The Guardian

We are losing in the fight against global warming, it is time to put effort into controlling what we pump into the atmosphere

The havoc unleashed by Hurricane Milton provided unambiguous evidence that we are entering a critical and alarming new phase in the planet’s climate crisis. Rising fossil fuel emissions have triggered increases in ocean temperatures and sea levels to such an extent they are generating some of the most destructive storms ever experienced in Florida. Together with Hurricane Helene earlier, the lives of about 250 people have been claimed and thousands of homes destroyed. Florida has been left reeling and forecasters have warned there is more to come – a lot more.

It is a grim prognosis that should be galvanising Florida’s political leaders into taking urgent action to protect the state. Extraordinarily, this has not been the case. Despite the intensification of hurricanes and worsening flooding over the past decade, governor Ron DeSantis has consistently rejected the idea that global warming poses a threat to Florida or that the phenomenon exists at all. A few weeks ago, he signed a law erasing the words “climate change” from state statutes and effectively pledged the state’s future to burning fossil fuels. Such behaviour is disturbing.

Party donor Dale Vince warns that urging homeowners to switch to clean-power technology risks political storm bigger than Ulez

The government risks a huge political backlash if it keeps pushing the public to install heat pumps to replace their boilers, one of Britain’s leading green entrepreneurs has warned.

Dale Vince, a major Labour donor and renewable energy advocate, called on Keir Starmer to rethink national programmes, championed by Boris Johnson, pushing the technology. Vince argued that Whitehall should explore alternatives to the devices, which he said were expensive, caused serious disruption and could end up increasing energy bills for some people.

50,000 people sign petition against creation of channel for river water through Ferris Meadow Lake

A freshwater lake that attracts more than 30,000 swimmers a year is under threat of closure from an Environment Agency (EA) plan to reduce flooding that will channel in polluted river water, according to campaigners.

Almost 50,000 people have signed a petition calling on the EA and Surrey county council to reroute the flood channel away from the lake, which is a site of nature conservation. But the EA and Surrey council seem likely to press ahead with the 50-metre wide channel, bisecting the lake and feeding river floodwater into its centre.

More than year’s worth of rain fell in two days in south-east Morocco, filling up lake that had been dry for decades

Dramatic pictures have emerged of the first floods in the Sahara in half a century.

Two days of rainfall in September exceeded yearly averages in several areas of south-eastMorocco and caused a deluge, officials of the country’s meteorology agency said in early October. In Tagounite, a village about 450km(280 miles) south of the capital, Rabat, more than 100mm (3.9 inches) was recorded in a 24-hour period.

The best of this week’s wildlife photographs from around the world

The supposedly green project – brainchild of the previous Tory government – will increase emissions, not reduce them

This will be Keir Starmer’s HS2: a hugely expensive scheme that will either be abandoned, scaled back or require massive extra funding to continue, after many billions have been spent. The government’s plan for carbon capture and storage (CCS) – catching carbon dioxide from major industry and pumping it into rocks under the North Sea – is a fossil fuel-driven boondoggle that will accelerate climate breakdown. Its ticket price of £21.7bn is just the beginning of a phenomenal fiscal nightmare.

There might be a case for a CCS programme if the following conditions were met. First, that the money for cheaper and more effective projects had already been committed. The opposite has happened. Labour slashed its green prosperity plan from £28bn a year to £15bn, and with it a sensible and rational programme for insulating 19m homes.

George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

Some Florida residents rode out Hurricane Milton despite evacuation orders, staying in their homes after the second major hurricane in two weeks. Milton slammed into Florida as a category 3 storm, killing at least 10 people, spawning tornadoes and leaving more than 3 million homes and businesses without power

• All our Hurricane Milton coverage

• A visual guide to Milton's damage

The man was aboard a fishing vessel that became disabled off Madeira Beach, Florida, hours before Hurricane Milton made landfall, a Coast Guard press officer says. The man was able to radio the Coast Guard in nearby St Petersburg before contact was lost

• Deaths expected to rise as Florida begins to assess Hurricane Milton destruction

Conservation trust says Boki ‘not out of the woods’ yet but doing well after operation to drain buildup of fluid

A brown bear that underwent brain surgery in the first operation of its kind in the UK is doing well but is “not out of the woods” yet, a charity has said.

Boki went under the knife on Wednesday after an MRI scan revealed he had hydrocephalus, a buildup of fluid in the brain.

Climate change deniers such as Florida’s Ron DeSantis lament the impact of such events but won’t acknowledge the underlying problem

The preparations for Hurricane Milton were on a mammoth scale, as the clean-up will be. The storm thankfully lost some of its force before it slammed into Florida, making landfall on Wednesday night as a category 3 hurricane. But many more lives would surely have been lost without the massive evacuation and the deployment of thousands of national guard troops and personnel from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

This was the second direct hit on the state in less than a fortnight, after Hurricane Helene, which killed at least 225 people in the US. The hotter ocean temperatures which worsened these storms are hundreds of times likelier because of human-made global heating, a new analysis has shown. Climate change may have increased the rain dumped on parts of the south by Helene by 50%, scientists believe. Another study has suggested such double punches could arrive every three years thanks to the continuing burning of fossil fuels.

Shimmery cellulose-based alternative looks safer for soil than conventional microplastics, Australian-led research finds

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Even before Taylor Swift donned “glitter freckles”, the sparkly stuff was prolific – sold in tiny vials at craft shops, and sprinkled on to a variety of products from clothing to Christmas decorations, cards and makeup.

Glitter ends up everywhere: in the environment as well as the carpet.

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Wheat haul in England estimated to be down by 21%, with Britain’s wine producers also hit hard

England has suffered its second worst harvest on record – with fears growing for next year – after heavy rain last winter hit production of key crops including wheat and oats.

The cold, damp weather, stretching from last autumn through this spring and early summer, has hit the rapidly developing UK wine industry particularly hard, with producers saying harvests are down by between 75% and a third, depending on the region.

As average population falls reach 95% in some regions, experts call for urgent action but insist ‘nature can recover’

Global wildlife populations have plunged by an average of 73% in 50 years, a new scientific assessment has found, as humans continue to push ecosystems to the brink of collapse.

Latin America and the Caribbean recorded the steepest average declines in recorded wildlife populations, with a 95% fall, according to the WWF and the Zoological Society of London’s (ZSL) biennial Living Planet report. They were followed by Africa with 76%, and Asia and the Pacific at 60%. Europe and North America recorded comparatively lower falls of 35% and 39% respectively since 1970.

Large, cattle-like tauros will shape landscape and strengthen wildlife as huge, extinct herbivore once did

A herd of beefy, long-horned tauros are to be released into a Highlands rewilding project to replicate the ecological role of the aurochs, an extinct, huge herbivore that is the wild ancestor of cattle.

The tauros have been bred in the Netherlands in recent years to fill the niche vacated by the aurochs, which once shaped landscapes and strengthened wildlife across Europe.

Our leaders may prefer complexity because it means they can defer taking action – but doing something about emissions reduction or slow wage growth is actually not that complex

After spending any time analysing policy you quickly realise that politicians expend a supreme level of effort to avoid doing the obvious, and instead they do complex things that neither solve a problem nor appease their opponents.

For politicians, the problem with clarity is that it demands action. Complexity provides safety because action can more easily be avoided. And so the obvious and clear are painted as “extreme”, while the complex is regarded as “mature”.

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Milton, which fluctuated in intensity as it approached Florida, was a category 3 hurricane as it made landfall.

'It will continue to move across central Florida throughout the night and into the early morning hours,' said Florida governor Ron DeSantis.

• Hurricane Milton

With clean air projects receiving just 1% of aid, activists say nations ‘cannot continue polluting practices at expense of climate stability’

Foreign aid for fossil fuel projects quadrupled in a single year, a report has found, rising ​​from $1.2bn in 2021 to $5.4bn in 2022.

“This shocking increase in aid funding to fossil fuels is a wake-up call,” said Jane Burston, CEO of nonprofit the Clean Air Fund, which conducted the research. “The world cannot continue down this path of propping up polluting practices at the expense of global health and climate stability.”

Climate disasters risk pulling society apart. To survive we need solidarity – and only one ticket in the US election offers that

Even as the good people of Florida’s west coast pulled the soggy mattresses from Helene out to the curb, Milton appeared on the horizon this week – a double blast of destruction from the Gulf of Mexico that’s a reminder that physics takes no time off, not even in the weeks before a crucial election. My sense is that those storms will help turn the voting on 5 November into a climate election of sorts, even if – as is likely – neither Kamala Harris nor Donald Trump spend much time in the next 25 days talking about CO2 or solar power.

That’s because these storms show not only the power of global heating (Helene’s record rains, and Milton’s almost unprecedented intensification, were reminders of what it means to have extremely hot ocean temperatures). More, they show what we’re going to need to survive the now inevitable train of such disasters. Which is solidarity. Which is something only one ticket offers.

Prof Pedro Arrojo-Agudo says regulator Ofwat ‘complacent’ about water firms putting their shareholders before public

The privatised English water system has been singled out for criticism by the UN special rapporteur on the human right to clean water.

Prof Pedro Arrojo-Agudo said water systems should be managed as a publicly owned service, rather than run by private companies set up to benefit shareholders.

The mining tycoon says his iron ore business will stop using fossil fuels by the end of the decade without carbon offsets or carbon capture and storage

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About $45 trillion of global business revenue is covered by corporate “net zero emissions” pledges but iron ore billionaire Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest thinks the whole net zero thing is “fantasy”.

“Now is the time to walk away from net zero 2050, that hasn’t been anything really but a con to maintain fossil fuels,” Forrest said last week.

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