Police in western Germany carried Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg and other protesters away Tuesday from the edge of an open coal pit mine where they demonstrated against the ongoing destruction of a village to make way for the mine's expansion, German news agency dpa reported. Thunberg was among hundreds of people who resumed anti-mining protests at multiple locations in the western German state of North Rhine-Westphalia a day after the last two climate activists holed up in a tunnel beneath the village of Luetzerath left the site. The German government reached a deal with energy company RWE last year allowing it to destroy the village in return for ending coal use by 2030, rather than 2038. Both argue the coal is needed to ensure Germany’s energy security that's squeezed by the cut in supply of Russian gas due to the war in Ukraine. But environmentalists say bulldozing Luetzerath will result in vast greenhouse gas emissions. Germany is expected to miss its ambitious climate targets for the second year in a row. Amid the heated coal debate in Germany, the European Union pushed forward on Tuesday with a major clean tech industrial project designed to boost its plans for a greener future as the 27-nation bloc pursues the goal of being climate neutral by 2050. Elsewhere in western Germany, dozens of climate activists glued themselves to a main street in Germany’s western city of Cologne and to a state government building in Duesseldorf. Near Rommerskirchen, a group of about 120 activists also occupied the coal railroad tracks to the Neurath power plant, according to police and RWE. Those who refused to leave the tracks were carried away, dpa reported. Read more: Teenage climate activist nominated for Nobel Peace Prize In addition, several people occupied a giant digger at the coal mine of Inden, while hundreds of other protesters joined a march near Luetzerath. The village itself was evacuated by the police in recent days and is sealed off. Once again, there were a few clashes with the police. Several activists ran over to the Garzweiler open pit mine, according to dpa. They stood at the brink of the open pit, which has a sharp break-off edge. Police said it was dangerous and people were prohibited from staying there. Thunberg had traveled to western Germany to participate in weekend demonstrations against the expanded mine and also took part in Tuesday’s protest near Luetzerath. Police in nearby Aachen said a group of around 50 protesters got dangerously close to the rim of the mine and did not want to leave despite being asked to do so. All the people in that group had to be carried away from the edge of the mine and were then temporarily held to determine their identities, police said. Photos from the scene showed Thunberg was one of those whom officers took away. One protester was able to enter the mine, RWE said, calling the move “very reckless,” dpa said. A police spokesman, who spoke on condition of anonymity as is customary in Germany, said he was not permitted to give out any details on Thunberg or any other individuals who participated in the protest due to privacy rules. Police and RWE started evicting protesters from Luetzerath on Jan. 11, removing roadblocks, chopping down treehouses and bulldozing buildings. Activists have cited the symbolic importance of Luetzerath for years, and thousands of people demonstrated Saturday against the razing of the village by RWE for the expansion of the Garzweiler coal mine.

Britain had its warmest year on record in 2022, official figures showed Thursday, the latest evidence that climate change is transforming Europe’s weather. The Met Office weather agency said the provisional annual average temperature in the U.K. was 10.03 degrees Celsius (50 Fahrenheit), the highest since comparable records began in 1884. The previous record was 9.88 Celsius (49.8 Fahrenheit) set in 2014. Met Office scientists said human activity — primarily fossil fuel emissions — has made such warm conditions vastly more likely. Britain's 10 hottest years on record have all been since 2003. “The results showed that recording 10C in a natural climate would occur around once every 500 years, whereas in our current climate it could be as frequently as once every three to four years,” said Met Office climate attribution scientist Nikos Christidis. Britain is not alone. France’s average temperature was above 14 Celsius (57.2 Fahrenheit) in 2022, making it the hottest year since weather readings began in 1900. Switzerland's meteorological service said the alpine nation's annual average temperature of 7.4 Celsius (45,3 Fahrenheit) was “by far the highest value since measurements began in 1864.” Spain also had its hottest year since records started in 1961, according to the national weather agency Aemet, with an average daily temperature of 15.4 Celsius (59.7 Fahrenheit). It said the four hottest years on record for the southern European country have all come since 2015. Read more: Dangerous heat predicted to hit 3 times more often in future Last year saw summer drought and heat waves across much of Europe, with the temperature in Britain rising above 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) for the first time on record. Norway’s Svalbard islands in the Arctic had their warmest summer in more than a century of record-keeping. The archipelago’s average temperature for June, July and August was 7.4 Celsius (45.3 Fahrenheit), the Norwegian Meteorological Institute said. Autumn brought more heavy rain in parts of Europe, including the mountainous Italian island of Ischia, where downpours in November triggered a massive landslide that pushed cars and buildings into the sea and killed at least a dozen people. Unlike the U.S. and Canada, which have been hit by bitter cold and snowstorms, much of Europe is experiencing unseasonably warm winter weather. In Germany, the year ended with the warmest New Year’s Eve on record, with temperatures reaching 20 Celsius (68 Fahrenheit) in the south of the country. Belarus, Belgium, Czechia, Latvia, Poland and the Netherlands all set national record daily highs for Dec. 31 or Jan. 1. As 2023 begins, many low and medium-altitude ski resorts in the Alps, the Pyrenees and other European ranges are suffering from a lack of snow. Read more: Weather, climate disasters hit millions, cost billions in 2022: UN In Bosnia, spring-like weather has foiled even artificial snow — either it’s too warm to make it, or it melts soon after being spat out onto the slopes. Along the slopes in Bjelasnica near Sarajevo on Wednesday, snow accumulation amounted to little more than several white patches on an otherwise grassy landscape of brown and green.

The Yellowstone National Park area's weather forecast the morning of June 12 seemed fairly tame: warmer temperatures and rain showers would accelerate mountain snow melt and could produce “minor flooding." A National Weather Service bulletin recommended moving livestock from low-lying areas but made no mention of danger to people. By nightfall, after several inches of rain fell on a deep spring snowpack, there were record-shattering floods. Torrents of water poured off the mountains. Swollen rivers carrying boulders and trees smashed through Montana towns over the next several days. The flooding swept away houses, wiped out bridges and forced the evacuation of more than 10,000 tourists, park employees and residents near the park. Read: Yellowstone National Park to partly reopen after floods As a cleanup expected to last months grinds on, climate experts and meteorologists say the gap between the destruction and what was forecast underscores a troublesome aspect of climate change: Models used to predict storm impacts do not always keep up with increasingly devastating rainstorms, hurricanes, heat waves and other events. “Those rivers had never reached those levels. We literally were flying blind not even knowing what the impacts would be,” said Arin Peters, a senior hydrologist with the National Weather Service. Hydrologic models used to predict flooding are based on long-term, historical records. But they do not reflect changes to the climate that emerged over the past decade, said meteorologist and Weather Underground founder Jeff Masters. “Those models are going to be inadequate to deal with a new climate,” Masters said. Another extreme weather event where the models came up short was Hurricane Ida, which slammed Louisiana last summer and then stalled over the Eastern Seaboard — deluging parts of Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York with unprecedented rainfall that caused massive flooding. The weather service had warned of a “serious situation” that could turn “catastrophic,” but the predicted of 3 to 6 inches (8 to 15 centimeters) of rain for New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania was far short of the 9 to 10 inches (23 to 25 centimeters) that fell. The deadly June 2021 heat wave that scorched the Pacific Northwest offered another example. Warmer weather had been expected, but not temperatures of up to 116 degrees (47C degrees) that toppled previous records and killed an estimated 600 or more people in Oregon, Washington state and western Canada. The surprise Yellowstone floods prompted a nighttime scramble to close off roads and bridges getting swept away by the water, plus rushed evacuations that missed some people. No one died, somewhat miraculously, as more than 400 homes were damaged or destroyed. As rock slides caused by the rainfall started happening in Yellowstone, park rangers closed a heavily-used road between the town of Gardiner and the park headquarters in Mammoth Hot Springs, Wyoming. It later washed out in numerous places. The rain and snowmelt was “too much too fast and you just try to stay out of the way,” Yellowstone Deputy Chief Ranger Tim Townsend said. If the road hadn’t been closed “we probably would have had fatalities, unquestionably,” park Superintendent Cam Sholly said. “The road looks totally fine and then it’s like an 80-foot drop right into the river," Sholly said. "No way if someone was driving in the rain at night that they would have seen that and could have stopped.” Rock Creek, which runs through the city of Red Lodge and normally is placid and sometimes just ankle deep, became a raging river. When the weather service issued a flood warning for the creek, the water already had surged over its banks and begun to knock down bridges. By the time the warning was went, “we already knew it was too late,” said Scott Williams, a commissioner for Carbon County, Montana, which borders Yellowstone. Red Lodge resident Pam Smith was alerted to the floods by something knocking around in her basement before dawn. It was her clothes dryer, floating in water pouring through the windows. In a scramble to save keepsakes, Smith slipped on the wet kitchen floor and fell, shattering a bone in her arm. She recalled holding back tears as she trudged through floodwaters with her partner and 15-year-old granddaughter to reach their pickup truck and drive to safety. “I went blank,” Smith said. “I was angry and like, ‘Why didn’t anybody warn us? Why was there no knock on the door? Why didn’t the police come around and say there’s flooding, you need to get out?’” Local authorities say sheriff’s deputies and others knocked on doors in Red Lodge and a second community that flooded. But they acknowledged not everyone was reached as numerous rivers and streams overflowed, swamping areas never known previously to flood. While no single weather event can be conclusively tied to climate change, scientists said the Yellowstone flooding was consistent with changes already documented around the park as temperatures warm. Read:Flood threat moves north as Sydney area emergency eases Those changes include less snowfall in mid-winter and more spring precipitation — setting the stage for flash floods when rains fall on the snow, said Montana State University climate scientist Cathy Whitlock. Warming trends mean spring floods will increase in frequency — even as the region suffers from long-term drought that keeps much of the rest of the year dry, she said. Masters and other experts noted that computer modelling of storms has become more sophisticated and is generally more accurate than ever. But extreme weather by its nature is hard to predict, and as such events happen more frequently there will be many more chances for forecasters to get it wrong. The rate of the most extreme rainstorms has increased by a factor of five, Masters said. So an event with a 1% chance of happening in any given year — commonly referred to as a “one in 100-year” event — now has a 5% chance of happening, he said. “We are literally re-writing our weather history book,” said University of Oklahoma Meteorology Professor Jason Furtado. That has widespread implications for local authorities and emergency officials who rely on weather bulletins to guide their disaster response approaches. If they’re not warned, they can’t act. But the National Weather Service also strives to avoid undue alarm and maintain public trust. So if the service's models show a only a slim chance of disaster, that information is likely left out of the forecast. Weather service officials said the agency's actions with the Yellowstone flooding will be analyzed to determine if changes are needed. They said early warnings that river levels were rising did help officials prepare and prevent loss of life, even if their advisories failed to predict the severity. Computer-based forecasting models are regularly updated to account for new meteorological trends due to climate change, Peters said. Even with those refinements, events like the Yellowstone flooding still are considered low-probability and so often won't make it into forecasts based on what the models say is most likely to occur. “It's really difficult to balance that feeling that you've got that this could get really bad, but the likelihood of it getting really bad is so small,” Peters said. He added that the dramatic swing from drought to flood was hard even for meteorologists to reconcile and called it “weather whiplash." To better communicate the potential for extreme weather, some experts say the weather service needs to change its forecasts to inform the public about low probability hazardous events. That could be accomplished through more detailed daily forecasts or some kind of color-coded system for alerts. “We've been slow to provide that information,” North Carolina State University atmospheric scientist Gary Lackmann said. “You put it on people's radars and they could think about that and it could save lives.”