The poignancy was unmistakable: prognosticators at Colorado State University amended their already miserable seasonal tropical cyclone forecast on Monday precisely as Hurricane Beryl was filling Houston’s streets with floodwater and knocking out power to more than 2m homes and businesses.

“A likely harbinger of a hyperactive season” was how CSU researchers characterized Beryl, which set numerous records on the way to its Texas landfall, including the earliest category 5 hurricane, strongest ever June storm, and most powerful to strike the southern Windward Islands.

In the Caribbean, the storm caused almost unprecedented destruction, and killed dozens from Grenada to the US.

With the six-month Atlantic hurricane season only six weeks old, and a monster storm such as those only usually seen in the later, peak months already in the books, climate scientists fear for what’s to come.

They also warn that nobody should be surprised about the eye-popping start to the 2024 season, or the rapid intensification of Beryl from a modest tropical storm into a deadly 165mph cyclone, because of “crazy” ocean heat that acts like rocket fuel for developing hurricanes.

“It’s a big wake-up call, certainly for folks in the US and throughout the Caribbean, that a greater risk for more extreme hurricanes is certainly there, and with warmer waters into the late spring we’re getting an earlier start to the hurricane season,” Brett Anderson, senior climate scientist with AccuWeather, told the Guardian.

“We’re seeing these types of storms developing very quickly, more so than 20 to 30 years ago, with all that warm water in place. Science has become really good with computer models forecasting the tracks of these storms, but intensity is still a challenge. Rapid intensification certainly we’re very concerned about, especially when these things get closer to the coast.”

It’s an old adage in hurricane season that it only takes one storm to make it an active season. On Monday, the team at Colorado state, one of the most respected in the forecasting business, predicted even more of them.

They now expect six major hurricanes with sustained wind speed above 111mph, and 12 hurricanes overall, before the season ends on 30 November.

In April, they predicted five major hurricanes from 11, both scenarios matching the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration prediction in May of a season well above the average of seven hurricanes and three major cyclones.

The meteorologists are confident that the alphabetical list of 21 names allocated when a disturbance becomes at least a 39mph tropical storm will be depleted this year for only the fourth time since 2005. Previously that had not happened since the naming convention began in 1950.

“We’re at well over a year now, probably 15 or so months of record breaking or close to record breaking ocean heat, and when I say close I mean comparing 2024 with 2023, so well above any previous year,” said Brian McNoldy, a climate scientist at the University of Miami.

“Obviously we have climate change acting on everything, it’s got its finger on this for sure. But it doesn’t totally explain the abrupt jump we saw in the spring of 2023 that hasn’t ended. There are other things going on.

“Last year, yes, we had these record-smashing warm ocean temperatures in the Atlantic, but we also started to get a stronger El Niño as the year went on, and all things being equal El Niño acts to reduce Atlantic hurricane activity.

“It probably did to some degree, but thanks to the ocean temperatures being so warm it ended up being an above average hurricane season anyway.”

Beryl, meanwhile, reinforced one often overlooked aspect of a coastal hurricane strike, the spawning of tornados and flooding far inland that can be equally as destructive and deadly. Beryl’s reach extended as far as New England, and caused fatalities in Texas, Louisiana, Vermont. AccuWeather’s initial estimate of economic loss in the US is up to $32bn.

“People need to be prepared for these kinds of storms,” said Matt Marshall, AccuWeather’s senior director for strategic projects.

“More die from water than wind in a hurricane, but people track storms by the wind speed. We use a real impact scale for wind, storm surge intensity, how much rain is going to fall and therefore how much flooding there’s going to be from rain, and it uses the overall economic impact expected by the storm to capture how much damage there’s going to be overall.

“We anticipated extended power outages in Texas, we anticipated the flooding rain coming up through the Great Lakes and into New England, we anticipated the potential tornado outbreak to the east and north of the storm track so things are pretty well aligned with what we forecast.”

As the frequency and intensity of storms continue to escalate, Marshall said, so will the cost.

“They’re causing more damage, the cost of materials has gone up, the cost of supply chains is going up,” he said.

“So when a hurricane comes in and knocks out power for days to areas and knocks out the supply chain, all of that’s going to have a downstream impact.”

Every day for the last two weeks, Johannes-Harm Hovinga has sat at a raised table in Museum Arnhem, using a two-hole page puncher to systematically perforate the 7,705-page sixth assessment report produced by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

He has printed it out on coloured paper and the result is a vibrant heap piling up at the artist’s feet.

Hovinga remains completely silent during each performance in the Netherlands-based museum. He drinks water, but doesn’t eat, with bathroom breaks his only intermission.

“We are at a crucial turning point in history,” says Hovinga, “where the consequences of climate change are becoming increasingly evident. Rising temperatures, extreme weather events, biodiversity loss and microplastics are just some examples of what our planet faces.”

The artist calls his living piece The Elephant in the Room. It is an artistic protest, meant to illustrate the lack of urgency by policymakers and global leaders. Hovinga believes in the power of creative expression to help raise awareness and persuade people to take a stand.

“The changing political landscape in Europe makes the work more relevant than ever. As humans, we are exhausting the Earth. Our current system of consumption is not sustainable. We need change, especially in our western world.

“For me, art and activism are symbiotic. The performance challenges each of us to confront our role in the climate crisis and encourages a renewed commitment to meaningful change.”

Hovinga’s artistic protest will last 20 days in total. By the end of it, he will have punched holes for 120 hours, at a physical and mental cost. “It’s getting harder to sit in silence concentrating on the same repetitive motion. I didn’t expect it to be so intense. After two days, my back, neck, elbows and wrists all started to hurt. I’ve been taking painkillers daily since the second week.”

Even so, he remains committed, accepting that change often comes with discomfort and sacrifice. For Hovinga, the most rewarding part is seeing the public reaction.

“Visitors have left me notes thanking me,” he says. “One day, two students from the art school next door waited until the museum closed so they could speak with me. I didn’t expect the reaction to be so positive. People see the layers of pain and are touched by it.”

However, Hovinga has had the odd negative response: “I’ve been called a WEF [World Economic Forum] puppet. Online, someone threatened to come and disrupt the performance. But that’s also fine because it still makes people reflect.”

Saskia Bak, the director at Museum Arnhem, says: “It’s crucial to showcase different perspectives on current topics, so we team up with artists not typically seen in museums. We highlight issues that are relevant in society, such as climate change. Johannes-Harm Hovinga’s performance fits perfectly.”

Of the audience reception, she says: “It’s been overwhelmingly positive. Some viewers get quite emotional during the performance, while others have applauded Hovinga for tearing up the nonsense that is the IPCC report.”

The hole-punching part of Hovinga’s art will wrap up on 14 July, after which the confetti installation will remain dispersed for two weeks. “After that, I will come back and clean in silence,” says Hovinga.

Having already staged a pilot version of Elephant in the Room for 11 days in 2022, during which he invited viewers to join him in the hole punching, the artist next plans to recreate the act during Cop29 in November.

In the long run, he hopes to take the performance across Europe, presenting his live art in museums and public spaces.

The Science Museum has been forced to cut ties with oil giant Equinor over its sponsor’s environmental record, the Observer can reveal.

Equinor has sponsored the museum’s interactive “WonderLab” since 2016, but the relationship is now coming to close, a move that will be seen as a major victory for climate change campaigners.

The London museum said that it was severing ties with the Norwegian state-owned energy giant over its failure to lower carbon emissions sufficiently to ensure it was aligned with the Paris Climate Agreement goal of limiting global warming to 1.5°C.

The sponsorship deal had been controversial because of Equinor’s role in Rosebank, the biggest undeveloped oil and gas field in the North Sea, which the government gave the go-ahead to develop last year.

The company also inserted a “gagging clause” in its original deal with the museum, which prevented staff from making comments that could be seen as “discrediting or damaging the goodwill or reputation” of Equinor.

Although the museum claimed that such clauses were reciprocal and standard in corporate partnerships, it has pledged to remove them in future.

In a statement, the Science Museum confirmed that Equinor’s sponsorship had “drawn to a close at the end of their current contract term”.

A museum spokesperson added: “The partnership concludes with our warm appreciation and with our ongoing encouragement to Equinor to continue to raise the bar in their efforts to put in place emissions reduction targets aligned with limiting global warming to 1.5°C.”

In emails disclosed under Freedom of Information legislation and shared with the Observer, Science Museum director Sir Ian Blatchford told Equinor that the company was in breach of the museum’s pledge to ensure its sponsors complied with the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement.

In other correspondence, the museum confirmed that sponsors in breach of climate commitments and unable to change course would be subject to gradual disengagement.

The move has added to pressure on the museum to cut ties with other fossil fuel sponsors, including the oil giant BP and the Indian coal-mining conglomerate Adani.

Last year the Church of England cut its fossil fuel investments after concluding no big oil and gas company was “aligned with the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement, as assessed by the Transition Pathway Initiative”.

The move is a major shift in policy by the museum, which has forcefully defended its relationships with oil and gas companies in the past. In 2019, Blatchford told the Financial Times that “even if the Science Museum were lavishly publicly funded I would still want to have sponsorship from the oil companies”.

Campaigners welcomed the decision to end the sponsorship. Chris Garrard, co-director of Culture Unstained, which has campaigned against the fossil fuel sponsorship of the Science Museum, said: “This is a seismic shift. After years of mounting pressure, the Science Museum has now adopted red lines on climate change which have led to Equinor being dropped.

“Yet rather than proudly telling the world that it took action because its sponsor was flouting climate targets backed by governments around the world, the museum continues to push the false narrative that its polluting sponsors are leading the energy transition.”

He added: “With BP also failing to align its business with Paris Agreement goals and Adani the world’s biggest private producer of coal, the museum must now hold these companies to the same standard and stop promoting their toxic brands.”

The move comes after the controversy surrounding investment manager Baillie Gifford and its ties to Israel and fossil fuel companies.

A campaign by Fossil Free Books led to Baillie Gifford ending funding for nine book festivals, including Edinburgh, Cheltenham and the Hay festival, which was the first to decline sponsorship after speakers began to boycott the event.

It was the moment when long-simmering media resentment at a seemingly opaque White House broke through the surface with startling intensity.

With Joe Biden’s candidacy teetering in the wake of last month’s alarming debate showing, journalists who had covered his presidency full-time for years suddenly asserted that it lacked that most basic political element: credibility.

The trigger was the revelation – disclosed in several news outlets – that a specialist in Parkinson’s disease had visited the White House eight times in as many months. The press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, was forced in a live televised briefing on to the defensive over a supposed lack of transparency.

“My first [question] to you is on the credibility of this White House when it comes to talking about the president’s health,” the Associated Press correspondent, Zeke Miller, asked Jean-Pierre, who, taken aback, responded by calling for “a little respect”.

The exchange quickly devolved into an angry back-and-forth over whether Jean-Pierre had given an accurate picture about the president’s health and her continuing refusal to confirm the name of the visiting specialist, despite it already being in the public domain. The White House ultimately clarified matters in a subsequent news release that confirmed the specialist as Kevin Cannard and explained that he had visited the White House in January to carry out the neurological part of Biden’s annual medical check-up.

Yet the flare-up went beyond one narrow episode.

Many journalists increasingly feel they have been bamboozled by a White House culture of denial and non-disclosure. People who pride themselves in holding power to account in the world’s leading democracy have been asking how they could have been so blinded to Biden’s diminishing state before it burst into the open so vividly on the debate stage in Atlanta.

At least some have reached the conclusion they have been misled by a campaign of obfuscation by White House staff – some of whom themselves privately complain of feeling deprived of access to the president that their seniority would normally have assured.

Wider staff access, the argument runs, could have given more people a clearer picture of whether Biden was in decline – which, in turn, would have created a higher chance of the true state of his functioning coming to light.

But Biden’s age-related decline was a media issue long before his disintegration at the debate, which the Biden campaign asked for partly in an effort to discredit such speculation. Little more than a week beforehand, widely circulating videos purporting to depict the president in varying states of confusion were reported in several respected outlets as tendentiously-edited “cheap fakes”.

“The evidence was there for people to see, and it’s somewhat disingenuous in the press corps to say, well, you know, we were kept in the dark,” said W Joseph Campbell, professor emeritus of communication of American University in Washington.

“Trump was ranting about Biden’s troubles and his gaffes in the 2020 campaign, so I think it depends on what outlets you were following. And to use a phrase the administration seems to be employing these days, this is a big-boy town and you find your news where you can – it doesn’t necessarily have to be ladled out to you by the White House press office.”

Yet those who did report the matter quickly found themselves rounded on by an outraged White House. When the Wall Street Journal published a 3,000-word front-page article in early June carrying detailed anecdotes that questioned Biden’s cognitive faculties, an administration spokesman, Andrew Bates, dismissed the stories as “false claims” made by Republicans.

The article – which has since been vindicated by reports in other US news sources, including the New York Times – was also attacked by the MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, a Biden supporter who later called on him to stand aside after the debate.

In a social media post showing that disquiet over Biden’s cognitive faculties was neither secret nor new, James Rosen, White House correspondent of the hard-right Newsmax outlet, recalled being ostracised after asking Biden in a press conference two and a half years ago about polling showing public concern about his perceived decline.

“When I asked Potus on January 19 2022, ‘with utmost respect for your life accomplishments and the high office you hold’, why the electorate harboured such profound concerns about his cognitive fitness, it was considered rude, and I was blackballed in briefings for eight months,” he wrote on X the day after the debate, accompanying his post with a transcript of the exchange.

Just as the whisperings over the president’s age and health have escalated into a roar, so too have the long-running tensions between the administration and the New York Times, which this week published its second editorial in 10 days urging Biden to end his campaign.

The calls have been in line with similar pleas from rival outlets but animus may have been sharpened by a lack of access to the president, keenly felt by an organisation that styles itself as America’s newspaper of record.

“The newspaper carries its own singular obsession with the president, aggrieved over his refusal to give the paper a sit-down interview that Publisher AG Sulzberger and other top editors believe to be its birthright,” Politico reported earlier this year.

Biden has given fewer press conferences and media interviews than any US president since Ronald Reagan, in what now looks like a deliberate strategy to conceal his deterioration. Trump – who has frequently denounced the media as “enemies of the people” – gave nearly three times more news conferences and interviews in office than Biden.

With a rash of hastily organised interviews and a high-profile news conference at Thursday’s close of the Nato summit, the administration is now trying to rectify that – a panicked tactical change which, if it results in more verbal flubs, may only serve to justify the previous approach.

It is an unintended irony that the White House has been shielding Biden from media accountability – a key component of the democratic process – and rubbishing questions over his age in an effort to maintain his credibility as a self-proclaimed defender of democracy and a bulwark against Trump’s authoritarian visions, which the administration insists is inimical to press freedom.

That circle, says Campbell, cannot easily be squared.

“It does seem to be in conflict with this greater goal as a protector or defender of democracy if you’re protecting the chief executive for an extended period of time, and then really criticising any attempts to pierce the veil.”

A proposed £1.2bn scheme to recycle effluent from the sewage system and turn it in to drinking water has been criticised as a threat to the environment and a potential costly “white elephant”.

Southern Water wants to treat effluent – wastewater from the sewage system – at a plant at Havant in Hampshire and pipe it into a nearby spring-fed reservoir to boost water supplies during droughts. The scheme would ensure less water is extracted from two rare chalk streams: the Rivers Test and Itchen.

It would be the first reservoir in the country to use recycled water derived from effluent to supplement its levels. Regulators says effluent recycling is successfully used overseas, providing plentiful and safe supplies, but campaigners say there are more environmentally friendly options.

Southern Water has been fined tens of millions of pounds in recent years for polluting rivers and coastal waters in Kent, Sussex and Surrey with sewage. Last week, Ofwat, the regulator, announced a proposed annual bill rise for Southern Water customers of 44%, or £183, by 2030.

The company’s proposed Hampshire water recycling project would deliver up to 90m litres of drinking water a day and is proposed to be operational by 2034. Southern Water is due to submit an application for a development consent order next year and says the scheme will keep “the taps and rivers” flowing.

Tracey Viney, an environmental specialist advising campaigners opposing the project, said: “This is not a sustainable solution. We get plenty of rainwater and should be developing schemes to store water that can be used in dry summers.”

Bill Cutting, a former director of Southern Water in the 1990s, said he was opposed to the scheme. “The costs are horrendous,” he said. “It’s a good idea if you’re living in a country where there is no water, but you can’t say the UK has no water.”

The Havant Thicket reservoir is the first large-scale reservoir to be built in the UK for more than three decades and is a collaboration between Southern Water and Portsmouth Water. It was given planning permission in 2021 and will hold about 8.7bn litres of water.

Southern Water lost about 108.5m litres of water a day in 2022-23 through leaks, according to most recent figures. Campaigners say the company should focus on reducing and repairing leakage.

Residents were told the reservoir, which is under construction, would be fed during the winter by underground springs. It is now proposed it is topped up with recycled effluent purified at a plant which would be built on a former landfill site at Havant.

Once purified under an energy-intensive process called reverse osmosis, the water would be piped to the reservoir and mixed with spring water. The rejected contaminated water would be pumped into the sea through a long sea outfall.

The water from the reservoir will be pumped about 25 miles to a treatment works at Otterbourne in Hampshire, where it would undergo further treatment to strict drinking water standards.

Viney said the scheme was intended to alleviate drought conditions, but Southern Water would operate it year-round to ensure the systems and pipework remained in good condition.

It would purify and pump about 30m litres of water a day, even during wet weather, to maintain the infrastructure, equivalent to the water held by 12 Olympic-size swimming pools.

Bob Comlay, who runs the Havant Matters website, which details community concerns, and who is also vice-chair of the Solent Protection Society, said construction work to build the plant on the former landfill site risked contaminating groundwater which would flow into the Solent. There are also concerns about the environmental impact on the marine ecology of rejected contaminated water discharged into the sea.

He said a Thames Water desalination plant which used the same technology had been mostly inactive since it was opened. “This is a vanity project,” he said. “It will be a white elephant.”

Tim McMahon, water director at Southern Water, said urgent action was required to provide increasing demand for water and to protect Hampshire’s chalk streams. Earlier this year, Southern Water admitted to discharging sewage into the River Test, a chalk stream famous for its trout fishing.

McMahon said: “More than 2.5bn extra litres of water a day will be needed in our region by 2050. [This project] will create a new safe and dependable source of supply that will help keep taps and rivers flowing.”

Southern Water says the impact of releasing reject water into the Solent is being investigated as part of its environmental impact assessment. It says the site of the proposed new plant at Havent will have “sustainable drainage features”.

Bob Taylor, chief executive of Portsmouth Water, said the firm was “consistently open and upfront” during the planning process about the potential supply for the reservoir of recycled water. He said Portsmouth Water was “proud to be building the first major new UK reservoir in over 30 years”.

Paul Hickey, managing director of the Regulators’ Alliance for Progressing Infrastructure Development, said: “We have allocated Southern Water £71m to further progress the development of the Hampshire water transfer and water recycling project.

“Water recycling is a safe, established method of water treatment. The technology is well tested elsewhere in the world. The scheme will need to go through a rigorous process before securing planning consent.”

For Anne-Marie Azevedo, 13 July 2022 started off like a normal day. Her brother David was staying with her while he got his life back on track after a period of unemployment. He was on the third day of a new job in construction and had been asked to work extra hours. Eager to make a good impression, David was up and out of the door first thing.

As she got ready for work later in the morning, Anne‑Marie thought David had mistakenly picked up her house keys, so she called him. She was reassured to hear that he sounded fine, despite the fact that the previous evening he had been exhausted and visibly unwell from the heat. France was in the grip of an intense heatwave, and he was working outside all day. David hadn’t taken the keys, so after a quick chat Anne-Marie got on with her day.

At 11.50am, she received a call from an unknown number. It was someone from the construction site saying that David was unwell and she needed to come and collect him. Anne-Marie immediately got into her car and drove the 10 minutes to the site.

Nothing had prepared her for what she saw. David was lying on the pavement, under a small tree – a patch of shade so small that part of his body was still in the sunlight. He was convulsing and drooling. No one was attending to him, and there were no medics to be seen. Anne-Marie screamed, and someone told her that an ambulance was on its way. “I didn’t understand what was happening,” she says. “I didn’t understand why my brother was like that, why they had called me, why they hadn’t called the emergency services first.” She is still haunted by the idea that the delay in medical treatment could have made a crucial difference.

Anne-Marie had no idea what was wrong with her brother, but she kicked into action. She works as a medical secretary and had some first-aid knowledge. She immediately removed his safety boots and socks, thinking – correctly – that he needed to cool down. She searched for water, which she says was not readily available. Someone handed her a bottle with a small amount in the bottom, and she used it to moisten her brother’s mouth. “I asked myself thousands of questions, but at the same time I tried to see if he was talking to me, if he was still conscious,” she says.

It was about half an hour before the ambulance arrived. One of the first things the paramedics did was to check David’s body temperature. It was 42C. He was in the throes of heatstroke. This is the most serious heat-related illness: it means that the body cannot control its temperature. As the temperature rises rapidly, the sweating mechanism fails and the body is unable to cool down. If treatment is delayed, the condition is fatal.

David was taken to hospital, where for hours doctors tried to save him. Just after midnight, he died. On his death certificate, the cause of death is written: “Cardiac arrest caused by severe hyperthermia”. David died because of the heat.

Anne-Marie is a small woman with dark brown hair, who speaks with firm clarity and wears her emotions on her face. This summer I visit her apartment in Clermont-Ferrand, a small city in central France nestled in the volcanic Chaîne des Puys region. It has been two years since David’s death – an event so sudden and shocking, and a loss so enormous, that Anne-Marie is still struggling to come to terms with it. Her home is full of painful reminders of her older brother. “This is where David spent his last days,” she says simply, gesturing at the small living room and the sofa where she found him asleep the night before he died.

We sit at her dining table and talk about happier times. Anne-Marie tells me that she, David and their middle brother, Eric, grew up in social housing in Brioude, a small town about an hour south of Clermont-Ferrand. The family didn’t have much, but they were close-knit, supportive and loving. “We chose to be together as much as possible,” she says. David was exceptionally generous. As a teenager, he would sometimes take food from the cupboard to sneak to friends whose families were struggling more than his own, or give away his clothes or shoes. “He was someone who loved people,” says Anne-Marie. “He never fought with anyone, he was never mean, he said hello to anyone who passed him on the street.”

When Anne-Marie was eight and David was 16, he left home to complete a qualification in masonry. He moved in with his girlfriend, but was always back and forth to his parents’ house. Anne-Marie remembers him poking his head round her bedroom door one evening. Thinking Anne-Marie was asleep, he told his girlfriend: “This is my little princess.” This continued into adulthood. “We called each other all the time; we were always together,” says Anne-Marie. “At one point he came over for lunch every day – he practically lived at my house.”

When Anne-Marie separated from her husband in 2009, she found herself socially isolated, with two young children. David, who never had children of his own, loved being an uncle. He stepped in, babysitting whenever Anne-Marie needed him, and introducing her to a new set of friends. “He helped me get my life back and flourish after divorce,” she says.

On 28 May 2022, David turned 50 and decided it was time to change his life. He was living in Brioude and had been out of work for a couple of years, drinking too much and struggling to break out of bad habits. He called Anne-Marie and told her: “I’m tired of life right now, and I want to start a new one.” David’s drinking was a taboo subject – he denied having a problem – and Anne-Marie was relieved to hear him talking about the future. “He realised that, at 50, he still had time to do a lot of things,” she recalls. “I was going to support him.”

The siblings hatched a plan. David – who had always worked in construction – would find a job in Clermont-Ferrand, staying with Anne-Marie until he’d saved up enough money to rent a place of his own. She lives in a modest two-bedroom apartment with her youngest daughter, Emma, who was 16 at the time. They agreed that David would take Emma’s room, and mother and daughter would share.

In June 2022, David signed up with Sovitrat, a major temp agency. As he was filling in the application forms and going to interviews, extreme heat swept across Europe, the first of several intense heatwaves that would hit the continent that summer. France was one of the worst-affected countries, with temperatures of 40-43C recorded in some places. The heat briefly let up, returning to summer averages as David got the good news: Sovitrat had found him a job in Clermont-Ferrand, working for the construction giant Eiffage. The contract was temporary, but the agency said that if all went well it could be extended until 2025. David was determined to make a good impression.

In July, David moved in with Anne-Marie, and a second, even more severe heatwave struck. It extended north to the UK, where temperatures surpassing 40C were recorded for the first time. France’s public health authority operates a colour-coded warning system for heatwaves: on 9 July 2022, they issued a red alert in Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, the region in which Clermont-Ferrand is situated. David’s first day of work was 11 July. Those most at risk in high temperatures are elderly people, young children, pregnant women, people with health conditions and outdoor labourers.

As climate change radically alters the world we live in, extreme heat in Europe is becoming an annual occurrence. According to Copernicus, the EU’s Earth observation programme, 2022 was at the time Europe’s hottest ever summer. (It has since been surpassed by the summer of 2023.) Intense periods of heat over the past few summers have caused wildfires in countries from Greece to France, led to parched riverbeds across the continent, and created issues with water supply.

Heatwaves also have a devastating effect on human health, typically causing a significant increase in deaths. But establishing which deaths are actually caused by the heat is not a straightforward process. The human body’s reaction to heat is complex: there is no set temperature at which heat is dangerous to human life; no specific limit to the time that can be safely spent outside. This is why one person might collapse and die in the heat, while another working alongside them might emerge unscathed.

Clermont-Ferrand is home to a large Michelin tyre factory, and David was working on the construction of a new truck depot, pouring a large concrete slab as a base. He worked in direct sunlight. Temperatures in Clermont-Ferrand soared to around 35C. That first day, David came home exhausted. He had no appetite, so he skipped dinner, took a shower and went straight to bed.

“I asked him, ‘Is there any shelter on the site?’” Anne‑Marie remembers. “He said there was no shade at all, just a little hut to eat lunch.” The next morning, he seemed better, and went to work as normal. Anne‑Marie didn’t think much of it. It had been a while since David had worked, so it was no surprise he was tired – and besides, she too was feeling the effects of the heat. Everyone was.

The second evening, David was clearly unwell. When Anne-Marie came home at 7.30pm, she found him asleep on the sofa. She roused him and prepared a salad, something light and fresh, to encourage him to eat. He told her that he had been asked to work overtime the next day – starting early and finishing late. Anne‑Marie was surprised. Every day, the news showed public health warnings about the need to stay hydrated and avoid being outside. “I told him, ‘It’s incredible to do overtime in these temperatures,’” she says. “But he said he was only a temporary employee and didn’t dare say no because he wanted to keep the job.”

When Anne-Marie recalls the events of 13 July 2022, her eyes fill with tears. “I relive that day very often,” she says. When the paramedics finally arrived at the construction site, they took David into the ambulance to provide treatment and get him out of the sun. When someone has heatstroke, their heart beats rapidly, trying to get blood to the skin to cool it. The heart can’t always keep up and, in the meantime, the other vital organs are starved of oxygen. Inside the vehicle, David had a cardiac arrest. He was transferred to intensive care at the hospital, where he was tested for Covid, as well as for alcohol and drugs in his system: all tests came back negative. For several hours, doctors tried and failed to lower his core body temperature. A quick response to heatstroke is vital.

Eiffage, the construction company running the site, disputes Anne-Marie’s account of the day David died, and says the site manager immediately took care of David, placing him in a lateral safety position and contacting emergency services. A spokesperson says: “All the preventive measures necessary to prevent heat-related risks were in place, in particular the provision of water on the site and the installation of a cooler on a generator as close as possible to the work area.”

Anne-Marie says she later found out that David had first felt unwell and fainted at 10.30am, over an hour before anyone on site called her, and nearly two hours before the emergency responders arrived. In hospital, he had a second cardiac arrest. He briefly came to his senses, and then deteriorated again. The doctor came to speak to Anne-Marie and told her that David’s organs were failing, one after the other. He said they would keep trying to treat him, but warned that he might not survive and that she should inform the rest of her family.

“What I was experiencing didn’t feel real,” says Anne-Marie. “I couldn’t comprehend that I spoke to my brother on the phone in the morning, and in the afternoon I was asking myself, ‘How am I going to tell my parents that my brother is going to die?’”

Anne-Marie’s daughter Emma was in Brioude visiting her sister Morgane when their mother rang to say their uncle was seriously unwell. They rushed to Clermont-Ferrand, taking their grandmother – David’s mother – with them. Anne-Marie’s father has his own health problems, so he and her brother Eric stayed behind in Brioude. The women arrived in the evening, joining Anne-Marie anxiously waiting at the hospital. Around 11pm, the doctor said that David’s situation was stabilising and they should go home and get some sleep. They had only got as far as the car park when Anne-Marie’s phone rang. It was the doctor, asking them to return immediately. Anne‑Marie and Morgane ran to find out what was going on, while Emma stayed with her grandmother outside.

Emma has never forgotten those moments. “My grandmother was screaming in the parking lot. She was in a state that I wouldn’t wish on anyone,” she says. “The pain crushed her as she realised she was going to lose her son.” Inside, the doctors told Anne-Marie that David was dying and it was time for the family to say their last goodbyes. Emma and her grandmother joined them inside the hospital. The doctors warned they might not recognise David because his face was so swollen. They each went into the room to say goodbye. Around midnight, David was pronounced dead. Emma recalls going in to see her uncle’s body after his death, and feeling that his body had gone cold. “I squeezed his left hand very tightly and I said to myself, ‘This will warm him up, he will come back.’ I kept repeating that to myself,” she says, and starts to cry. “I couldn’t understand why he was there, lying on this table – and how he went so quickly.”

A death like David’s, which happened as a direct result of exposure to heat, is unusual: more often, people die from heat placing a strain on their bodies and triggering another health issue. This means that it takes time to understand the death toll of a heatwave.

“Unlike other disasters, which are happening in real time, we only really know the true impacts of extreme heat weeks or months after the event itself – it comes from analysing death records, for instance,” says Julie Arrighi, associate director of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Climate Centre. “This is challenging from a risk communication perspective. With extreme heat, you end up talking about population-level statistics, which are harder to connect with.”

Nonetheless, those statistics are alarming: across Europe, people are dying in large numbers from the heat every summer. One study looking at excess mortality data across 16 European countries estimated that 70,000 people died due to heat in the summer of 2022. Italy was worst affected, with more than 18,000 heat-related deaths.

The increased risk to elderly people is due to the cardiovascular strain caused by extreme temperatures. But those with no choice but to be outside – homeless people, agricultural or construction workers – are also in more danger than the general population. The public health advice to stay indoors where possible, keep out of the midday sun, and avoid physical exertion is impossible for most labourers to follow.

“Fundamentally, illness related to heat is incredibly preventable. All you have to do is not overexpose someone and allow them to recover,” says Cora Roelofs, a professor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, who studies worker safety and the environment. “But workers are compelled to be in the heat. They have to work or they lose their livelihood. This speaks to a wider dynamic: power and money determine your vulnerability to climate change.”

A week after David’s death, José Antonio González, a street sweeper in Madrid, died of heatstroke after collapsing at work. He was 60, and like David was working on a temporary contract and determined to prove himself. His son told the Spanish newspaper El País: “I am convinced that he did not stop cleaning that street until he fainted. He thought his contract was not going to be renewed and he was giving his all to prove himself.”

There is a sad echo of this in the French public health insurer’s report into David’s death, which recorded Eiffage’s site manager telling investigators: “He was running everywhere. He wanted to prove that he was valuable to be kept.”

In her research on heat death in the US, Roelofs has found that it is common for workers to die in their first few days on the job, not just because of the physiological adjustment to heat exposure, but social factors.

“People don’t know their name, they feel like they can’t step out and say to a manager: ‘I don’t feel well.’ They don’t know where the water is, where the shade is, when it’s acceptable to slack off,” she says.

What is happening to outdoor workers is a concern for all of us. Back in 2014, Roelofs wrote a paper for the American Journal of Public Health in which she warned that workers are “the canary in the climate coalmine”: a warning of the health risks that are coming for the general population as extreme temperatures become the norm. “I wouldn’t use that phrasing now, because canaries were dispensable,” Roelofs tells me. “I’d say now that workers are the sentinels.”

Safeguards for workers are a major frontier in climate policy. Spain introduced a raft of new protections after the outcry that followed the death of González, including a requirement for employers to specifically risk assess for heat, prohibiting certain tasks in high temperatures, and making it mandatory to adapt work during a heatwave, with measures such as reducing or modifying work hours. But not all countries have taken such steps: in France, a “bad weather fund” is available for workers affected by storms or other adverse conditions, but it does not currently cover heatwaves.

“There’s basic good practice: shifting work schedules, frequent breaks, access to water, and training so that everyone can spot signs of heat stress – such as confusion – in their colleagues and administer immediate first aid,” says Arrighi. “But this is an area that absolutely needs strengthening. It’s a challenge that’s only going to get worse as temperatures increase.”

When David died, Anne-Marie didn’t know that it was not an isolated incident: Santé Publique France, the public health agency, would later release figures estimating that more than 2,800 people died in France in the heatwaves of summer 2022, with a significant proportion in the region around Clermont-Ferrand. At the time, the family was consumed by their own personal tragedy. Anne-Marie organised the funeral, handling the grim logistics that follow a death. (“My mother was very, very, very strong,” says Emma, who is now 18.) She was so busy, she barely had time to think, let alone to grieve. The whole family was anxious that people would think David had died because of his drinking, when in fact he was at a turning point.

“He died because he wanted to go back to work and it wasn’t because of alcohol, or being lazy, or anything like that,” Anne-Marie tells me. When she stood up to speak at his funeral, she addressed her brother: “You came to Clermont more determined than ever to take control of yourself, but unfortunately life has decided not to take this new path. Instead, eternal rest.”

The shock and grief of the early days soon gave way to anger. Sovitrat, the temp agency, sent the family flowers, but Eiffage, the construction company he had been working for, sent nothing. (When asked why, a spokesperson said: “Our teams were not aware of the family’s wishes, ahead of the funeral organised very quickly.”) A week after David’s death, Anne-Marie received paperwork from Eiffage. In it, the company denied any link between David’s death and his work on the construction site. Later, in an email to Sovitrat, Eiffage reiterated this, writing that David’s collapse and subsequent death were “simply the manifestation of a health problem totally independent of work”.

To Anne-Marie, this felt like an abdication of responsibility. When her brother died, his body temperature had been 42C. He had never had heart problems or other health conditions, and his death certificate stated that his cardiac arrest was caused by heatstroke. Had he not been working, David would not have spent three full days out in the sun, physically exerting himself. Anne-Marie thought of the lack of water, the overtime, the state she had found him in, convulsing and drooling in partial shade. She worried that if the company didn’t take responsibility, this could happen to someone else. “I can’t stand injustice,” she says. “I can’t stand when things aren’t taken seriously.”

That August, the French public health insurer l’Assurance Maladie conducted an administrative investigation, interviewing the site managers and Anne-Marie. The report concluded that David’s death should be deemed a workplace accident – not put down to a totally unrelated illness. Eiffage did not accept the finding. In March 2023, Anne-Marie’s lawyer filed a manslaughter case with the French public prosecutor against multiple parties, and followed this up in January 2024 with a complaint in Clermont-Ferrand. To date, they have heard nothing. Eiffage says they are still awaiting the insurer’s position on “which accidental event was the cause of Mr Azevedo’s discomfort”, and that they will comply if the prosecutor decides to open an investigation.

Anne-Marie doesn’t care about compensation.

“I would simply like the people who work for them to work in humane conditions,” she says. “They should have water, they should have reduced hours in the extreme heat, they should be taken care of quickly if they’re unwell.”

More than anything, the family craves information: what happened in that crucial hour and a half when David was taken ill? “I don’t understand why a company, when an employee doesn’t feel well, doesn’t call for medical help, doesn’t do first aid,” she says. They still don’t have answers, and sometimes it feels as if they never will. “I think about it all the time,” says Anne-Marie. “Will I get mail today? Will someone call to tell me the investigation has started?”

As they wait, they feel David’s absence keenly. When the family comes together, as they often do, they don’t talk about his harrowing and avoidable death, but about his life. The jokes they shared, his love of silly hats and cycling, the way he taught his nieces and nephews the value of respect and generosity. “We often talk about David, even if it hurts us,” says Anne-Marie. “We still try to make him live with us. But we constantly ask ourselves the questions: why, and for what?”

Around the world, extreme heatwaves are happening more frequently and hitting ever-higher temperatures. If we continue on our current trajectory, global temperatures will reach 2C above pre-industrial averages by the 2040s. One recent study in the Lancet predicted that if this happens, heat-related deaths will quadruple. This would take us into uncharted territory – and nowhere in the world is adapting fast enough to these rapidly changing temperatures to prevent deaths on a massive scale.

David’s loved ones all bear the trauma in different ways. His father rarely discusses the death, but goes to the cemetery to visit his eldest son’s grave every day. Since seeing her uncle swollen and dying in the hospital, Emma has suffered with sleep paralysis. Every time her phone rings with a call from a family member, she gets a jolt of panic that something awful has happened.

Anne-Marie used to love sitting in the sun, but now she is filled with a deep, bodily fear when the temperature rises. She stays inside as much as she can, and anxiously checks on her elderly parents, wishing she could afford to move them to a place with air conditioning. “Whenever they announce heat,” she says, “it scares me.”

Serena Williams has taken a swing at the Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker, saying women “don’t need” him after he controversially railed against Pride month, working women and abortion rights during a May graduation speech.

The 23-time tennis grand slam winner took aim at Butker while she was speaking on stage at the Excellence in Sports Performance Yearly (Espy) awards ceremony on Thursday alongside her sister, Venus Williams – the seven-time tennis grand slam winner – and the Abbott Elementary actor Quinta Brunson.

Venus Williams wrapped the segment by urging the audience “to go ahead and enjoy women’s sports like you would any other sports – because they are sports”.

Serena Williams then chimed in: “Except you, Harrison Butker. We don’t need you.”

With Butker in attendance, Brunson added: “At all, like ever.”

Butker earned widespread criticism – except among adherents to the US’s political right – over his 11 May commencement speech at Benedictine College, a Catholic private liberal arts school in Atchison, Kansas. He dismissed Pride month – which each year in June celebrates LGBTQ+ achievements – as a “deadly sin” and argued that some Catholic leaders were “pushing dangerous gender ideologies on to the youth of America”.

During the roughly 20-minute address, the three-time Super Bowl champion also claimed that the “most important” role for a woman to assume was being a homemaker.

Addressing the female graduates, Butker said: “Some of you may go on to lead successful careers in the world. But I would venture to guess that the majority of you are most excited about your marriage and the children you will bring into this world.”

Butker also said access to abortion – which most Americans favor despite the US supreme court’s elimination of it as a nationwide right in June 2022 – resulted from the “pervasiveness of disorder”.

The 28-year-old’s speech sparked a backlash that prompted the NFL to issue a statement distancing itself from his comments, saying they ran contrary to the pro football league’s “commitment to inclusion”.

Butker’s superstar teammates Travis Kelce and Patrick Mahomes publicly said they did not agree with him.

The placekicker later said he had some regrets about expressing his views, saying: “If it wasn’t clear that the timeless Catholic values are hated by many, it is now.”

Nonetheless, amid the fallout from his speech, US conservatives rallied around Butker and helped his jersey become one of the most sold at NFL.com.

US senator Susan Collins didn’t vote for her fellow Republican Donald Trump for president in 2016 or 2020 – and the third time will not be the charm.

The longtime moderate conservative from Maine told reporters on Friday that she intended to write in former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley’s name on the ballot in November. The move recalls 2016, when Collins said she wrote in then-US House speaker Paul Ryan for president over Trump, who won the White House before losing to Democratic rival Joe Biden in 2020.

Collins is the only New England Republican in Congress and the only Republican holding statewide office in Maine, where Trump has twice won an electoral vote. She said Friday that she is sticking with her endorsement of Haley despite the fact Haley will not be on the ballot.

“I publicly endorsed Nikki Haley, and I wanted her to win. She’s still my favorite candidate, and I think she could do a great job. She’s my choice, and that’s how I’m going to express it,” Collins told WMTW-TV.

Collins made the remarks about the election at an event in Limerick, about 34 miles west of Portland, where she was speaking at a ribbon-cutting for a new fire and emergency medical services station.

After the event, Collins spokesperson Annie Clark said the senator “has said this before”, including during a June television appearance.

During that appearance, on Spectrum News, Collins said she “does not support the Democratic nominee either” and supports “some of … Trump’s policies”.

However, she also said Trump’s style is “divisive at a time when our country is already so polarized”.

Collins was also one of seven Republicans who voted at an impeachment trial to convict Trump of inciting an insurrection after his supporters attacked the US Capitol on 6 January 2021.

Collins was elected to the Senate in 1996. She is the longest-serving Republican woman in the Senate, is often a key vote and is famous for not missing votes.

Collins is not on the ballot in 2024 and was most recently reelected in 2020, when she defeated Democratic challenger Sara Gideon.

She represents a state where Trump has twice lost the statewide vote – but he picked up one electoral vote because Maine is one of two states to apportion electoral votes by district.

Trump has many fans in rural Maine, which makes up most of the second congressional district.

One week into Alec Baldwin’s involuntary manslaughter trial, a New Mexico judge has dismissed the case against the actor and found that the state improperly withheld evidence.

In dramatic proceedings on Friday, Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer ruled in favor of the defense and agreed that the charges against Baldwin should be dropped with prejudice, finding that the state had concealed evidence that would have been favorable to the actor.

“There is no way for the court to right this wrong,” Sommer said.

The news was met with relief from Baldwin, who hugged his attorneys, and his wife, who could be seen crying as the judge issued her ruling.

The evidence in question was live rounds of ammunition turned over to New Mexico police in March, following Gutierrez-Reed’s conviction. That evidence suggested the live ammunition that made its way on to the set came from the prop supplier, rather than the film’s armorer, Baldwin’s attorney Alex Spiro said.

A witness confirmed to the judge on Friday afternoon that a special prosecutor in the case, Kari Morrissey, was directly involved in the decision to file the evidence in an entirely different case file separate from the other Rust materials.

The development in hearings Friday brings to a sudden end, at least temporarily, the ongoing criminal case against Baldwin over death of Halyna Hutchins on the Rust movie set. The 42-year-old cinematographer died after a gun Baldwin was holding during rehearsals fired a single live round of ammunition. Prosecutors have long said evidence shows that Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, the film’s armorer who was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in March, was the source of the live round.

The defense brought forward evidence during the trial that they said the state had “buried” regarding the live ammunition and where it originated, and on Friday asked the judge to dismiss the case.

A report of the interview was not included with the other Rust evidence nor shared with the lawyer of Gutierrez-Reed, Spiro said. Testimony from Alexandria Hancock, with the Santa Fe county sheriff’s office, revealed that she and other officials made the decision to file it separately from the other Rust evidence in an entirely different case file.

Morrissey earlier in the day said she had never before seen the report about the ammunition brought to the sheriff’s office. But as the judge questioned Hancock, the corporal said that Morrissey took part in the decision to keep the evidence separate from the Rust case – which elicited gasps in the courtroom.

Luke Nikas, one of Baldwin’s attorneys, said the report was relevant to the entire case and relevant to the credibility of witnesses who testified in the trial.

“If this evidence wasn’t as important as we say it is, they would have turned it over,” Nikas said.

In the morning, Morrissey had said the state had not violated its obligations and that the defense was aware of the evidence brought forward.

“This is a wild goose chase,” she said. “This has no evidentiary value whatsoever.”