The Guardian

Increase in extreme weather due to climate change is damaging fruit and vegetable growing

The British chip has been left an inch shorter by the 2018 heatwave, according to a report on the risks to UK fruit and vegetable growing from climate change.

The spell of baking summer weather was made 30 times more likely by global warming and left spuds substantially smaller than usual. Yields of carrots and onions were also sharply down.

Hundreds of residents in Townsville have been evacuated and two men are missing as the area is hit with a year’s worth of rainfall in nine days

• Townsville flooding: two missing as questions mount over dam release

Scott Morrison is trying to scare people about franking credits but seems blithely unaware people are already scared – about climate change

As I write this, fire is 500 metres from the largest King Billy pine forest in the world on Mt Bobs, an ancient forest that dates back to the last Ice Age and has trees over 1,000 years old. Fire has broached the boundaries of Mt Field national park with its glorious alpine vegetation, unlike anything on the planet. Fire laps at the edges of Federation Peak, Australia’s grandest mountain, and around the base of Mt Anne with its exquisite rainforest and alpine gardens. Fire laps at the border of the Walls of Jerusalem national park with its labyrinthine landscapes of tarns and iconic stands of ancient pencil pine and its beautiful alpine landscape, ecosystems described by their most eminent scholar, the ecologist Prof Jamie Kirkpatrick, as “like the vision of a Japanese garden made more complex, and developed in paradise, in amongst this gothic scenery”.

“You have plants that look like rocks – green rocks – and these plants have different colours in complicated mosaics: red-green, blue-green, yellow-green, all together. It’s an overwhelming sensual experience really.”

Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries CEO says improving quality of high sulphur fuel could offer 5% improvement on CO2 emissions ‘overnight’

Australia’s cheap, dirty petrol ranks among the worst of the OECD nations, yet the peak industry body representing Australian petrol refiners has rejected the criticism, saying the industry should be given until 2027 to adjust to stricter regulations.

Paul Barrett, the chief executive of the Australian Institute of Petroleum, hit back at critics who have described Australian petrol as low quality thanks to its sulphur content.

Exposure to particulate matter and ozone highest in poor eastern European states, says study

Europe’s poorest, least educated and most jobless regions are bearing the brunt of the air pollution crisis, according to the first official stocktake of its kind.

Nearly half of London’s most deprived neighbourhoods exceeded EU nitrogen dioxide (NO2) limits in 2017 compared with 2% of its wealthiest areas.

My friend Edward Goff, who has died aged 73, was a real dairy farmer producing real food. He stood at the forefront of the organic farming revolution in the UK.

He set about converting his farm, Hindford Grange, in Shropshire, in 1983, long before most farmers had even heard of organic production. Relying largely on clover to provide the fertility for forage and growing cereals and fodder beet, he developed a self-sufficient farm providing virtually all the feed for his 70-strong dairy herd. I worked with him as an adviser over the years.

Ministers are playing politics with the country’s future, says Ineos boss Sir Jim Ratcliffe

The UK’s richest person has launched an attack on the government’s fracking rules, accusing ministers of policies that will cause an “energy crisis” and “irreparable damage” to the economy.

Sir Jim Ratcliffe, chairman of petrochemicals firm Ineos, pledged four years ago to start a UK fracking revolution but the company has been bogged down in planning battles and is yet to drill or frack a single well.

Even radical climate change action won’t save glaciers, endangering 2 billion people

At least a third of the huge ice fields in Asia’s towering mountain chain are doomed to melt due to climate change, according to a landmark report, with serious consequences for almost 2 billion people.

Even if carbon emissions are dramatically and rapidly cut and succeed in limiting global warming to 1.5C, 36% of the glaciers along in the Hindu Kush and Himalaya range will have gone by 2100. If emissions are not cut, the loss soars to two-thirds, the report found.

Off-road drivers and vandals damaged the fragile ecosystem, prompting fears it could take ‘300 years’ to bounce back

As Ethan Peck’s boots crunch through the desert sands, he stops to point out tracks on the side of the trail: not coyote or other wildlife, but dog prints. “It’s just sad that people would do this,” says Peck, who owns Joshua Tree Adventures and has lived in the area for seven years. “You’re not allowed to hike with your dog in any national park.”

Related: Joshua Tree national park 'may take 300 years to recover' from shutdown

Firm hopes to build scheme within six years after ministers rejected it for being too costly

The backers of a pioneering project to harness energy from the tides off the Welsh coast have rebooted the scheme and believe they can build it without the help of government.

With the recent failure of two major nuclear projects, attention has turned to alternatives to fill the low-carbon power gap, with developers of windfarms and small nuclear plants among those vying for government support.

Scientists say effects of global warming on ‘phytoplankton’ will intensify the colours

The blues and greens of the ocean will become even bluer and greener by the end of the century as a result of global warming, scientists have found.

Researchers say the colour changes are down to the effect of climate change on populations of tiny water-dwelling organisms, known as phytoplankton, that convert sunlight into chemical energy through photosynthesis, as well as effects on levels of other colourful components of the oceans.

Streaming case online will raise awareness of climate change, barrister argues

A high court challenge to the government’s controversial plan for a third runway at Heathrow could be opened up to a mass audience through livestreaming for the first time if judges accept a legal argument.

Although the supreme court has transmitted its hearings since 2009, photography and recording of court proceedings elsewhere are strictly controlled by the Crime and Courts Act 2013, which only permits cases in the court of appeal to be broadcast.

Water birds and marine animals particularly at risk, according to new RSPCA findings

Wildlife and pets are under increasing threat from plastic waste and litter, according to new data from the RSPCA, which shows the number of incidents of animals hurt by plastic litter has risen sharply on previous years.

Plastic litter led to 579 cases of damage to wildlife or pets that were reported to the animal charity in England and Wales in 2018, up from 473 in 2015. That rise came against a background of falling damage to animals from other forms of litter, down from 4,968 reported incidents in 2015 to 4,579 last year.

Protected countryside is more than 15 miles away from almost half of the most deprived areas

From Exmoor to Northumberland, the country’s poorest people are being denied access to England’s most beautiful countryside and missing out on the mental and physical health benefits that can result, research has found.

Almost half of the country’s most socially deprived areas are more than 15 miles by road from 10 national parks and 46 areas of outstanding natural beauty (AONB), according to a submission to a government review into how national assets are being managed.

After 12% drop in generation, experts say existing nuclear plants are likely to close early

Britain’s nuclear power stations recorded a 12% decline in their contributions to the country’s energy system over the past month, as outages raised concerns over how long the ageing plants will be able to keep operating.

Related: What role does nuclear power play in UK and what are alternatives?

Why has it taken so long just to move past the bare minimum needed to support what is now an expanding sector?

Last September, Sylvia Wilson became the second person in the country to drive around Australia in an electric car.

The entire 20,396 kilometre trip took the 70-year-old 110 days in her Tesla S75 and cost just $150.90.

The journalist and author has claimed climate change will soon render the world uninhabitable, leading his supporters to say he’s telling the terrifying truth and critics to brand him a reckless alarmist. Why is he so worried?

David Wallace-Wells’s apocalyptic depiction of a world made uninhabitable by climate chaos caused an outcry when it was published in New York magazine in 2017. Based on the worst-case scenarios foreseen by science, his article portrayed a world of drought, plague and famine, in which acidified oceans drown coastal homelands, dormant diseases are released from ancient ice, conflicts surge, economies collapse, human cognitive abilities decline and heat stress becomes more intolerable in New York City than in present-day Bahrain. Critics called this irresponsibly alarmist. Supporters said it was a long-overdue antidote to climate complacency. Whatever your view, it was among the best-read climate articles in US history. Now he is back with a book-length follow-up.

Related: ‘The devastation of human life is in view’: what a burning world tells us about climate change

Some put lack of action down to fundamental differences between the two countries

It started with a solo protest outside Sweden’s parliament by 16-year-old Greta Thunberg and has snowballed across the globe.

Schoolchildren demanding action on climate change have played truant and taken to the streets in Australia, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Switzerland and, in their greatest numbers, in Belgium, where 35,000 made their voices heard in Brussels a week ago and a further 12,500 marched on Thursday.

An understaffed stretch of California coastline has new residents: nearly 100 elephant seals and their pups

During the US government shutdown, understaffed national parks were overrun by careless visitors. But at one spot in California, the absence of rangers meant a takeover by a horde of a different sort: a massive group of boisterous elephant seals.

Related: 'That income is gone': shutdown pain lingers for unpaid contract workers

I was wilfully deluded until I began covering global warming, says David Wallace-Wells. But extreme heat could transform the planet by 2100

I have never been an environmentalist. I don’t even think of myself as a nature person. I’ve lived my whole life in cities, enjoying gadgets built by industrial supply chains I hardly think twice about. I’ve never gone camping, not willingly anyway, and while I always thought it was basically a good idea to keep streams clean and air clear, I also accepted the proposition that there was a trade-off between economic growth and cost to nature – and figured, well, in most cases I’d go for growth. I’m not about to personally slaughter a cow to eat a hamburger, but I’m also not about to go vegan. In these ways – many of them, at least – I am like every other American who has spent their life fatally complacent, and wilfully deluded, about climate change, which is not just the biggest threat human life on the planet has ever faced, but a threat of an entirely different category and scale. That is, the scale of human life itself.

A few years ago, I began collecting stories of climate change, many of them terrifying, gripping, uncanny narratives, with even the most small-scale sagas playing like fables: a group of Arctic scientists trapped when melting ice isolated their research centre on an island also populated by a group of polar bears; a Russian boy killed by anthrax released from a thawing reindeer carcass that had been trapped in permafrost for many decades. At first, it seemed the news was inventing a new genre of allegory. But of course climate change is not an allegory. Beginning in 2011, about a million Syrian refugees were unleashed on Europe by a civil war inflamed by climate change and drought; in a very real sense, much of the “populist moment” the west is passing through now is the result of panic produced by the shock of those migrants. The likely flooding of Bangladesh threatens to create 10 times as many, or more, received by a world that will be even further destabilised by climate chaos – and, one suspects, less receptive the browner those in need. And then there will be the refugees from sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and the rest of south Asia – 140 million by 2050, the World Bank estimates, more than 10 times the Syrian crisis.