A top official helping to oversee upcoming international climate negotiations hopes to prove critics wrong — and surprise them with a "course correction" for an ever-warming world.

But don't expect that big a turn.

Firefighters on Thursday were battling flames in Brazil's northeastern Bahia state, fanned by strong winds and abnormally high temperatures for the season, authorities said.

While it is still technically winter in Brazil, with spring due to start in a couple days, a heat wave prompting record temperatures has swept across much of the country since the beginning of the week.

Two tornadoes within hours killed 10 people and seriously injured four others in eastern China, state media said Wednesday.

The first tornado hit parts of Suqian city in Jiangsu province on Tuesday afternoon, state broadcaster CCTV said. It destroyed 137 homes and damaged crop land and pig farms. Five people died and four were injured.

The devastating storm that dumped torrential rains along the Libyan coast this month was up to 50 times more likely to occur and 50% more intense because of human-caused climate change, according to an analysis released Tuesday.

Before crossing the Mediterranean, the storm raged for four days and caused extensive damage in central Greece and parts of Bulgaria and Turkey, a region where such extreme storms are up to 10 times more likely and up to 40% more intense because of climate change, scientists said.

Trying to lessen climate change's sweeping impact, experts are hoping that attempts to improve the sputtering global public health system and sometimes-stalled efforts to curb global warming through collaboration can combine — and create a better system for handling the problem along the way.

Leaders of both the World Health Organization and the upcoming climate negotiations said that for the first time, they are going to devote a day during December climate talks to public health issues. By concentrating on how climate change is causing death and disease, they hope, nations may act more on the root cause: carbon pollution.

Sydney experienced its first total fire ban in almost three years on Tuesday and several schools along the New South Wales state coast to the south were closed because of a heightened wildfire danger, caused by unusually hot and dry conditions across southeast Australia.

Authorities have forecast the most destructive wildfire season during the approaching Southern Hemisphere summer in Australia's populous southeast since the catastrophic Black Summer fires of 2019-20 that killed 33 people, destroyed more than 3,000 homes and razed 19 million hectares (47 million acres).

German climate activists have sprayed orange paint onto Berlin's Brandenburg Gate to urge the German government to take more urgent action against climate change.

Members of the group the Last Generation used fire extinguishers filled with paint to spray all six columns of the popular landmark in Germany's capital. The group's priorities include getting Germany to stop using all fossil fuels by 2030 and take short-term measures, including imposing a general speed limit of 100 kilometers per hour (62 mph) on highways, to cut emissions more quickly.

Yelling that the future and their lives depend on ending fossil fuels, tens of thousands of protesters have kicked off a week where leaders will try once again to curb climate change primarily caused by coal, oil and natural gas.

But protesters say it's not going to be enough. And they aimed their wrath directly at U.S. President Joe Biden, urging him to stop approving new oil and gas projects, phase out current ones and declare a climate emergency with larger executive powers.

The warnings were clear but went unheeded.

Experts had long said that floods posed a significant danger to two dams meant to protect nearly 90,000 people in the northeast of Libya. They repeatedly called for immediate maintenance to the two structures, located just uphill from the coastal city of Derna. But successive governments in the chaos-stricken North African nation did not react.

Earth is exceeding its "safe operating space for humanity" in six of nine key measurements of its health, and two of the remaining three are headed in the wrong direction, a new study said.

Earth's climate, biodiversity, land, freshwater, nutrient pollution and "novel" chemicals (human-made compounds like microplastics and nuclear waste) are all out of whack, a group of international scientists said in Wednesday's journal Science Advances. Only the acidity of the oceans, the health of the air and the ozone layer are within the boundaries considered safe, and both ocean and air pollution are heading in the wrong direction, the study said.