The Guardian

World’s largest lizard moves from vulnerable to endangered on IUCN red list of threatened species

The komodo dragon, the world’s largest lizard, is threatened with extinction as rising water levels driven by the climate crisis shrink its habitat, according to the latest “red list” update.

Endemic to a handful of Indonesian islands, the komodo dragon lives on the edge of forest or in open savannah, rarely venturing higher than 700 metres above sea level. Rising water levels are set to affect 30% of its habitat in the next 45 years, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which has changed its status from vulnerable to endangered.

Power outages from the storm have left air quality tracking systems out of commission, making public health concern hard to gauge

Behind a playground littered with downed tree branches, Shell’s refinery in Norco, Louisiana spewed black smoke from its stacks. The smell of rotten eggs, the signature scent of sulphur emissions, lingered in the air. In an effort to burn off toxic chemicals before and after Hurricane Ida, many industrial facilities sent the gases through smoke stacks topped with flares.

But the hurricane blew out some of those flares like candles, allowing harmful pollution into the air.

Guardian investigation finds 17 MPs, candidates or associations took out 50 ads criticising a clean air zone

Conservative councillors, MPs and local associations have vocally opposed measures to clean up air pollution, often in opposition to government policy, a Guardian investigation has found.

Transport decarbonisation is one of the government’s “priority action areas” at the upcoming Cop26 global climate talks. However, cities in the UK have been slow to adopt clean air zones, schemes that deter the use of older, more polluting vehicles and incentivise cleaner forms of transport. Only three cities currently operate a CAZ.

Organisers say showing people they are not alone in their fears is key to instigating climate action

Kathy Kilmer tried bringing up the climate crisis twice at a recent dinner party, but it didn’t go well. Guests quickly turned the conversation to other topics.

“I just feel awful bringing it up,” said Kilmer, a retired conservation group communications director from Denver, Colorado. “And yet, I feel like talking about it is absolutely key to getting people to understand it.”

A small team of ecologists and scientists are working to find new ways to bolster populations of Australia’s endangered native animals

Emmanuel Macron tells IUCN World Conservation Congress ‘there is no vaccine for a sick planet’

The world’s biggest biodiversity summit since the start of the pandemic has opened in the French port city of Marseille with a warning from Emmanuel Macron that “there is no vaccine for a sick planet”.

Speaking at the opening of the IUCN World Conservation Congress, the president echoed warnings from leading scientists that humanity must solve ongoing crises with climate and nature together or solve neither, urging the world to catch up on preventing the loss of biodiversity.

Critics pillory the companies for cynical expressions of sympathy while continuing to block climate solutions

Major oil companies are being pilloried on social media for sending “thoughts and prayers” to victims of Hurricane Ida while sidestepping their role in the ongoing climate disaster.

At least two ExxonMobil outposts – from Beaumont and Baytown, Texas – tweeted the message on Monday, using the hashtag #LouisianaStrong. It didn’t take long for Twitter users to call out the company for its tone-deaf response, noting that Exxon’s own internal research program predicted catastrophic climate change decades ago.

Sixty doctors, nurses and other health professionals have staged a die-in protest outside JP Morgan’s Canary Wharf headquarters in London to highlight the bank’s investment in fossil fuels.

The demonstration on Friday was organised by Doctors for Extinction Rebellion and was part of a two-week series of XR protests against organisations supporting fossil fuels

• Doctors stage XR die-in outside JP Morgan offices in London

The best of this week’s wildlife pictures, including a Hermann’s tortoise, some award-winning cheetahs and an airlifted cow

Sixty medical professionals including nurses hold protest to highlight fossil fuel investments

Sixty doctors, nurses and other health professionals have staged a die-in protest outside JP Morgan’s Canary Wharf headquarters in London to highlight the bank’s investment in fossil fuels.

The protest on Friday was organised by one of Extinction Rebellion’s groups, Doctors for Extinction Rebellion. The climate activist medics said this was their biggest protest so far and that JP Morgan was the biggest funder of coal, oil and gas extraction.

Newcrest Mining has been fined $105,000 over the 2018 attack, in which the woman was bitten by a pair of dingoes

Workers heard a female employee scream when she was attacked by dingoes at a West Australian mine site in 2018, leaving her with “wounds to multiple parts of her body” and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Newcrest Mining has now been fined $105,000 over the July 2018 attack at its Telfer gold and copper mine in the Great Sandy desert in the Pilbara region, WA’s mining regulator said in a statement.

• ‘Planet cannot handle more stress from oil and gas production’

• Announcement came as Gulf states battered by Hurricane Ida

Outrage and at least one lawsuit has followed the Joe Biden administration’s announcement this week that it would open tens of millions of acres in the Gulf of Mexico for oil and gas exploration in an effort to comply with a court order.

Earthjustice, a non-profit public interest organization, has filed a lawsuit on behalf of four environmental groups in Washington DC federal court challenging the move. They alleged that the environmental analysis behind the auction is flawed and violated federal law.

Warming sea and shifting food sources drive whales into areas where they risk ship strikes and entanglement in fishing gear

Climate change-induced warming in the Gulf of Maine has resulted in the population of the North Atlantic right whale to plummet, leaving the species critically endangered and conservationists desperate for safeguards, according to a study published this week in the journal Oceanography.

Related: Cape Cod: eight great white sharks seen feeding on humpback whale carcass

Chris Stark urges Treasury to speed up pace of decarbonisation strategy ahead of Cop26 summit

The UK’s top climate adviser has pushed back strongly against “defeatist” criticism that the country’s net zero target is expensive, and urged the Treasury to pick up the currently “incremental” pace of decarbonisation.

Chris Stark, the chief executive of the Committee on Climate Change (CCC), urged the debate over net zero to be framed in a more positive light: “It can be done,” he said. “It is worth it … I hope we can move away from thinking about the cost and see it as a mission to modernise the economy.”

Arctic change increased chances of tightly spinning winds above North Pole, authors say, boosting chances of extreme weather

The climate crisis has not only been leaving deadly heatwaves and more destructive hurricanes in its wake, but also probably creating extreme winter weather events, according to a new report released on Thursday by the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s journal Science.

Related: ‘Fire weather’: dangerous days now far more common in US west, study finds

Environmental demonstrators disobey orders to stay away from London financial district

Dozens of Extinction Rebellion activists have carried out a mass act of non-violent civil disobedience by breaking bail conditions ordering them to stay away from the City of London financial district.

The activists joined with hundreds of supporters in a low-key rally outside the Bank of England on Thursday afternoon, listening to speeches from a mobile sound system.

It shudders

The writer Jenny Diski is on her way to Antarctica. At Grytviken, an abandoned whaling station on South Georgia, she spots a “grey, jellied mountain”.

“Elephant seal is one of those euphemistic names humans give creatures who remind them of what they don’t want to be reminded of,” she writes. But her fellow travellers want to be reminded: they take pictures. Maybe the elephant seal will get a spot on someone’s wall. It will be the first time in history that a person has chosen to decorate using that face.

Deaths and damage spanned huge areas in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Connecticut and Maryland

At least 18 people have been killed in New York and the wider US north-east as the remnants of Hurricane Ida brought unexpected levels of heavy rain and flooding.

The deaths and damage spanned huge areas in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut and Maryland. Officials blamed many of the fatalities on basement apartments becoming filled with water.

The expansion of drylands is leaving entire countries facing famine. It’s time to change the way we think about agriculture

• David R Montgomery is professor of geomorphology at the University of Washington, and author of Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations and Growing a Revolution: Bringing Our Soil Back to Life

This summer’s record-setting heatwaves and dramatic fires in southern Europe and the American west were stark reminders that the climate crisis has arrived. But as the world warms, there is also a quieter, lesser-known crisis unfolding underfoot. Desertification, long seen primarily as a threat to developing nations, is coming for Europe and North America too, as worsening droughts bake soils already degraded by conventional farming and grazing practices.

In Spain, for example, about a fifth of all land is now at high risk of desertification, as is much of the agricultural land across Italy, Greece, and western North America.

It’s media malpractice not to mention that burning fossil fuels drives extreme weather events like Hurricane Ida

The climate emergency is exploding in various parts of the world this week, but climate silence inexcusably continues to reign in much of the United States media.

Hurricane Ida has left more than a million people in Louisiana without running water, electricity, or air conditioning amid a heat index topping 100F. The Caldor fire destroyed hundreds of houses and forced mass evacuations around Lake Tahoe in California. Abroad, vast swaths of Siberia were ablaze while drought-parched Madagascar suffered what a United Nations official called the first famine caused entirely by climate change.