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Air temperatures hit all-time highs for month and Arctic sea ice level was ‘particularly low’

The world this year experienced its hottest September on record, scientists have reported.

Surface air temperatures last month were 0.05C warmer than in September 2019, making it the hottest September on record globally, experts from the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said.

Climate and environment policies nearly always end up in court these days. They may have a harder time surviving if Amy Coney Barrett cements a conservative majority on the Supreme Court.

Wildfires in California have set a new record, but some fire scientists say focusing on that number is doing more harm than good.

(Image credit: JOSH EDELSON/AFP via Getty Images)

747, one of more than 2,200 brown bears roaming Alaska’s Katmai national park and preserve, won after a week of online voting

In Alaska’s annual battle of furry heavyweights, a salmon-chomping bruin nicknamed 747 – like the jumbo jet - has emerged as the people’s choice as the most fabulously fat.

The bear, one of more than 2,200 brown bears roaming Alaska’s Katmai National Park and Preserve, was victorious late on Tuesday after a week of frenzied online voting (by humans) in what has become an international sensation: Fat Bear Week.

Study calls for more rights for indigenous reserves as rising gold price attracts more miners

A new report has exposed the scale and impact of mining on indigenous reserves in Amazon countries as gold prices soared during the Covid-19 pandemic. More than 20% of indigenous lands are overlapped by mining concessions and illegal mining, it found, covering 450,000 sq km (174,000 sq miles) – and 31% of Amazon indigenous reserves are affected.

The report, released on Wednesday by the World Resources Institute, said indigenous people should be given more legal rights to manage and use their lands, and called for better environmental safeguards. As pressure mounts over the issue, a leading Brazilian thinktank has called for regulations tracing gold sold by financial institutions.

Across most forest types and ages, thinning had little impact on the severity of Black Saturday fires in Victoria, ANU study suggests

Removing trees to thin out forests is unlikely to cut the risk of severe bushfires despite the claims of forest industry groups, according to the authors of a new study.

Analysis of forests that burned in Victoria’s Black Saturday fires in 2009 found in most cases areas that had been thinned did not see less severe burning and, depending on the type of trees, such intervention sometimes made fires more intense.

We do not know how many species live on Earth. Barcoding could change that – and open the way for incredible discoveries

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Guanacaste conservation area in north-west Costa Rica is the most DNA barcoded place on Earth. On its western frontier, jaguars hunt turtles from the mangrove swamps that line the Pacific coast. Endangered spider monkeys swing through dry tropical forest, the remnants of a rapidly disappearing ecosystem that once ran from northern Mexico to Panama.

While some say CO2 capture is part of the problem, big projects are being invested in as a part solution to the climate crisis

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As the world dices with the climate emergency, businesses and governments are starting to push funding towards technology that aims to trap planet-heating gases rather than let them saturate the atmosphere.

Carbon capture is a controversial idea, attacked as a costly distraction from stopping emissions occurring in the first place.

In the past, although windfarms were located just off the coast of Scotland, manufacturing work was outsourced to Indonesia

Yesterday’s speech to the virtual Conservative party conference was classic Boris: amusing metaphors, whimsical slogans and grand rhetoric. The prime minister has pledged to usher in a “green industrial revolution” that will help us “bounce back greener” from Covid-19.

One of the most significant announcements was the scaling up of the offshore wind sector. The government intends to quadruple offshore wind capacity by 2030, with a promise to power all our kettles, lights and electric cars from clean, “guilt-free” electricity.

Mining giant and energy compny say they object to advertising targeting individual parties and had asked for campaign to be halted

Australia’s largest miner, BHP, and the largest energy company, Origin Energy, have suspended their membership of the Queensland Resources Council over state election advertisements urging people to “vote the Greens last”.

Several other major resource companies are understood to have raised concerns about advertisements, which the mining industry peak body says were approved by its board.

The document, which cost about $200,000, fails to mention either the realities of climate crisis or the downsides of the energy industry

The Trump administration’s energy department is rolling out a lengthy report touting oil and gas as “providing energy security and supporting our quality of life”, without acknowledging that fossil fuels are the main cause of the climate crisis.

Released a month before the election, the report is strikingly at odds with the realities of climate change that the American public has been coping with over the past few months, from huge wildfires to destructive derecho storms and a series of intense hurricanes.

Aurora Energy Research calculates investment would have to quadruple capacity

Boris Johnson’s bold new vision for offshore wind to power every home in the UK by 2030 would require almost £50bn in investment and the equivalent of one turbine to be installed every weekday for the whole of the next decade.

The huge investment, calculated by Aurora Energy Research, an Oxford-based consultancy, would increase the UK’s offshore wind power capacity by four times what it is today, to reach 40GW by 2030.

August complex fire expanded beyond 1m acres, elevating it from a mere ‘megafire’ to a new classification: ‘gigafire’

California’s extraordinary year of wildfires has spawned another new milestone – the first “gigafire”, a blaze spanning 1m acres, in modern history.

Related: California fires set bleak record as 4m acres destroyed

Government backs plan by London-based Entocycle to build facility outside capital

The UK’s first large-scale farm breeding insects for animal feed and pet food has moved a step closer after the government backed the project with a £10m funding package.

The new facility will be built by the insect farming start-up Entocycle, which will use it to raise black soldier flies fed on food waste to create sustainable insect protein.

PM pledges to transform country in keynote address to Conservative party conference

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Boris Johnson has said the UK must not return to the status quo after the coronavirus pandemic, promising a transformation akin to the “new Jerusalem” the postwar cabinet pledged in 1945.

The prime minister also mounted a robust defence of the private sector, saying “free enterprise” must lead the recovery and that that he intended to significantly roll back the extraordinary state intervention the crisis had necessitated.

Gruesome find comes as 12 people are reported killed with a further 20 still missing

The task of searching for victims of the French and Italian floods in Alpine villages and on nearby coasts has grown more gruesome as authorities have said corpses from cemeteries have been swept down the mountain by violent rains.

A spokeswoman for France’s Alpes-Maritimes regional administration, badly hit by the storm along with the Italian regions of Liguria and Piedmont, said it was unclear where the bodies had come from but corpses unearthed from cemeteries had washed up on the Italian side.

Inquiry into encounters off coasts of Spain and Portugal says speed could be a factor

Experts investigating a series of extraordinary encounters between orcas and yachts off the coasts of Spain and Portugal believe the animals responsible may have been triggered to target boat rudders by an earlier “aversive incident” involving some kind of vessel.

Related: 'They were having a real go': man tells of orca encounter off Spain