The Guardian Climate Change

Bring in ‘future homes standard’ or leave families at risk of higher bills and emissions for decades, MPs and experts say

Ministers must take steps now to ensure that all homes are built to the most efficient low-carbon standards, or risk locking households into higher bills and greenhouse gas emissions for decades to come, a group of MPs and experts have urged.

The government is mulling changes to the building regulations in England to bring in a “future homes standard” that would require all new homes to be built with low-carbon equipment such as heat pumps and solar panels.

In 2020, nine bodies were found near US-Mexico border. In the first eight months of 2024, there were 108.

Ten times as many migrants died in New Mexico near the US-Mexico border in each of the last two years compared with just five years ago.

During the first eight months of 2024, the bodies of 108 presumed migrants, mostly from Mexico and Central America, were found near the border in New Mexico, according to the most recent data. Many of the bodies were discovered less than 10 miles (16km) from El Paso.

Investors say climate change poses biggest risk to their assets, and urge Albanese government to see the economic dangers of a slow path to net zero

• Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates
• Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast

Institutional investors dealing with portfolios in the trillions of dollars aren’t typically the most vocal climate campaigners. You won’t find many superannuation fund staff, fund managers, asset consultants or brokers with a placard on the streets or on top of a Newcastle coal train.

But you may increasingly find them on a screen you’re watching. Or at least their message.

Sign up for Guardian Australia’s breaking news email

UC San Diego has added an innovative prerequisite to ‘prepare students for the future they really will encounter’

Melani Callicott, a human biology major at the University of California, San Diego, thinks about the climate crisis all the time. She discusses it with family and friends because of the intensity of hurricanes like Milton and Helene, which have ravaged the southern US, she says. “It just seems like it’s affecting more people every day.”

That’s one reason why she is glad that UC San Diego has implemented an innovative graduation requirement for students starting this autumn: a course in climate change. Courses must cover at least 30% climate-related content and address two of four areas, including scientific foundations, human impacts, mitigation strategies and project-based learning. About 7,000 students from the class of 2028 will be affected this year.

Natural sinks of forests and peat were key to Finland’s ambitious target to be carbon neutral by 2035. But now, the land has started emitting more greenhouse gases than it stores

Read more: Trees and land absorbed almost no CO2 last year. Is nature’s carbon sink failing?

Tiina Sanila-Aikio cannot remember a summer this warm. The months of midnight sun around Inari, in Finnish Lapland, have been hot and dry. Conifer needles on the branch-tips are orange when they should be a deep green. The moss on the forest floor, usually swollen with water, has withered.

“I have spoken with many old reindeer herders who have never experienced the heat that we’ve had this summer. The sun keeps shining and it never rains,” says Sanila-Aikio, former president of the Finnish Sami parliament.

A US study estimates the total climate pollution from LNG was 33% greater than that from coal over a 20-year period. This should have major ramifications for emissions policy

• Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast

The claim that Australian gas exports are “clean” and needed to drive the transition to net zero greenhouse gas emissions has become an article of faith for significant parts of the country’s industry, media and political classes – often repeated, only occasionally challenged.

It has buttressed a massive expansion of the liquified natural gas (LNG) industry in the north of the continent over the past decade, with major new developments in Queensland, Western Australia and the Northern Territory.

Sign up for Guardian Australia’s breaking news email

The sudden collapse of carbon sinks was not factored into climate models – and could rapidly accelerate global heating

It begins each day at nightfall. As the light disappears, billions of zooplankton, crustaceans and other marine organisms rise to the ocean surface to feed on microscopic algae, returning to the depths at sunrise. The waste from this frenzy – Earth’s largest migration of creatures – sinks to the ocean floor, removing millions of tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere each year.

This activity is one of thousands of natural processes that regulate the Earth’s climate. Together, the planet’s oceans, forests, soils and other natural carbon sinks absorb about half of all human emissions.

New climate network will teach trainee doctors more about heatstroke, dengue and malaria and role of global warming in health

Mosquito-borne diseases such as dengue and malaria will become a bigger part of the curriculum at medical schools across Europe in the face of the climate crisis.

Future doctors will also have more training on how to recognise and treat heatstroke, and be expected to take the climate impact of treatments such as inhalers for asthma into account, medical school leaders said, announcing the formation of the European Network on Climate & Health Education (Enche).

Former administration officials say Trump deliberately denied funds to states he deemed politically hostile

Donald Trump deliberately withheld disaster aid to states he deemed politically hostile to him as US president and will do so again unimpeded if he returns to the White House, several former Trump administration officials have warned.

As Hurricane Helene and then Hurricane Milton have ravaged much of the south-eastern US in the past two weeks, Trump has sought to pin blame upon Joe Biden’s administration for a ponderous response to the disasters, even suggesting that this was deliberate due to the number of Republican voters affected by the storms.

The Iranian photographer reveals the dangers posed to fishermen and farmers by the polluted water in which he used to swim

The world’s largest enclosed body of water, the Caspian Sea, is surrounded by jeopardies. Declining water levels from global heating have been exacerbated by increasing levels of extraction from the Volga and the Ural, the Russian rivers that flow into it. Satellite photographs show the sea shrinking at a dramatic rate. And each year increasing levels of pollutants from the five coastal states that border the Caspian contaminate it with spills from growing numbers of oil and gas fields, and with industrial and domestic waste from expanding coastal towns and cities, a magnet for internal migration.

The Iranian photographer Khashayar Javanmardi grew up on the shores of the Caspian Sea in northern Iran and used to count the hours at school before he could return to swim in it. He has spent the past few years, however, documenting the environmental decline along its coastline.

Caspian: A Southern Reflection is published by Loose Joints (£44)

We are losing in the fight against global warming, it is time to put effort into controlling what we pump into the atmosphere

The havoc unleashed by Hurricane Milton provided unambiguous evidence that we are entering a critical and alarming new phase in the planet’s climate crisis. Rising fossil fuel emissions have triggered increases in ocean temperatures and sea levels to such an extent they are generating some of the most destructive storms ever experienced in Florida. Together with Hurricane Helene earlier, the lives of about 250 people have been claimed and thousands of homes destroyed. Florida has been left reeling and forecasters have warned there is more to come – a lot more.

It is a grim prognosis that should be galvanising Florida’s political leaders into taking urgent action to protect the state. Extraordinarily, this has not been the case. Despite the intensification of hurricanes and worsening flooding over the past decade, governor Ron DeSantis has consistently rejected the idea that global warming poses a threat to Florida or that the phenomenon exists at all. A few weeks ago, he signed a law erasing the words “climate change” from state statutes and effectively pledged the state’s future to burning fossil fuels. Such behaviour is disturbing.

While some embrace technological innovations, others are forced to close as global heating causes lack of snowfall

Sitting at his window in Västerås, central Sweden, Thomas Ohlander is wondering when the winter season might start for his outdoor adventure business, Do The North. “To schedule a trip we have to be sure of snow,” he says, “And that start date is going backwards at a crazy speed.”

Each year, Ohlander’s local ice-skating club has recorded the first date on which its members managed to get out on the frozen lakes. In 1988, that date was 4 November; this year the prediction is 4 December.

Hurrican Milton, the Middle East crisis, forest fires in Brasília and the Northern Lights: the last seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists

Drone footage from 2 October shows how more than a year’s worth of rain fell in two days in September in south-east Morocco, filling up lakes that had been dry for decades

• Dramatic images show the first floods in the Sahara in half a century

Harris and White House criticize Donald Trump for attacks on federal response to Hurricanes Helene and Milton

• Tell us: how have you been affected by Hurricane Milton?

Hurricane Milton made landfall as a category 3 hurricane on Wednesday night at around 8.30pm near Siesta Key in Florida. For about eight hours, the storm brought intense rainfall, flooding, tornadoes, storm surge and strong winds before moving off over the ocean just north of Cape Canaveral as a category 1 hurricane.

Our visual team have put together this visual guide to the damage caused:

More than year’s worth of rain fell in two days in south-east Morocco, filling up lake that had been dry for decades

Dramatic pictures have emerged of the first floods in the Sahara in half a century.

Two days of rainfall in September exceeded yearly averages in several areas of south-eastMorocco and caused a deluge, officials of the country’s meteorology agency said in early October. In Tagounite, a village about 450km(280 miles) south of the capital, Rabat, more than 100mm (3.9 inches) was recorded in a 24-hour period.

Storms Helene and Milton have triggered rise of misinformation stoked by Trump and fellow Republicans

• Hurricane Milton – latest updates

Meteorologists tracking the advance of Hurricane Milton have been targeted by a deluge of conspiracy theories that they were controlling the weather, abuse and even death threats, amid what they say is an unprecedented surge in misinformation as two major hurricanes have hit the US.

A series of falsehoods and threats have swirled in the two weeks since Hurricane Helene tore through six states causing several hundred deaths, followed by Milton crashing into Florida on Wednesday.

The supposedly green project – brainchild of the previous Tory government – will increase emissions, not reduce them

This will be Keir Starmer’s HS2: a hugely expensive scheme that will either be abandoned, scaled back or require massive extra funding to continue, after many billions have been spent. The government’s plan for carbon capture and storage (CCS) – catching carbon dioxide from major industry and pumping it into rocks under the North Sea – is a fossil fuel-driven boondoggle that will accelerate climate breakdown. Its ticket price of £21.7bn is just the beginning of a phenomenal fiscal nightmare.

There might be a case for a CCS programme if the following conditions were met. First, that the money for cheaper and more effective projects had already been committed. The opposite has happened. Labour slashed its green prosperity plan from £28bn a year to £15bn, and with it a sensible and rational programme for insulating 19m homes.

George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

Climate change deniers such as Florida’s Ron DeSantis lament the impact of such events but won’t acknowledge the underlying problem

The preparations for Hurricane Milton were on a mammoth scale, as the clean-up will be. The storm thankfully lost some of its force before it slammed into Florida, making landfall on Wednesday night as a category 3 hurricane. But many more lives would surely have been lost without the massive evacuation and the deployment of thousands of national guard troops and personnel from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

This was the second direct hit on the state in less than a fortnight, after Hurricane Helene, which killed at least 225 people in the US. The hotter ocean temperatures which worsened these storms are hundreds of times likelier because of human-made global heating, a new analysis has shown. Climate change may have increased the rain dumped on parts of the south by Helene by 50%, scientists believe. Another study has suggested such double punches could arrive every three years thanks to the continuing burning of fossil fuels.

Graphics show storm that made landfall as category 3 and ushered in intense rainfall, tornadoes and storm surge

• Hurricane Milton’s destructive power – in pictures

Hurricane Milton made landfall as a category 3 hurricane on Wednesday night at around 8.30pm near Siesta Key in Florida. For about eight hours, the storm brought intense rainfall, flooding, tornadoes, storm surge and strong winds before moving off over the ocean just north of Cape Canaveral as a category 1 hurricane.

Some of the hardest-hit areas included Sarasota, Fort Myers, St Petersburg, St Lucie and other cities on the Gulf coast. Storm surge warnings were in effect along Florida’s east coast to Georgia’s Altamaha Sound.