The Guardian

We should be celebrating the revival of the bluefin tuna – but a ravenous fishing industry, backed by government and ‘science’, is already licking its lips

Over the past three weeks, I’ve been watching one of the greatest natural spectacles on Earth, here in south Devon. At a certain station of the tide, within a few metres of the coast, the sea erupts with monsters. They can travel at 45mph. They grow to 2.5 metres (8ft 2in) in length and 600kg in weight. They herd smaller fish – saury and garfish in this case – against the surface, then accelerate into the shoal so fast that they overshoot sometimes 2 or 3 metres into the air. Bluefin tuna. They are here, on our southern coasts, right now.

When I’ve mentioned this on social media, some people refuse to believe me: you must be seeing dolphins, they say. Yes, I often see dolphins too, and it’s not hard to spot the difference. They don’t believe it because we have forgotten that our coastal waters were once among the richest on Earth. Bluefin and longfin tuna were common here. So were several species of whale, including sperm, fin, humpback and Atlantic grey, and a wide range of large sharks. Halibut the size of barn doors hunted the coastal shallows. Cod reached almost 2 metres in length, haddock nearly a metre, turbot were the size of tabletops, oysters as big as dinner plates, shoals of herring and mackerel were miles long.

George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

Why are so many settler Australians haunted by this almost mythical bird? Why?

• Sign up here to get an email whenever First Dog cartoons are published
• Get all your needs met at the First Dog shop if what you need is First Dog merchandise and prints

Footage shows bin and debris fired into street after items wrongly placed in residential bin were crushed

A crew of refuse workers in north London narrowly escaped injury when combustible items that had been packed into a bin exploded after being loaded into a refuse truck.

Footage shows the moment of the explosion, caused after combustible items such as batteries, aerosol or gas canisters were wrongly placed into a residential bin.

England’s recycling rate decreased in 2022 as rest of UK improved but country still lags behind Europe

Just 44% of UK household waste is being recycled, government statistics show, as the recycling rate in England is going down instead of improving.

The UK recycling rate for waste from households was 44.1% in 2022, the latest year the government had data for, down from 44.6% in 2021.

It’s that time of year when homes fill with hairy eight-legged monsters. At least they keep the flies under control …

It is giant spider season and I am delighted. As someone who is ravaged by flying insects all summer, I welcome these eight-legged death machines into my home with open arms. Speckle-backed Tegeneria? Be my guest! I would far rather something that looks like an animated tomato stalk occasionally scuttled across my curtain than be beset by a swarm of fruit flies, bluebottles or midges. I have even heard that spiders might eat clothes moths, although I think for them to have a significant impact on numbers I would have to lean even further into my Miss Havisham alter ego and stroll around bedecked by webs.

I wasn’t always this way. As a child, I was as terrified of spiders as I am today by droughts and unfiled tax returns. I would watch in amazed horror as my country-born mother picked up arachnids the size and heft of dogs and calmly threw them out the window. There were whole cupboards I refused to open for fear of spiders. Once, after accidentally walking into a web during a game of hide and seek, I actually vomited at the thought of a spider being close to my skin (they found me quite quickly after that).

On my return to the UK from Brazil I’ve seen how northern latitudes are behaving like the equatorial margins

Returning to British suburbia from the Brazilian Amazon is always disconcerting, but it has been doubly weird in the past few days because the London commuter belt has been inundated with volumes of rain that normally belong in the tropics.

Mini-tornadoes, flash floods and the dumping of a month’s worth of rain in a single day have flooded transport hubs, high street pubs, and the shrubs of semidetached homes.

Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough!

It isn’t fit for humans now,

Loved-up brown bears and whispering raccoons feature in this light-hearted look at a selection of finalists from the Nikon Comedy Wildlife awards. A winner will be announced on 10 December

Carbon Brief says more than £800m will need to be spent in each of the next two years

The UK government has been failing to meet its commitments to fund nature protection in the developing world, and will need to double current spending to meet the targets, new data has shown.

Underspending on overseas climate aid by the previous Conservative government has meant spending averaged £450m a year for the three full years since 2021 – less than half the £3bn that was pledged for nature projects in poor countries.

So far there are no costings and no details on what type of reactors there would be, their size or who would build them

• Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast

Usually you need a few genuine releases under your belt before you start putting out “greatest hits” albums, but when it comes to spruiking nuclear this hasn’t stopped Peter Dutton.

This week, the opposition leader gave a speech that some hoped – perhaps naively – would add some more detail to the Coalition’s scant policy proposal to build nuclear reactors at seven sites around Australia.

Sign up for Guardian Australia’s breaking news email

Letter says technologies to produce blue hydrogen and capture CO2 are unproven and could hinder net zero efforts

Leading climate scientists are urging the government to pause plans for a billion pound investment in “green technologies” they say are unproven and would make it harder for the UK to reach its net zero targets.

Labour has promised to invest £1bn in carbon capture, usage and storage (CCUS) to produce blue hydrogen and to capture carbon dioxide from new gas-fired power stations – with a decision on the first tranche of the funding expected imminently.

Lock the UK into fossil fuel production for generations to come.

Result in huge upstream emissions from methane leaks, transport and processing of liquefied natural gas (LNG) from the US.

Rely on carbon capture and storage (CCS) during the production of hydrogen – technology they say has been abandoned in the vast majority of similar projects around the world.

Pose a danger to the public if there are any leaks from pipes carrying the captured carbon. At least 45 people had to be taken to hospital after a leak in the US.

How does a massive coal push lasting decades line up with what it has pledged? Leaders of low-lying Pacific nations might appreciate some answers

• Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast

The most obvious point to make about Tanya Plibersek’s approval of three coalmine expansions on Tuesday is the most important. The potential climate impact is substantial, and far beyond anything else we have seen approved so far by the Albanese government.

Labor has been criticised for its support of new fossil fuel developments before, but the four coal developments it had backed prior to this were relatively small. They are expected to add about 156m tonnes of heat-trapping carbon dioxide to the atmosphere if fully developed.

Nine climate protesters have stopped a coal train headed to the Port of Newcastle in opposition to the federal government’s approval of three new mining projects. Rising Tide, the group behind the move, said in a statement that the three projects – Whitehaven Coal’s Narrabri thermal coal project to 2066, Mach Energy’s Mount Pleasant thermal coal project to 2058 and Yancoal’s Ashton coal project to 2064 – would create 1.4bn tonnes of emissions

• Tanya Plibersek approves three coalmine expansions in move criticised as ‘the opposite of climate action’

Until the government changes its stance on the environment and the war in Gaza and Lebanon, there is nothing to celebrate

On Monday morning, we walked into the main hall of Labour’s annual conference in Liverpool, before the keynote speech of the chancellor, Rachel Reeves. What we did next, you might have seen.

Shortly after Reeves began her address, two of us stood to speak out on Labour’s complicity in suspected Israeli war crimes, and the party’s ties to climate-wrecking corporations. We were there on behalf of Climate Resistance, a group campaigning to end the cosy relationship between politics and the fossil fuel industry. Just like arms manufacturers, oil companies have been guilty of hindering democratic processes with donations and lobbying, putting human lives on the line for their own profits.

Jack McGinn is a climate activist with Climate Resistance

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

Appointee was a climate chief at the World Bank and will lead UK’s return to high-level environmental diplomacy

• Who is Rachel Kyte, the UK’s new climate envoy?

A former climate chief of the World Bank has been appointed to lead the UK’s efforts to forge a global coalition on climate action, the Guardian can reveal.

Rachel Kyte, who previously served as special representative for the UN and a vice-president of the World Bank, will take up the role of climate envoy to lead the UK’s return to the front ranks of global climate diplomacy.

When sighting rates for basking sharks are high they are low for minke whales, says monitoring programme

The highest ever recorded numbers of minke whales and the lowest number of basking sharks were observed in the Hebrides in 2023, according to a report.

The latest findings of the 20-year monitoring programme by the Hebridean Whale and Dolphin Trust suggest a possible association between these two highly mobile and long-lived species. When sighting rates for basking sharks are high, they are low for minke whales, and vice versa.

Researchers find climate crisis aggravated the four days of heavy rainfall and deadly floods

• ‘We’re getting rid of everything’: floods destroy homes and lives in Czech Republic

Planet-heating pollution doubled the chance of the extreme levels of rain that hammered central Europe in September, a study has found.

Researchers found global heating aggravated the four days of heavy rainfall that led to deadly floods in countries from Austria to Romania.

Narrative that transition has stalled ‘demonstrably not true’, researcher says, but investment and construction must accelerate

• Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates
• Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast

Large-scale renewable energy investment and construction in Australia is rebounding this year after a slump, but will need to accelerate to reach the pace needed to meet the Albanese government’s goal for 2030.

The country could add more than 7 gigawatts of renewable energy capacity this year, up from 5.3 GW last year, according to data released by the Clean Energy Regulator.

Amaga pseudobama was first spotted in 2020 in North Carolina and has now spread to Florida and Georgia

A new species of invasive flatworm has been discovered in the United States and has been found in several states in the south, according to a new paper.

The species, named Amaga pseudobama, was discovered by an international team of researchers and first spotted in 2020 in North Carolina. It is thought to be native to South America.

‘It’s like time-travelling,’ says Dr Rebecca West – ‘we’re reversing and going back to what it would have been like 200 years ago’

• Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates
• Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast

Quolls and bettongs delivered to the far north-west corner of New South Wales are the final piece of a decade-long project to reintroduce seven locally extinct mammals to the arid desert landscape.

Twenty burrowing bettongs and 20 western quolls have been released into Sturt national park as part of the Wild Deserts project. They joined previously released and flourishing populations of bilbies, bandicoots and mulgaras (a small but ferocious native predator).

Sign up for Guardian Australia’s breaking news email

Exclusive: council issues advisory as investigation begins and documents reveal estimates of PFOA emissions

People living near a chemicals plant in Lancashire have been told to wash and peel vegetables from their gardens before eating them, while an investigation into potential contamination of soil in the area with a banned toxic chemical gets under way.

The chemical PFOA, one of the PFAS family of about 15,000 chemicals, does not break down in the environment and last year was categorised as a human carcinogen by the World Health Organization. It is also toxic to reproduction and has been linked to a range of health problems such as thyroid disease and increased cholesterol.