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Rapid ocean warming and unusually hot winter days recorded as human-made global heating combines with El Niño

February is on course to break a record number of heat records, meteorologists say, as human-made global heating and the natural El Niño climate pattern drive up temperatures on land and oceans around the world.

A little over halfway into the shortest month of the year, the heating spike has become so pronounced that climate charts are entering new territory, particularly for sea-surface temperatures that have persisted and accelerated to the point where expert observers are struggling to explain how the change is happening.

Seventy perc ent of pregnant women in state had herbicide dicamba in their urine, up from 28% in an earlier study

Pregnant women in a key US farm state are showing increasing amounts of a toxic weedkiller in their urine, a rise that comes alongside climbing use of the chemicals in agriculture, according to a study published on Friday.

The study, led by the Indiana University school of medicine, showed that 70% of pregnant women tested in Indiana between 2020 and 2022 had a herbicide called dicamba in their urine, up from 28% from a similar analysis for the period 2010-12. The earlier study included women in Indiana, Illinois and Ohio.

Protests against Australia’s transition to renewable power have attracted a wide coalition of interests, from mainstream parties to the wild shores of conspiracy

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The protest signs at last week’s rally against renewables in Canberra spoke of hyperlocal concerns – but also cabals and plots of global proportion.

Some spoke of immediate worries linked to environmental policies: “Oberon betrayed by state forestry”; and “Say no to Twin Creek wind farm”.

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Four people died after heavy rain in the Middle Eastern country, which is one of the driest in the world

Abnormally high rainfall hit Oman and the United Arab Emirates on Monday, with heavy downpours and thunderstorms rolling in from the north-east. The two countries are among the driest in the world, with large parts of both typically receiving less than 100mm of rainfall each year. However, on Monday 50-100mm of rainfall was widely reported across eastern UAE and northern Oman, with a highest total of 140mm in Dibba, a city in the far north of Oman that lies on its border with the UAE. Some thunderstorms were accompanied by hail, with a particularly heavy shower in Abu Dhabi leaving the streets blanketed in hailstones, some of which were almost the size of golf balls.

Flooding was widespread, with flash flooding proving particularly dangerous in Oman’s mountainous regions. More than 100 people had to be rescued, many from stranded vehicles, while four fatalities were confirmed. Three stages of the Tour of Oman cycling race were curtailed due to landslides on some climbs. The UAE was less badly affected, but some schools were closed, while an official visit to Dubai by Narendra Modi, the prime minister of India, was scaled down.

The best of this week’s wildlife photographs from around the world

The animal translocation scheme by wildlife NGOs including African Parks, once headed by the royal, has been dogged by controversy

Four more people have died after an elephant translocation overseen by two wildlife organisations, including one that was headed by Prince Harry, in a protected area in Malawi. The recent deaths bring the total fatalities connected to the relocated elephants to seven.

In July 2022, more than 250 elephants were moved from Liwonde national park in southern Malawi to the country’s second-largest protected area, Kasungu, in a three-way operation between Malawi’s national park service and two NGOs: the International Fund for Animal Welfare (Ifaw), and African Parks. Prince Harry was president of African Parks for six years, before being elevated to the board of directors from 2023.

Brussels is ditching green measures as EU leaders panic over rural protests, upcoming elections and the threat of the far right

Ursula von der Leyen surrendered to angry farmers last week faster than you could shake a pitchfork or dump a tractor-load of manure outside the European parliament. The European Commission president, expected to announce her candidacy for a second term heading the EU executive next week, told lawmakers that the commission was withdrawing a bill to halve the use of chemical pesticides by 2030 and would hold more consultations instead.

The proposed measure was a key plank in the commission’s European Green Deal and its Farm to Fork strategy, intended to make the EU carbon-neutral by 2050, make agriculture more environmentally friendly and preserve biodiversity.

An overturned barge has been leaking oil into the Caribbean Sea off the coast of Trinidad and Tobago, prompting authorities on the island nation to declare a state of emergency. Satellite imagery showed parts of the Trinidadian coast dyed black from the spill, and the leak began reaching nearby Venezuela and Grenada. Farley Augustine, chief secretary of Tobago’s House of Assembly, said: 'We need those responsible to come clean and we need those responsible to know that they have to pay for this mess, that they are culpable as part of this mess'

• Trinidad & Tobago says oil spill from mystery vessel is national emergency

• Tobago oil spill spreads to Grenada waters and could affect Venezuela

The Tijuana River flows through Mexico and empties off California, carrying pathogens and chemicals and threatening public health

Raw sewage and runoff in the Tijuana River is exposing communities at the US-Mexico border to an unusual and noxious brew of pathogens and toxic chemicals, according to a report released this week.

Billions of gallons of sewage flow through the river, which winds north from Mexico through California and empties into the Pacific Ocean, containing a mix of carcinogenic chemicals including arsenic, as well as viruses, bacteria and parasites, according to public health researchers at San Diego State University, who published the report.

Research reveals area size of France is under threat by restoration projects taking place in unsuitable landscapes

Misguided tree-planting projects are threatening crucial ecosystems across Africa, scientists have warned.

Research has revealed that an area the size of France is threatened by forest restoration initiatives that are taking place in inappropriate landscapes.

Organisers call for ‘national effort’ to protest against low supermarket prices and cheap imports from post-Brexit deals

Farmers unhappy at low supermarket prices and cheap food imports from post-Brexit trade deals have vowed to renew their French-style protests with tractors this weekend.

Demonstrations modelled on those across the Channel in recent months have sprung up in the UK, most notably in Wales and southern England. On Thursday, Andrew Gibson, a farmer in Kent who has been centrally involved in organising previous actions, said more were to come.

Lack of activity persists despite lifting of ban on projects last year, and contrasts with 46 applications made in Scotland

No new proposals for general-use windfarms were submitted for planning permission in England last year, despite the government’s much-vaunted relaxation of planning restrictions.

Only seven applications were submitted for onshore wind turbines for the whole of 2023 in England, new data from the government has shown, and all of those developments were for the replacement of existing turbines or for private sites, where the energy produced is destined for a particular consumer, such as a business.

It is one thing to U-turn on a modest green transition programme. It is another to do so using mendacious Tory economic paradigms

Rarely has a lacklustre policy been abandoned for a reason so bad that it threatens to inflict long-term damage on a society. Independently of whether the £28bn green investment programme was the right policy for the next Labour government to commit to, Rachel Reeves’s reasons for ditching it were an undeserved gift to the Tories and a partial vindication of their disgraceful flirtations with an austerian, anti-green political narrative.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today shortly after her U-turn on Labour’s headline £28bn green transition programme, the shadow chancellor explained her decision by claiming that, under Jeremy Hunt, the Treasury is “planning on maxing out the credit card”, adding for good effect that the Tories are “maxing out the headroom ahead of the next general election” thus limiting “what an incoming Labour government will be able to achieve”. By comparing the state’s coffers to an overladen credit card, Reeves endorsed an insidious fallacy.

Angry farmers, worried tourism workers and unprepared politicians – Catalonia is on the frontline of a drought-stricken future

Walking through Barcelona these days, you can’t miss the signs and billboards picturing a red plastic bucket and the message “Water doesn’t fall from the sky” (l’aigua no cau del cel in Catalan). The ads are part of a campaign to get people to save water. Since the beginning of February, Barcelona and 200 other towns in Catalonia have been in an official drought emergency. That means more than 6 million people in the region live with restrictions. Daily water usage per inhabitant is limited. Parks are unwatered, fountains are dry and showers at swimming pools and beaches are closed. Farmers can’t irrigate most of their crops and must halve their water usage for livestock or face fines.

It’s not just Catalonia. The European Drought Observatory’s map of current droughts in Europe shows the entire Spanish Mediterranean coast in bad shape, with red areas indicating an alert similar to those in north Africa and Sicily. Catalonia may be going through the worst drought on record for the area, but the southern region of Andalucía has faced continuous drought since 2016. Last year, Spain’s droughts ranked among the 10 most costly climate disasters in the world, according to a report by Christian Aid.

María Ramírez is a journalist and deputy managing editor of elDiario.es, a news outlet in Spain

Denialism highest in central and southern US, with Republican voters less likely to believe in climate science

Nearly 15% of Americans don’t believe climate change is real, a new study out of the University of Michigan reveals – shedding light on the highly polarized attitude toward global warming.

Additionally, denialism is highest in the central and southern US, with Republican voters found less likely to believe in climate science.

The current wave of protests endangers environmental progress. But imaginative politics can get the green deal back on track

Another day, another tractor blockade. Earlier this week, all economic activity at the Belgian port of Antwerp ground to a halt as hundreds of farmers prevented access to freight. In Spain, tractors blocked motorways near Seville and Granada, and in Catalonia. As a rolling wave of rural discontent has made itself felt across Europe since the start of the year, only four EU member states have remained unaffected.

Numerically, farmers account for only 4% of Europe’s working population. But as Europe’s political leaders are belatedly coming to realise, the burgeoning crisis has outsize implications. A perfect storm of factors – including rising energy costs, competition from lightly regulated foreign imports and supermarket profit-gouging – have driven angry farmers off the land and on to the streets of capitals. But in disputes that touch on some of the faultlines of contemporary culture wars, there is a growing danger that the EU’s green deal takes the rap for a crisis incubated elsewhere.

‘We need to respond now,’ says author of study that says crucial forest has already passed safe boundary and needs restoration

Up to half of the Amazon rainforest could hit a tipping point by 2050 as a result of water stress, land clearance and climate disruption, a study has shown.

The paper, which is the most comprehensive to date in its analysis of the compounding impacts of local human activity and the global climate crisis, warned that the forest had already passed a safe boundary and urged remedial action to restore degraded areas and improve the resilience of the ecosystem.

Scientist behind hybrid carbohydrate praises its ‘pleasant and novel flavour experience’

Bowls of decidedly pink-tinged rice are about to feature on sustainable food menus, according to researchers who created rice grains with beef and cow fat cells grown inside them.

Scientists made the experimental food by covering traditional rice grains in fish gelatin and seeding them with skeletal muscle and fat stem cells which were then grown in the laboratory.

Even as the weather emergency was still unfolding, some commentators and politicians couldn’t resist the urge to blame renewable energy

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More than half a million electricity customers were without power in Victoria on Tuesday after storms swept across the state, downing power lines and transmission towers.

But as workers and system managers scrambled to get power back online, some commentators and Coalition MPs were unable to resist the urge to somehow blame renewable energy.

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Republican Jeff Landry, who has labeled climate change ‘a hoax’, has elevated fossil fuel executives to key environmental posts

In his first four weeks in office, Louisiana’s Republican governor, Jeff Landry, has filled the ranks of state environmental posts with executives tied to the oil, gas and coal industries.

Landry, who has labeled climate change “a hoax”, has also taken aim at the state’s climate taskforce for possible elimination as part of a sweeping reorganization of Louisiana’s environmental bureaucracy. The goal, according to Landry’s executive order, is to “create a better prospective business climate”.