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The climate crisis is upon us all but the president pursues more rollbacks. This election offers an existential choice

The air outside my window is yellow today. It was orange yesterday. The Air Quality Index is over 200. The Environmental Protection Agency defines this as a “health alert” in which “everyone may experience more serious health effects if they are exposed for 24 hours”. Unfortunately, the index has been over 200 for several days.

Related: Wildfires are striking closer and closer to cities. We know how this will end | Alastair Gee and Dani Anguiano

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How do physics and space travel inspire musicians? Award-winning producer Paul Epworth finds out.

Record-breaking wildfires are threatening thousands of acres of one of the most biologically diverse areas on the planet, Brazil's Pantanal region.

'Sometimes we are a bit frustrated, but we try to have hope and to rescue the few animals we can,' said 26-year-old vet Karen Ribeiro at one of the shelters, where rescue units and volunteers are bringing in animals including jaguars for evacuation

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‘Stop the world’ the musical hero said whenever things went wrong. I’ve been feeling this way for a few years now

• This is part of a series of essays by Australian writers responding to the challenges of 2020

The sense of time-slip begins during the summer megafires. Walking my children home from school in Sydney under a red sun I have the nagging feeling, beneath my anxiety, that I’ve seen this close orange light before. Then I remember. My father made our family nativity set out of pumpkin-coloured cardboard, topped with a skylight of red acrylic. The sideboard lamp cast the same uncanny glow on to baby Jesus and his shadowless entourage.

Three months later, in early March, my partner and I are driving the twins down the south coast through green dairy country to isolate from the coronavirus. “Does the sky seem particularly blue to you?” he asks as we look up the valley. “I’m having a ‘severe clear’ moment.” A dark joke between us: pilots used the term to describe a sky of perfect visibility on the morning of 9/11. With most planes cancelled, there are no bright contrails in the usually busy flight path above the escarpment. The air is alert and tender. It occurs to me that we haven’t seen a sky like this since our own childhoods, near the beginning of the Great Acceleration, when the indicators of human activity on the “planetary dashboard” began their upward surge.

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Celebrities hit back at move to brand protesters as part of ‘organised crime group’

Stephen Fry, Mark Rylance and a former Archbishop of Canterbury are among 150 public figures to hit back at government moves to classify the climate protesters of Extinction Rebellion as an “organised crime group”. In a letter to be published in the Observer on Sunday, XR is described as “a group of people who are holding the powerful to account” – who should not become targets of “vitriol and anti-democratic posturing”.

It comes in response to the prime minister and home secretary’s reported move to review how the group is classified in law after it disrupted the distribution of four national newspapers, including the Sun and the Daily Mail, last Saturday.

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The California governor, Gavin Newsom, said ‘this is not a world that anyone should be experiencing’ as he surveyed charred mountain terrain devastated by wildfires. ‘If you do not believe in science, I hope you believe in observed evidence,’ he added. More than 68,000 people are under evacuation orders in California where the largest fire in state history has burned over 740,000 acres in the Mendocino National forest

• Dozens missing in Oregon as historic fires devastate western US

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The fires raging in three states show that the climate debate "is over", California's governor says.

The climate crisis is a factor, but so are efforts to fight fires - which have had the opposite effect

We call them wildfires, but that might not be the right word any more.

In recent days, at least five whole towns have been destroyed by fire in Oregon. So has much of Malden, Washington, and swathes of Big Creek and Berry Creek, both in California.

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A daily summary of our news plus bite-sized updates from around the world.

The naturalist looks at the fragile state of the natural world and how human activity drives extinction.

A media watchdog analysis found that just 15% of broadcast news segments over a September weekend made the connection to climate breakdown

Most news coverage of the wildfires raging in California, Washington and Oregon on American TV channels made no mention of the connection between the historic fires and climate crisis, according to a new analysis from Media Matters

Reviewing coverage aired over the 5-8 September holiday weekend, the progressive media watchdog group found that only 15% of corporate TV news segments on the fires mentioned the climate crisis. A separate analysis found that during the entire month of August only 4% of broadcast news wildfire coverage mentioned climate crisis.

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EUAs rose to their highest all week on Friday, but then eased back to notch a 3.3% weekly rise as MEPs agreed to push for the higher climate ambition.

Compliance entities trimmed their California Carbon Allowance (CCA) positions by more than 1 mln for the second consecutive week as speculative holdings rose, according to US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) data published Friday.

The oneworld airline alliance pledged to achieve carbon neutrality by mid-century on Friday, with several major carriers joining other member companies that had already announced similar emissions goals.

A pair of California Carbon Offset (CCO) projects in the western US applied to transition into the state’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS), continuing a trend this year and going beyond dairy digesters located within the Golden State.

Germany will need to raise the costs under its domestic carbon pricing scheme for transportation and heating a second time in order to meet the more ambitious climate goals to be targeted by the EU, Economy and Energy Minister Peter Altmaier said Friday.

The EU will urge China to ramp up its climate policy in three areas at a high-level meeting on Monday, aiming to raise the ambition of the world’s largest-emitting country, EU officials said Friday.

Reneging on international deals does not put the UK in a good position to lead global initiatives in the run-up to UN climate talks

A decade ago, the writer and scientist James Lovelock despaired that the main obstruction to meaningful action to tackle the climate emergency was democracy itself. “Even the best democracies agree that when a major war approaches, democracy must be put on hold for the time being,” he told this newspaper. “I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as a war. It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while”. China’s claim to leadership in global green debates is rooted in the idea that only enlightened dictators can take a long view, overcome entrenched interests and force the required changes in societies. However, eco-authoritarians see democracy through a glass, darkly.

Dealing with humanity’s impact on the planet is not a war to be ended in a decisive victory. It is a constant struggle of adaptation and mitigation. The route lies not in suspending democracy but enhancing it. Time is short. Even reducing greenhouse gas emissions as fast as possible, we can barely keep temperatures below dangerous limits. The moment urgently requires the public to be instilled with a commitment to ecological values and a desire to act in the face of an existential challenge. That is why the UK’s first climate assembly is so important. It involved a group of 100 or so randomly selected UK citizens meeting and discussing with experts how the country should reach net zero emissions by 2050.

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The best of the week’s wildlife pictures from around the world, from mountain lion cubs in California to an orca with her new calf

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A little-known sub-sector of the EU carbon market could be behind a gradual decline in the participation in daily allowance auctions, experts say, as it lets abstaining traders “shadow” the sales and buy from brokers at prices linked to the outcome.