The Guardian

In climate change, the Four Horsemen have a perfect force of destruction. Maybe these fires and floods will be a wakeup call to stop stalling

As the west coast burns into an orange hellscape you have to wonder if those preaching the end of time aren’t on to something. The people smart enough to make a cellphone have been warning that we have no more than a decade to tamp down the climate crisis. Other wise men and women think we don’t even have that much time. We should listen.

People have been preaching the end of time since the beginning of time. The whole story got laid down in the Book of Revelations. Being raised Catholic, we did not read the Bible that much and were casually advised by the nuns to not wade too deep in that chapter. Concentrate on Love Thy Neighbor because Ye Shall Not Know the Hour or Day.

Deformities point to unsettling sign of extremely low genetic diversity in isolated population in the Santa Monica mountains

Mountain lions with crooked tails have been spotted in the Santa Monica mountains, an unsettling sign of extremely low genetic diversity within an isolated population of less than two dozen individuals roaming the rugged canyonlands just north of Los Angeles.

In early March, biologists examined a young sedated male mountain lion. The cougar, designated P-81, had a kinked tail shaped like the letter L and only one descended testicle, a condition known as cryptorchidism.

Mock Cop26 set up in frustration at lack of progress due to coronavirus crisis

Young climate activists have begun a parallel process to the UN climate crisis talks, in frustration at the lack of progress they perceive in world governments’ efforts to address the emergency.

Crunch negotiations aimed at fulfilling the Paris climate agreement, called Cop26, were to be hosted by the UK this November, but have been delayed by the coronavirus crisis. Activists, participants and observers have told the Guardian they are concerned at a lack of progress so far.

The US president is urged to recognise the changing climate and what it means to forests, during a briefing on the wildfires in California on Monday. Trump interrupts an official, Wade Crowfoot, the secretary of California’s Natural Resources Agency, to argue the climate 'will start getting cooler, you just watch'. Crowfoot responds: 'I wish science agreed with you.' To which Trump retorts: 'I don’t think science knows actually'

• Biden calls Trump a 'climate arsonist' as president denies science on wildfire tour

Exclusive: congestion climbed above 2019 levels in August as people went back to using cars after lockdown

Road traffic congestion in outer London is now far higher than it was last year as people have gone back into their cars after lockdown, according to new data.

Congestion climbed above 2019 levels in August, and has increased to nearly a fifth on average above last year, in roads outside the capital’s central congestion charging zone, even while it has dropped sharply in the centre of the city.

Firms join Apple and Microsoft in committing to put no excess carbon into the atmosphere

Facebook and Google are becoming carbon neutral businesses, joining competitors Apple and Microsoft in committing to put no excess carbon into the atmosphere, both companies have independently announced.

But the details of the two companies’ ambitions differs greatly. At Google, which first committed to going carbon neutral in 2007, the announcement sees the company declaring success in retroactively offsetting all carbon it has ever emitted, since its foundation in 1998. It has also committed to being powered exclusively by renewable energy by 2030.

The Coalition has royally stuffed up energy policy when Australia should be moving to fuels of the future

It really is remarkable, to have lived through the bushfire season at the start of this year, and emerge from that as a political leader stronger in your conviction that the answer is locking in more fossil fuels, for longer.

Mind-boggling, in truth.

The NSW Liberals now look like koala saviours – but green groups say much more is needed to save the animal from extinction in the state by 2050

Last week the leader of the New South Wales Nationals, John Barilaro, brought the state’s Coalition government to the brink of collapse over koala protections. Within days, the Liberal premier, Gladys Berejiklian, had stared him down and Barilaro retreated from his threats.

In comparison with the Nationals, who want to repeal new legislation aimed at protecting koala habitat, the Liberals now seem like the animals’ saviours.

Leaked proposal includes carbon sinks provided by trees, soils and oceans in target

The EU executive has been accused of “cheating” on its 2030 climate plans by proposing to include carbon sinks provided by trees, soils and oceans in its emissions reduction goal.

The European commission will this week call for an EU emissions reduction target of “at least 55%” by 2030 compared to 1990 levels, according to a leaked draft seen by the Guardian. The proposal sets the stage for an intense political battle over the autumn to agree the target, intended to set the EU on track to meet a landmark pledge of net-zero emissions by the middle of the century.

Some of 101 crew left stranded off Brazil amid Covid-19 crisis protested to demand repatriation

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Dozens of Mauritian cruise ship workers who were stranded off the coast of Brazil throughout the pandemic have finally started their journey home after desperate appeals to return.

A crew member representing the 101 workers, who have been at anchor on three ships off Santos in southern Brazil, said they had not been paid for over six months by the cruise line MSC, one of the companies leading the industry’s return to operations.

Food safety officials deny claims that diseased or contaminated meat is being eaten by consumers

Consumers are being exposed to an “avoidable risk” of disease after a reduction of official controls in food inspections of pig and poultry carcasses across the EU, European meat inspectors have said.

Diseased meat is being eaten by consumers in the UK and EU, including pus from abscesses and tuberculosis lesions from pigs’ heads, said the European Working Community for Food Inspection and Consumer Protection (EFWFC) this week. The EWFC represents EU meat inspectors.

Creatures of the Amazon, one of the earth’s most biodiverse habitats, face an ever-growing threat as loggers and farms advance further and further into the rainforest. Photojournalist Ueslei Marcelino has been in Rhondonia and Amazonas states in Brazil has been following the destruction and the mission to save the region’s animals

All that koala habitat that burned during the bushfires - should we let it grow back? Hell no!

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Climate Action 100+ group put 161 fossil fuel, mining, transport and other big-emitting companies on notice in latest campaign by shareholders

Institutional investors that collectively manage more than US$47tn in assets have demanded the world’s biggest corporate polluters back strategies to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions and promised to hold them to public account.

The Climate Action 100+ group, representing 518 major investor organisations across the globe, has written to 161 fossil fuel, mining, transport and other big-emitting companies to set 30 climate measures and targets against which they will be analysed in a report to be released early next year.

UK government said it failed on two-thirds of targets, but RSPB analysis is bleaker – and suggests UK is moving backwards in some areas

The UK has failed to reach 17 out of 20 UN biodiversity targets agreed on 10 years ago, according to an analysis from conservation charity RSPB that says the gap between rhetoric and reality has resulted in a “lost decade for nature”.

The UK government’s self-assessment said it failed on two-thirds of targets (14 out of 20) agreed at the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in Nagoya, Japan, in 2010, but the RSPB analysis suggests the reality is worse. On six of the 20 targets the UK has actually gone backwards. The government’s assessment published last year said it was not regressing on any target.

New thinking is needed because of economic turmoil since 2008 and environmental concerns

For years, those on the left in Britain have been arguing that the government should be more aggressive in its use of state aid to revitalise those parts of the country affected by industrial blight.

Now, at last, we have ministers prepared to have a bare-knuckled fight with the EU over their right to intervene on behalf of those living where the factories and the coalmines used to be, but they grew up as disciples of Margaret Thatcher, who insisted that tough state aid rules be included in the rules for the single market. Ah the irony of it!

Blockading newspapers may cross a line for some, but is the PM a bigger criminal?

My old university friend, the American geographer William Dyer, accepted my Skype call at a research station on the pebble shores of the Antarctic Sound. Once, it would have been too remote to receive messages and yet here I was, laughing at the Sub Pop Records baseball cap that fixed him temporally and culturally. Will had wanted to be free, free to do what he wanted to do. And he had wanted to get loaded and have a good time. But Will, a better man than I, discovered a conscience. And now he was watching ice melt.

Will had been the first person to tell me about climate change, one long whiskey night in 1986, but the idea that the world was warming was absurd, just like his claim that one day we would piggyback on a worldwide military computer network to communicate face to face. And yet here we were doing just that and Will was in a shrinking southern ice field documenting exactly the kind of destruction I had doubted.

From the Strait of Gibraltar to Galicia, orcas have been harassing yachts, damaging vessels and injuring crew

Scientists have been left baffled by incidents of orcas ramming sailing boats along the Spanish and Portuguese coasts.

In the last two months, from southern to northern Spain, sailors have sent distress calls after worrying encounters. Two boats lost part of their rudders, at least one crew member suffered bruising from the impact of the ramming, and several boats sustained serious damage.

Europe is a far more important export market for the UK, as business leaders know – bigger even than the US

There was a consistent message from business leaders to international trade secretary Liz Truss’s claims that she had signed a “historic” deal with Japan to lower tariffs and gain access to previously restricted markets.

Thank you, they said, but could you please sign a deal with the EU because that is our most important export market.

The climate crisis is upon us all but the president pursues more rollbacks. This election offers an existential choice

The air outside my window is yellow today. It was orange yesterday. The Air Quality Index is over 200. The Environmental Protection Agency defines this as a “health alert” in which “everyone may experience more serious health effects if they are exposed for 24 hours”. Unfortunately, the index has been over 200 for several days.

Related: Wildfires are striking closer and closer to cities. We know how this will end | Alastair Gee and Dani Anguiano