The Guardian

State officials report ‘unprecedented’ deaths due to starvation as pollution and algal blooms take toll

More manatees have died already this year than in any other year in Florida’s recorded history, primarily from starvation due to the loss of seagrass beds, state officials have said.

The Florida Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission reported that 841 manatee deaths were recorded between 1 January and 2 July, breaking the previous record of 830 that died during the whole of 2013 because of an outbreak of toxic red tide.

When Unesco recommended the reef be placed on the ‘in danger’ list, the Coalition’s response was to shift the blame. We must do better

• Unesco recommends reef world heritage site be listed as ‘in danger’
• Timeline: decades of damage and Australia’s fight to stop ‘in danger’ listing

Escaping responsibility has become the recurrent theme of the Morrison government. Whether it is the glacial progress of the vaccination rollout, dealing with the megafires two summers ago, or the parlous state of the Great Barrier Reef, someone else is always to blame.

When Unesco released its recommendation to the World Heritage Committee in June to place the Great Barrier Reef on the “in danger” list, the first reaction of the federal government was to blame China.

Exclusive: Environment officials raised concerns that damage to habitat on Robbins Island could be difficult to offset

A proposed new windfarm on Robbins Island off north-west Tasmania could threaten a disease-free Tasmanian devil population, according to federal environment officials, who say the damage to habitat could be difficult to offset.

Correspondence obtained by Guardian Australia under freedom of information laws shows officials raised concerns that no comparable habitat existed anywhere else to compensate for the effects the project could have on the island’s unique devil colony, which is considered a stronghold for the survival of the species.

The Delta variant is rattling markets. But the temptation to soothe them with quantitative easing must be resisted

Falling share prices. Investors piling into the safe haven of bonds. Rising infection rates of the Delta variant of coronavirus. The events of the past week have demonstrated one thing clearly: this isn’t over yet.

A couple of months ago the way out of the crisis looked clear. Immunisation programmes were allowing developed countries to remove restrictions on activity. A pick-up in growth was expected to continue without interruption. Rising government bond yields were seen as a sign of life returning to normal.

Wildlife officials in Montana stake out chicken coop visited by same grizzly that fatally mauled camper

A grizzly bear that pulled a California woman from her tent and killed her has been fatally shot by wildlife officials, who used night-vision goggles to stake out a chicken coop it had also raided near the small Montana town of Ovando.

They shot the bear shortly after midnight on Friday when it approached a trap set near the coop about two miles from Ovando where 65-year-old Leah Davis Lokan of Chico, California, was killed on Tuesday, said Greg Lemon with Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks.

The world was watching as a judge formalised into law a government’s duty of care to protect under-18s from the climate crisis

At about 9.30am on Thursday morning, 17-year-old Melbourne school student Anjali Sharma was walking her two-year-old kelpie-cross dog Maya down to the creek when the notifications started buzzing on her phone.

“I was getting updates from the lawyers in the court,” says Sharma, who as we speak is about to take another call from a journalist at the Times of India.

Capturing stunning rock climbing images requires a specialised set of logistic, physical and artistic skills. In this episode of Art of Photography,  internationally renowned climbing photographer Simon Carter outlines some of the techniques he has used to capture some of the world’s most spectacular rock climbing photographs of the past 25 years

• From Devil’s Tower to the Grampians: Simon Carter’s rock climbing photography – in pictures
• More from Guardian Australia's Art of Photography series

Company has been issued with a huge fine but those affected by its actions are finding it hard to celebrate

• Southern Water fined £90m over sewage
• Timeline: privatisation to pollution fines

The town of Whitstable sits on the north Kent coast, home to the oysters that have brought it worldwide fame from waters that are some of the most protected in Europe.

Celebrities, royals, tourists and locals flock to its annual festival to taste the native Whitstable oyster. But in 2013 the pollution in the sea where the famous oysters feed was so extreme that the Prince of Wales, the Duchess of Cornwall and other high-profile guests had to be served Irish shellfish hastily imported for the occasion.

Privatised firm dumped billions of litres of raw sewage off north Kent and Hampshire coasts to avoid costs and penalties

• Timeline: from privatisation to pollution fines
• ‘The sea was milky white’: how the scandal unfolded

Southern Water has been fined a record £90m for deliberately dumping billions of litres of raw sewage into protected seas over several years for its own financial gain.

Mr Justice Jeremy Johnson, sentencing the privatised water company, said it had discharged between 16bn and 21bn litres of raw sewage into some of the most precious, delicate environments in the country.

The best of this week’s wildlife pictures, including a hungry hippo, coot chick and mother and basking turtle

Harmful PFAS chemicals are being used to hold food, drink and cosmetics, with unknown consequences for human health

Many of the world’s plastic containers and bottles are contaminated with toxic PFAS, and new data suggests that it’s probably leaching into food, drinks, personal care products, pharmaceuticals, cleaning products and other items at potentially high levels.

It’s difficult to say with precision how many plastic containers are contaminated and what it means for consumers’ health because regulators and industry have done very little testing or tracking until this year, when the Environmental Protection Agency discovered that the chemicals were leaching into a mosquito pesticide. One US plastic company reported “fluorinating” – or effectively adding PFAS to – 300m containers in 2011.

Researcher accidentally spots tiny insect walking on the underside of the water surface as if it were a pane of glass

An Australian beetle has been observed walking upside down along the surface of water – the first instance that such behaviour has been visually documented.

The tiny aquatic beetle, about 6mm to 8mm in length, has been recorded scuttling along the undersurface of a pool of water in New South Wales.

The Australian beetle, about 6mm to 8mm in length, was discovered by a PhD student while researching frogs in the Watagan Mountains of New South Wales. The unidentified species is believed to belong to the Hydrophilidae family of beetles, commonly known as water scavengers

Politicians must respond to the latest warnings that climate science has underestimated risks

Last week’s shockingly high temperatures in the northwestern US and Canada were – and are – very frightening. Heat and the fires it caused killed hundreds of people, and are estimated to have killed a billion sea creatures. Daily temperature records were smashed by more than 5C (9F) in some places. In Lytton, British Columbia, the heat reached 49.6C (121F). The wildfires that consumed the town produced their own thunderstorms, alongside thousands of lightning strikes.

An initial study shows human activity made this heat dome – in which a ridge of high pressure acts as a lid preventing warm air from escaping – at least 150 times more likely. The World Weather Attribution Group of scientists, who use computer climate models to assess global heating trends and extreme weather, have warned that last week exceeded even their worst-case scenarios. While it has long been recognised that the climate system has thresholds or tipping points beyond which humans stand to lose control of what happens, scientists did not hide their alarm that an usually cool part of the Pacific northwest had been turned into a furnace. One climatologist said the prospect opened up by the heat dome “blows my mind”.

Commission imposes €875m fine for breaching antitrust rules by delaying cleaner emissions technology

The EU has fined Volkswagen and BMW €875m (£750m) after finding that the German carmakers colluded with another rival, the Mercedes-Benz owner Daimler, to delay emissions-cleaning technology.

The European Commission said that the carmakers had “breached EU antitrust rules by colluding on technical development in the area of nitrogen oxide cleaning”.

What has not been melted, incinerated or damaged beyond repair has been compromised to the point of being unsafe

• We are republishing in its entirety the open letter written by the mayor of Lytton after the village was destroyed by wildfire

On June 29, the small village of Lytton, in Canada, became one of hottest places on Earth. Temperatures reached an astounding 49.6 °C (121.3 °F). The next day, a wild fire destroyed most of the town. In this open letter, the Mayor of Lytton describes the situation on the ground.

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In Canada, almost every policy to help wean us off fossil fuel has been watered down by oil and gas lobbyists

After recording the country’s highest ever temperatures of 49.6C, the town of Lytton in British Columbia, Canada, burst into flames. Residents had minutes to flee a “wall of fire” with nothing but the clothing on their backs. Like people in many other places in the world struggling with heatwaves, fires, droughts and strange extreme storms, BC residents now know what it feels like to live in a changing climate on an increasingly inhospitable planet.

It’s the helplessness you feel as a mother when your son is throwing up from heat exhaustion. It’s the fear you feel when your asthmatic niece struggles to breathe because of the dense smoke from wildfires. It’s the panic you feel when you know that your oldest son is out in northern British Columbia tree planting and that there are now 180 wildfires raging across the province, caused by unprecedented “fire weather” – 710,000 lightning strikes in a 24-hour period.

Cruise ships kill whales, leak gray water, and are largely exempt from US taxation. When they violate the law, they pay the equivalent of a parking ticket

Decades ago, when I worked as a ranger in Alaska’s Glacier Bay national park, each cruise ship that entered the bay carried hundreds of passengers. Today, they carry thousands. They don’t look like ships any more. They look like the boxes the ships came in, huge floating milk cartons – ponderous and white.

But once they get moving, they’re a force. One that occasionally strikes whales.

British Columbia scientist says heat essentially cooked mussels: ‘The shore doesn’t usually crunch when you walk’

More than 1 billion marine animals along Canada’s Pacific coast are likely to have died from last week’s record heatwave, experts warn, highlighting the vulnerability of ecosystems unaccustomed to extreme temperatures.

The “heat dome” that settled over western Canada and the north-western US for five days pushed temperatures in communities along the coast to 40C (104F) – shattering longstanding records and offering little respite for days.

In the midst of a climate crisis with 8 billion humans on the globe, it’s absurd to say that what’s lacking is babies

Fertility rates are falling across the globe – even in places, such as sub-Saharan Africa, where they remain high. This is good for women, families, societies and the environment. So why do we keep hearing that the world needs babies, with angst in the media about maternity wards closing in Italy and ghost cities in China?

The short-range answer is that, even though this slowdown was predicted as part of the now 250-year-old demographic transition – whose signature is the tumbling of both fertility and mortality rates – occasional happenings, such as the publication of US census data or China’s decision to relax its two-child policy, force it back into our consciousness, arousing fears about family lines rubbed out and diminishing superpowers being uninvited from the top table.