The Guardian Climate Change

The golden jackal has expanded its range as far as Norway and Spain, seemingly driven by climate breakdown

The golden jackal, Canis aureus, may seem an exotic creature from a far-off country but the species has suddenly expanded its range into western Europe. Much smaller than a wolf but larger than a fox, the jackal will compete with both species for food and territory. The animals have been found as far north as Finland and Norway and have also reached Spain.

Genetic research shows the individual jackals studied had travelled at least 745 miles (1,200km) from their original homes, and sometimes twice as far. This is comparable with wolves looking for new territories.

Excessive heat warnings bring elevated wildfire risk, potential for power outages and rising death toll

San Francisco recorded its hottest day of the year on Tuesday, and Phoenix set a record for the hottest 1 October on record, as the National Weather Service predicted record-high fall temperatures across the south-western US.

With temperatures hitting 100F (38C) or higher in many places, officials and local media outlets issued warnings that the heat posed “a significant threat to property or life”. Excessive heat warnings were in place across the region, bringing with it warnings about elevated wildfire risk, the potential for sweeping power outages in California and a rising toll of heat-related deaths, a particularly deadly risk for unhoused people and the elderly.

Searchers using helicopters to get past washed-out bridges and hike through wilderness to reach isolated homes

Hurricane Helene’s death toll has surpassed 150 as searchers use helicopters to get past washed-out bridges and hike through wilderness to reach isolated homes.

Crews were still trudging through knee-deep muck and debris in the wake of the deadly category 4 storm that dumped more than 40tn gallons of rain on the southern US after it crashed ashore in Florida on Thursday.

US public sector workers’ retirement savings invested in projects that pump out a billion tonnes of emissions a year

Private equity firms are using US public sector workers’ retirement savings to fund fossil fuel projects pumping more than a billion tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere every year, according to an analysis.

They have ploughed more than $1tn (£750bn) into the energy sector since 2010, often buying into old and new fossil fuel projects and, thanks to exemptions from many financial disclosures, operating them outside the public eye, the researchers say.

Workers struggle with dehydration, fatigue dizziness and headaches – but state laws have stripped their protections

Every day, Raquel Atlahua begins her work as a roofer bracing for the blistering sun.

On the roof, there is no escape from the direct light and heat, and the temperatures in Florida quickly climb as the day progresses. The high humidity and lack of shade make it feel even hotter, and even more difficult to cool down.

This is the first of three stories about the US workers who are struggling to survive a summer of extreme heat that shattered records from coast to coast. Parts two and three coming soon.

Why do the mass killers of the fossil fuel industry walk free while the heroes trying to stop them are imprisoned?

The sentences were handed down just as Hurricane Helene hit North Carolina. As homes were smashed, trucks swept down roads that had turned into rivers and residents were killed, in the placid setting of Southwark crown court two young women from Just Stop Oil, Phoebe Plummer and Anna Holland, were sentenced to two years and 20 months, respectively, for throwing tomato soup at the glass protecting Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. No prison terms have been handed to the people whose companies deliver climate breakdown, causing the deaths of many thousands and destruction valued not at the £10,000 estimated by the court in damage to the painting’s frame but trillions.

Everywhere we see a farcical disproportion. The same judge, Christopher Hehir, presided over the trial of the two sons of one of the richest men in Britain, George and Costas Panayiotou. On a night out, they viciously beat up two off-duty police officers, apparently for the hell of it. One of the officers required major surgery, including the insertion of titanium plates in his cheek and eye socket. One of the brothers, Costas, already had three similar assault convictions. But Hehir gave them both suspended sentences. He also decided that a police officer who had sex in his car with a drunk woman he had “offered to take home” should receive only a suspended sentence. Hehir said he wanted “to bring this sad and sorry tale to its end with a final act of mercy”. The solicitor general referred the case to the court of appeal for being unduly lenient, and the sentence was raised to 11 months in jail.

The historic North Carolina city was touted as a climate ‘haven’ – a reputation deadly Hurricane Helene left in ruins

Nestled in the bucolic Blue Ridge mountains of western North Carolina and far from any coast, Asheville was touted as a climate “haven” from extreme weather. Now the historic city has been devastated and cut off by Hurricane Helene’s catastrophic floodwaters, in a stunning display of the climate crisis’s unlimited reach in the United States.

Helene, which crunched into the western Florida coast as a category 4 hurricane on Thursday, brought darkly familiar carnage to a stretch of that state that has experienced three such storms in the past 13 months, flattening coastal homes and tossing boats inland.

It’s difficult to overstate how rapidly Australians have embraced solar power – there’s now more rooftop solar than coal-fired power. The key question is what policymakers can learn from its success

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Australia was a different place in 2011. Julia Gillard’s Labor government, the Greens and a couple of country independents were rewriting the country’s climate policies, including introducing a world-leading carbon pricing system and creating three agencies to back it up.

Those organisations – the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, the Australian Renewable Energy Agency and the Climate Change Authority – have survived and help shape the investment and policy landscape. The carbon pricing system – falsely described as a tax – famously didn’t.

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Biden says he plans to visit affected areas after devastating storm destroys entire communities

As the south-east US continues recovery efforts after Hurricane Helene’s devastation, the storm’s death toll keeps climbing, with more than 100 killed across several states, Joe Biden said Monday.

The president said that he was planning to visit the areas affected by Helene on Wednesday or Thursday, as long as it does not disrupt rescue and recovery operations.

Labor government has undermined case to co-host 2026 UN climate summit with island nations, Dr Maina Talia declares

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Tuvalu’s climate minister says Australia’s decision to approve three coalmine expansions calls into question its claim to be a “member of the Pacific family”, and undermines the Australian case to co-host the 2026 UN climate summit with island nations.

Dr Maina Talia said last week’s mine approvals that analysts say could generate more than 1.3bn tonnes of carbon dioxide across their lifetime once the coal is shipped and burned overseas was “a direct threat to our collective future”.

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At least 30 stranded or missing and hundreds injured after heaviest monsoon rains in two decades

More than 200 people were killed in Nepal over the weekend in what experts described as some of the worst flash flooding to have hit the capital, Kathmandu, and the surrounding valleys.

Swathes of Kathmandu were left underwater after the heaviest monsoon rains in two decades fell on Friday and Saturday, washing away entire neighbourhoods, bridges and roads. The heavy rains caused the Bagmati River, which runs through the city, to swell more than 2 metres higher than deemed safe.

One of Bolivia’s first female Indigenous mountain climbers, Cecilia Llusco has scaled its highest peaks, changed the tourism landscape – and now has her eye on Everest

At 5,200m above sea level, two women sit at a stone table. Mountains pierce the horizon in all directions. An imposing glacier covers the top of Huayna Potosí, a peak that stands at 6,088m. Its white surface, with a narrow footpath traversing it, gleams under the low afternoon sun.

Cecilia Llusco is sitting eating crackers with caramel spread and drinking coca tea.

‘Our polleras don’t impeded us’ says Cecilia Llusco of the traditional garment she and other female guides wear to climb

With the last coal-fired plant closing on Monday, we chart the rise and fall of the once-indispensable fuel that powered modern Britain

• End of an era as Britain’s last coal-fired power plant shuts down

Britain’s transition to a low-carbon future has reached a milestone with the closure of its last remaining coal-fired power plant at Ratcliffe-on-Soar in Nottinghamshire.

The shutdown of the 57-year-old power plant on Monday ends more than 140 years of coal power generation in the UK – an industrial story closely interwoven with Britain’s socioeconomic and political history.

Academics say there has been no serious response from FAO to their complaints of ‘serious distortions’ in report

More than 20 scientific experts have written to the UN’s food agency expressing shock at its failure to revise or withdraw a livestock emissions report that two of its cited academics have said contained “multiple and egregious errors”.

The alleged inaccuracies are understood to have downplayed the potential of dietary change to reduce agricultural greenhouse gases, which make up about a quarter of total anthropogenic emissions and mostly derive from livestock.

UK’s 142-year history of coal-fired electricity ends as turbines at Ratcliffe-on-Soar plant in Nottinghamshire stop for good

Britain’s only remaining coal power plant at Ratcliffe-on-Soar in Nottinghamshire will generate electricity for the last time on Monday after powering the UK for 57 years.

The power plant will come to the end of its life in line with the government’s world-leading policy to phase out coal power which was first signalled almost a decade ago.

It will be ‘complicated recovery’ in North Carolina, Florida, Tennessee, South Carolina and Georgia, says head of Fema

The head of the US disaster relief agency has called Hurricane Helene, which has killed at least 64 people so far, a “true multi-state event” that caused “significant infrastructure damage” and had been made worse because of global heating.

“This is going to be a really complicated recovery in each of the five states” of Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee, the Fema administrator, Deanne Criswell, said.

The lassitude that distinguishes our moment is born of sorrow and buried rage. We act like colonial subjects because, in effect, that’s what we are

“Kids these days are such snowflakes! So flaccid and self-involved, so doomy and anxious. If it’s not the drugs, it’s the screen time, right? I mean, what’s their problem?”

I try to sidestep conversations like these. Engaging saps so much time and energy. But avoiding them leaves me feeling dirty. Not because I’ve foregone an opportunity to win an argument, but because I know I’ve failed to defend those who need and deserve my solidarity.

Two countries agree to modifications beneath Matterhorn peak, one of Europe’s highest summits

Switzerland and Italy have redrawn a border that traverses an Alpine peak as melting glaciers shift the historically defined frontier.

The two countries agreed to the modifications beneath the Matterhorn, one of the highest mountains in Europe, which straddles Switzerland’s Zermatt region and Italy’s Aosta valley.

‘The Grapevine’, which connects the metropolis to the state’s agricultural hub, now serves as a window to the effects of climate crisis

Wildfires. Snowstorms. Falling boulders. DC Williams has long given up on predicting what the day will bring on Interstate 5 near Tejon Pass, an eight-lane stretch of highway that winds through the steep mountains north of Los Angeles.

Williams has been an officer with the California Highway Patrol and worked in this area for 11 years. On a chilly day this spring, he wore a thick black jacket even as he sat inside his Ford Explorer on a bridge overlooking the highway.

Rightwing US thinktank claimed in report that non-profit holding trainings is ‘corruptly influencing the courts’

A rightwing organization is attacking efforts to educate judges about the climate crisis. The group appears to be connected to Leonard Leo, the architect of the rightwing takeover of the American judiciary who helped select Trump’s supreme court nominees, the Guardian has learned.

The Washington DC-based non-profit Environmental Law Institute (ELI)’s Climate Judiciary Project holds seminars for lawyers and judges about the climate crisis. It aims to “provide neutral, objective information to the judiciary about the science of climate change as it is understood by the expert scientific community and relevant to current and future litigation”, according to ELI’s website.