Floods, heatwaves and wildfires - the daily diet of catastrophic climate-related news as the planet heats up provides a grisly backdrop to the upcoming science report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Its two-week meeting will culminate on August 9 with the release of the first major update on the physical science of global warming since 2013 - and it won't make light holiday reading.

"We are now observing climate change with our own eyes in ways we did not broadly before," says Corinne Le Quere, a climate scientist at the University of East Anglia and one of the report's authors.

At the request of governments, the IPCC has for the first time looked at the growing possibility of "black swan" events - low probability but high impact shifts, such as irreversible melting of major ice sheets that could lead to huge increases in global sea levels.

The report, the first in a series, is also expected to confirm that the world is not on track to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement and that holding global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times is now "very challenging".

With less than 100 days to go until the COP 26 climate talks in Glasgow in November, governments are being asked by co-hosts Britain and Italy, and the United Nations, to step up with ambitious-enough emissions-cutting targets to keep that 1.5C limit "alive".

Whether they will rise to the occasion remains unclear, with a G20 climate and energy ministers' meeting in Naples late last week failing to secure backing from big-emitting emerging economies for an early phase-out of coal power - which Britain says is key to sticking to 1.5C.

The longstanding thorn in the side of the talks is rich nations' failure to deliver a promised $100 billion a year in climate finance for developing countries from 2020, with pressure growing for a clear plan on when and how that money will come.

This will be essential to unlock progress at COP26, U.S. climate envoy John Kerry said in London last week, adding that his boss, Joe Biden, is committed to making it happen. Germany and Canada have now been tasked with finding a way forward.

Meanwhile, flood-hit communities in Germany, Belgium and China have been left with hefty clean-up bills. 

And homeowners could face an added financial strain in the years ahead as insurers move to hike premiums to reflect rising climate risks, with others forced to take on debt to repair the damage.

This and other threats have sparked debate about how to share the costs of disaster response and protection more fairly across society.

Under a new state bill in California, a "revolving" fund would be set up to provide soft loans for coastal cities like Richmond to buy seaside properties threatened by rising seas, and then rent them back to the owners or tenants for as long as they remained habitable.

And as climate change and gaps in forest management create more intense and deadly wildfire seasons, firefighting resources are increasingly stretched to the limit.

To help deploy them more effectively, technology experts are building AI tools to bring the latest in machine learning, big data and forecasting to the world of firefighting, reports our correspondent Avi Asher-Schapiro.

"This is about reducing the uncertainty, and helping firefighters make better decisions," says Brad Pietruszka, a fire manager at the San Juan National Forest in western Colorado.

Even if we do manage to avoid busting through 1.5C, the impacts we're already seeing at 1.2C of warming mean more such solutions are urgently needed to keep us safe. 

See you next week,

Megan

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