezos launched later than Branson, he set out to reach higher altitudes — about 120 km, or 74 miles.

As temperatures rise and pollution increases, wildfires, floods and extreme winds have battered many parts of the world in the last six months

By all accounts, the climate crisis is already here. Deadly heat domes across the Pacific Northwest, a petroleum pipeline leak in the middle of the ocean that set the Gulf of Mexico on fire, and the deadly floods in Germany and Belgium in the past few weeks alone have proved that the world is changing in response to how we have changed it.

Madrid is building a green wall around the city: a 75-kilometre urban forest with nearly half a million new trees.

Climate change is driving a large increase in intense, slow-moving storms, a new study by Newcastle University and the Met Office has found. Investigating how climate affects intense rainstorms across Europe, climate experts have shown there will be a significant future increase in the occurrence of slow-moving intense rainstorms. The scientists estimate that these slow-moving storms may be 14 times more frequent across land by the end of the century.

Need proof that climate change is real, and caused by human emissions? Read on.

Scientists believe climate disruption will bring more extreme weather, and humans are making things worse

The government of Greenland has decided to suspend all oil exploration off the world's largest island, calling it "a natural step" because the Arctic government "takes the climate crisis seriously."

More than a billion marine animals along Canada’s Pacific coast may have died last week as a result of the record-breaking temperatures in British Columbia. The unprecedented heat wave that hit western Canada and the north-western U.S. saw temperatures soar to record highs in late June and early July, killing as many as 500 people and triggering hundreds of wildfires, mainly in British Columbia.

Cutting emissions more urgent than ever, say scientists, with forest producing more than a billion tonnes of carbon dioxide a year

It's stupidly hard to get TV to pay attention to the most important story of our lifetime.

Researchers worry that female dragonflies may no longer recognize their male counterparts.

Jeffrey Sachs writes that America still has a chance to save itself from the dangers of climate change. President Joe Biden's plans to build a new 21st-century infrastructure based on renewable energy, electric vehicles, and other zero-carbon technologies is on the right course -- provided the nation can overcome corporate greed and a broken political system.

Nights on average are heating up faster than days in most parts of the United States — a trend caused by climate change, according to the 2018 National Climate Assessment Report, newly cited by the New York Times.Why it matters: Last month was the hottest June on record for the U.S., and more than 1,500 areas of the country logged new record-high overnight temperatures toward the end of the month.Get market news worthy of your time with Axios Markets. Subscribe for free.Abnormally high nighttime

On the climate crisis and other hyperobjects

After recording the country’s highest ever temperatures of 49.6C, the town of Lytton in British Columbia, Canada, burst into flames. Residents had minutes to flee a “wall of fire” with nothing but the clothing on their backs. Like people in many other places in the world struggling with heatwaves, fires, droughts and strange extreme storms, BC residents now know what it feels like to live in a changing climate on an increasingly inhospitable planet.

We do not know how much climate change will cost us. Yet that cost is the ‘externality’ missing from fossil fuel prices (Gollier 2021), which needs to be incorporated by either taxing or capping carbon emissions (as in the EU Emission Trading System). Plausible assumptions about that cost could justify carbon prices anywhere from a few dollars to hundreds of dollars per tonne.

The long read: The effects of ‘weird weather’ were already being felt in the 1960s, but scientists linking fossil fuels with climate change were dismissed as prophets of doom

Environmentalists in recent days have expressed outrage over the eight-year prison sentence handed to Jessica Reznicek — a nonviolent "water protector" who pleaded guilty to damaging equipment at the Dakota Access Pipeline in Iowa — while calling the fossil fuel companies who knowingly caused the climate emergency the real criminals who should be held to account.

Planting extra trees to combat climate change across Europe could also increase rainfall, research suggests. A new study found that converting agricultural land to forest would boost summer rains by 7.6% on average. The researchers also found that adding trees changed rainfall patterns far downwind of the new forests.