The Guardian

Warm air from south to bring above-average temperatures – but heavy rain expected to follow

North-west Europe is forecast to experience a burst of autumn warmth this week, thanks to warm air from southern Europe spreading northwards. This brief episode of warmer-than-average conditions will be driven by an amplified, or “wavy”, jet stream, which will allow warm air to push farther north.

Daytime temperatures across much of France are forecast to reach the mid-20s on Tuesday and Wednesday, with some areas in the south-west potentially exceeding this. Meanwhile, the Benelux area and south-east England are expected to reach the low-20s by midweek.

We’ve all been there. We’ve all felt like a badly made-up, odd-limbed, irritable floor-dwelling mess

As you contemplate the wonders of evolution, and how a creature can be born with something weird and new, and that thing can either help it get ahead or not hurt its chances, and it can then reproduce and make another one like it, spare a thought for the red-lipped batfish.

A real animal, it has the kind of mouth that, as a kid, you may have made from Babybel cheese wax, to go with your red wax fake nails. It has a beard of white whiskers. It has fins that bend backwards, like a person’s arms at yoga when they are about to do upward dog. Before your eyes, it sprouts a new limb from its nostril. Its nose – technically a snout – is long, at the top of its head, and hook-shaped. It cannot swim, only crawl. Its crawl is more like a waddle.

The mid-Atlantic archipelago of nine islands, the tips of drowned volcanoes, is a remarkable place for marine mammals. The clear, deep waters provide the perfect habitat for cetaceans, and 28 species of whale and dolphin have been documented there. The Dutch scientist and photographer Jeroen Hoekendijk spent a week in September capturing the diversity of Azorean wildlife

• Photographs by Jeroen Hoekendijk

Invasive Species Council says 5 million native mammals, birds, reptiles and frogs are killed by feral and roaming pet cats a day in Australia

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A five-person team of expert shooters will soon target feral cats in New South Wales national parks as the state steps up efforts to control the pest animals.

The intensive ground operation is being deployed in response to increased cat numbers, according to National Parks and Wildlife Service deputy secretary, Atticus Fleming.

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Information ‘blueprint’ of the spotted handfish could aid monitoring, captive breeding and protection efforts, scientists say

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They’re Australia’s own underwater punks in leopard print.

Spotted handfish are an endangered species of fish that prefer to “walk” instead of swim, thanks to their unusual pectoral and pelvic fins; have a fluffy dorsal fin on their head that looks almost like a mohawk; and live in the waters off south-east Tasmania.

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The keen birdwatcher encourages others to take 20 minutes out of their day, describing the experience as ‘meditative’

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In early October the comedian Geraldine Hickey went looking for tawny frogmouths, a charismatic bird with a frog-like beak and mottled feathers.

“They’re a good-looking bird,” Hickey says, though it hasn’t yet appeared in her annual bird calendar, a project she started as a “lockdown thing” that has gained its own dedicated audience.

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United Utilities and Severn Trent had four-star environment ranking but discharges breached permits, campaign group says

• ‘Ankle deep in sewage’: English spring water village suffers supected unlawful spills

Two of England’s biggest water firms dumped raw sewage into rivers across the country in suspected illegal breaches of their permits, despite being given the highest possible rating by the regulator for their environmental performance, the Observer can reveal.

Severn Trent Water and United Utilities were responsible for 1,374 raw sewage spills from sewage treatment works in apparent breaches of permits over a two-year period in more than 80 watercourses, according to an analysis of previously unpublished operational data. It is alleged the suspected illegal discharges were during dry weather or at times when the plants were not at operating capacity.

Water firm Severn Trent accused of being in breach of environmental permits over pollution near Malvern Hills

• Top-rated UK water firms ‘dumped 1,374 illegal spills into rivers’

Colwall, a village of less than 3,000 people on the border between Herefordshire and Worcestershire, is renowned for its spring water, which comes from the nearby Malvern Hills. An area of outstanding natural beauty, it has been favoured by the royal family for centuries, including Elizabeth I and Queen Victoria.

But the water at Colwall is now in the spotlight for very different reasons. The most recent data from Severn Trent Water, the company that covers the area, reveals that a sewage treatment works on Cradley Brook, near the village, spilled sewage for 1,756 hours in 2021 and 1,361 hours in 2022.

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.