Sixteen environmental activists who were jailed for actions including stopping traffic, blocking an oil facility and splashing a van Gogh painting with soup went to a London court Wednesday to challenge their sentences.

The Just Stop Oil protesters say they received unduly harsh prison terms –- between 15 months and five years –- for disruptive but peaceful actions.

The Grammy Awards will look a little bit different this week.

Each year, the Recording Academy hosts a multitude of events to welcome the music industry during Grammy week and record labels do the same. However, many institutions have canceled their plans — Universal Music Group, Sony, Spotify, BMG and Warner Music Group among them — and instead are allocating resources to help those affected by the devastating Los Angeles-area wildfires.

Human-caused climate change increased the likelihood and intensity of the hot, dry and windy conditions that fanned the flames of the recent devastating Southern California wildfires, a scientific study found.

But the myriad of causes that go into the still smoldering fires are complex, so the level of global warming's fingerprints on weeks of burning appears relatively small compared to previous studies of killer heat waves, floods and droughts by the international team at World Weather Attribution. Tuesday's report, too rapid for peer-review yet, found global warming boosted the likelihood of high fire weather conditions in this month's fires by 35% and its intensity by 6%.

Economic losses from hurricanes and other natural disasters soared in the U.S. last year and were above average globally, reflecting another year of costly severe storms, floods and droughts.

Damage caused by Hurricanes Helene and Milton helped push total economic losses from natural disasters in the U.S. to $217.8 billion last year, according to insurance broker Aon PLC. That figure represents an 85.3% increase from 2023, when losses totaled about $117.5 billion. It's also the largest annual tally of economic losses from natural disasters since 2017.

Millions of people in Ireland and northern parts of the U.K. were urged to stay at home Friday as hurricane-force winds disabled power networks and brought widespread travel disruptions.

Forecasters issued a rare "red" weather warning, meaning danger to life, across the whole island of Ireland and central and southwest Scotland.

At least 242 million children in 85 countries had their schooling interrupted last year because of heatwaves, cyclones, flooding and other extreme weather, the United Nations Children's Fund said in a new report Friday.

UNICEF said it amounted to one in seven school-going children across the world being kept out of class at some point in 2024 because of climate hazards.

A record 47% of the European Union's electricity now comes from solar and other renewables, a report Thursday said, in yet another sign of the growing gap between the bloc's push for clean energy and the new U.S. administration's pursuit of more fossil fuels.

Nearly three-quarters of the EU's electricity doesn't emit planet-warming gases into the air — with 24% of electricity in the bloc coming from nuclear power which also doesn't release greenhouse gases, a report released by the climate energy think tank Ember found. This is far higher than in countries like the United States and China, where nearly two-thirds of their energy is still produced from carbon-polluting fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas.

Indonesian rescuers retrieved two more bodies after they resumed their search Wednesday for people missing after floods and landslides on Indonesia's main island of Java, bringing the death toll to 19.

Waters from flooded rivers tore through nine villages in Pekalongan regency of Central Java province and landslides tumbled onto mountainside hamlets after the torrential rains Monday.

Parched Southern California was forecast to face more dangerous winds on Wednesday but could get some badly needed rain this weekend, dampening the prospects of another round of killer wildfires though even a small amount of precipitation could could create new challenges like toxic ash runoff.

Los Angeles officials were preparing for that prospect even as a small number of residents were allowed to return to the devastated Pacific Palisades and Altadena areas and firefighters quickly controlled small blazes that broke out.

U.S. President Donald Trump has announced the United States' withdrawal from the Paris climate accord for a second time, a defiant rejection of global efforts to combat planetary warming as catastrophic weather events intensify worldwide.