The Guardian Climate Change

Several people have died, an official said, and at least seven people are missing after torrential rain caused flash floods in southern and eastern Spain, shutting roads and high-speed train connections. Raging flood waters swept through the town of Letur in the east, pushing cars through the streets. State weather agency AEMET declared a red alert in the Valencia region and the second-highest level of alert in parts of Andalusia.

• Dead bodies found after torrential rain brings flash flooding to Spain

It was my dream job. But what’s the point of preserving masterpieces for a future being destroyed by fossil fuel companies?

• Margaret Reid is currently on remand for taking action with Just Stop Oil

I used to be part of the art world but I just can’t stomach it any more. Now I’m in prison, and it suits my conscience better. Back in the 1980s, art was my life. Aged 16, I fell head over heels for painting and could imagine nothing better than spending my life working in museums.

Looking back almost 40 years, I see my younger self, starstruck in Paris. I’m staring up with awe at Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa and greedily gobbling up the story of how it scandalised the art world. That sickening green cadaver that almost fell out of the frame had me weeping with admiration. Of course it shocked the critics. They hated the grisly truth: the emaciated corpse that was a direct challenge to government corruption and incompetence.

Margaret Reid is a former museum professional currently on remand for taking action with Just Stop Oil

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Researchers found 38,000 fewer people – 10 times number of murders – would have died if atmosphere was not clogged with greenhouse pollutants

Climate breakdown caused more than half of the 68,000 heat deaths during the scorching European summer of 2022, a study has found.

Researchers from the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal) found 38,000 fewer people would have died from heat if humans had not clogged the atmosphere with pollutants that act like a greenhouse and bake the planet. The death toll is about 10 times greater than the number of people murdered in Europe that year.

Rising Tide event would involve thousands of paddling climate activists blocking coal exports

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The New South Wales police force is challenging a planned protest through the supreme court for the second time this month – this time an event in Newcastle calling for climate action.

The November protest is organised by Rising Tide and known as the “People’s Blockade of the World’s Largest Coal Port”. It would involve thousands of activists paddling into the Port of Newcastle on kayaks and rafts to stop coal exports from leaving Newcastle for 50 hours.

Exclusive: Linked accounts on X push petrostate’s posts about climate summit and drown out criticism

Scores of apparently fake social media accounts are boosting Azerbaijan’s hosting of the Cop29 climate summit, an investigation has revealed.

The accounts were mostly set up after July, at which time seven of the top 10 most engaged posts using the hashtags #COP29 and #COP29Azerbaijan were critical of Azerbaijan’s role in the conflict with Armenia, using hashtags such as #stopgreenwashgenocide. By September this had changed, with all of the top 10 most engaged posts coming from the official Cop29 Azerbaijan account.

In 2000, only one of these Arctic beasts was resident in the UK. Now there are 16. Is there any benefit to captivity for this climate-ravaged species?

A small boy calls out the sights as the train speeds through the Suffolk countryside from London Liverpool Street.

“Tractor. Church. Pigs. Polar bear! Dad! A polar bear!”

Sailors visit the polar bear enclosure at London zoo in 1930. Below: a bear at Dudley Zoo in Worcestershire, 1937 (left), and Brumas, the first baby polar bear to be successfully reared in the UK, at London Zoo in 1950. Photographs: Fox/Getty Images; Mirrorpix/Getty Images

It seems reasonable to call the Coalition’s policy what it primarily is: a proposal to expand fossil fuels

Some news you may not have clocked last week while the focus was on important things like a royal tour: 44 of the world’s top climate scientists, including four decorated Australian professors, released an open letter warning that ocean circulation in the Atlantic is at serious risk of collapse sooner than was previously understood.

They said a string of studies suggested the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a body backed by nearly 200 countries, had greatly underestimated the possibility that the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation – or Amoc, a system of ocean currents that brings heat into the northern Atlantic west of Britain and Ireland – could in the next few decades reach a point at which its breakdown was inevitable. The cause? Rising greenhouse gas emissions.

Australian miner paying ‘massive bonuses’ for ‘steamrolling ahead with an outdated and unacceptably risky coal growth strategy’, activists say

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Whitehaven Coal, one of Australia’s biggest coal producers, faces a rare “second strike” from shareholders this week as climate activists seek to draw attention to the miner’s plans to ramp up volumes and resulting carbon emissions.

The ASX-listed company received a 41% vote against its executives’ remuneration report at last year’s annual general meeting. A vote of at least 25% at this year’s AGM on Wednesday would force a motion to spill Whitehaven’s board.

Carbon dioxide concentration has increased by more than 10% in just two decades, reports World Meteorological Organization

The concentration of planet-heating pollutants clogging the atmosphere hit record levels in 2023, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has said.

It found carbon dioxide is accumulating faster than at any time in human history, with concentrations having risen by more than 10% in just two decades.

The harm to babies and mothers is one of the warnings being sent to Cop29 decision-makers by leading scientists

Miscarriages, premature babies and harm to mothers caused by the climate crisis are a “blind spot” in action plans, according to a report aimed at the decision-makers who will attend the Cop29 summit in November.

Potential collapse of the Amazon rainforest, vital Atlantic Ocean currents and essential infrastructure in cities are also among the dangers cited by an international group of 80 leading scientists from 45 countries. The report collects the latest insights from physical and social science to inform the negotiations at the UN climate summit in Azerbaijan.

Australasian Centre for Corporate Responsibility alleges Santos’s plan to reach net zero by 2040 is ‘little more than a series of speculations’

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A world-first greenwashing case that seeks to hold oil and gas company Santos accountable for its net zero commitments began in the federal court today, brought by one of its own shareholders, the Australasian Centre for Corporate Responsibility (ACCR).

The organisation claims Santos did not have a proper basis for saying it had a clear pathway to reduce emissions by 26% to 30% by 2030 and reach net zero by 2040, which constituted misleading or deceptive conduct in breach of Australian corporate and consumer laws.

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Consumption of world’s wealthiest people also making it increasingly difficult to limit global heating to 1.5C

The high carbon emissions of the world’s richest 1% are worsening hunger, poverty and excess deaths, a report has found.

Owing to luxury yachts, private jets and investments in polluting industries, the consumption of the world’s wealthiest people is also making it increasingly difficult to limit global heating to 1.5C.

Pledge signed by scientists from nine countries reflects concerns that offsets generated from forest-related projects may not have reduced emissions

Carbon offsets used by corporations around the world to lower their reportable greenhouse gas emissions are “ineffectual” and “hindering the energy transition”, according to more than 60 leading climate change scientists.

A pledge signed by scientists from nine countries, including the UK, US and Australia, said the “only path that can prevent further escalation of climate impacts” was “real zero” and not “net zero”.

Legions of young people are getting organised, skilling up, raising their voices and placing their bodies in the path of those who profit from our addiction

Not long before the Nazis murdered him, the Lutheran pastor and resister Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote that “the ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world it leaves to its children”.

That moral challenge is timeless. But with the climate emergency upon us, it has an unsettling new edge, and with that in mind, I’ve been preoccupied lately by the underappreciated power of solidarity.

Climate Change Committee advised Ed Miliband to cut level by 81% but activists want bigger promises

Climate campaigners have urged ministers to make steeper cuts in the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions after the government’s statutory adviser on the climate gave its verdict on new targets.

The Climate Change Committee, which advises the government, has written to Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, to advise cuts of 81% in the UK’s emissions, compared with 1990 levels, by 2035, if emissions from aviation and shipping are excluded.

Israeli airstrikes in Lebanon, a total blackout in Cuba, tributes to Liam Payne and the US election: the past seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists

Lack of time, difficulties with scientific rigour, an uninterested public … television meteorologists open up about why they’re so quiet about the reasons for extreme conditions

Why do TV and radio forecasts rarely contextualise extreme weather events in terms of the climate crisis? After all, the latest data suggests Britain is getting hotter, wetter and stormier. The number of “very hot days” of 30C or more, according to the Met Office’s latest climate report, has trebled over the last few decades. Last year was the second warmest on record since 1884, with only 2022 warmer.

“If you believe, as I do, that climate change is the most fundamental challenge facing humanity,” says Sunil Amrith, history professor at Yale’s School of Environment, and author of the forthcoming book The Burning Earth: An Environmental History of the Past 500 Years, “any contribution to making its causes and effects more widely known will have a role to play”.

Families cope as experts say learning disruptions caused by hurricane can set children back for years

When Elizabeth Steere’s two sons were little, the family watched The Wizard of Oz and its famous tornado scene that whips Dorothy through the air.

Steere, who lives in Asheville, North Carolina, assured her kids, now 11 and 13, not to worry. “I remember saying, very glibly, ‘That’s not something you guys have to worry about,’” Steele recalled.

Kevin Jordan and two other claimants argued the country’s climate adaptation plans were insufficient and unlawful

An East Anglian man who lost his home to coastal erosion has lost his high court challenge against the government’s climate adaptation plans.

Kevin Jordan was one of three claimants who argued the government’s plans for adapting to the existing and predicted impacts of climate change, known as the National Adaptation Programme 3 (NAP3), were insufficient and unlawful.