Tory former energy secretary facing conflict of interest claim over JCB owner links

Shadow cabinet secretary Claire Coutinho accepted donation from Lord Bamford while overseeing millions awarded to his family businesses in green grants

A Conservative former cabinet ­minister who took donations from the billionaire boss of the JCB digger dynasty – including a £7,000 trip on his VIP private helicopter – oversaw decisions to award his family’s business empire millions in taxpayer-funded green energy grants.

Claire Coutinho also posed for ­pictures promoting Lord Bamford’s personal £100m hydrogen engine project and accepted a £7,500 donation from JCB to her local election campaign while she was the energy secretary in Rishi Sunak’s government.

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‘A total waste of time’: why Papua New Guinea pulled out of Cop29 and why climate advocates are worried

Country’s foreign minister says UN climate summits have produced ‘no results’ as Pacific nation takes the rare step of withdrawing from upcoming Cop29

Papua New Guinea’s decision to pull out of an upcoming UN global climate summit due to frustration over “empty promises and inaction” has prompted concern from climate advocates, who fear the move will isolate the Pacific nation and put vital funding at risk.

Prime minister James Marape announced in August the country would not attend Cop29 in “protest at the big nations” for a lack of “quick support to victims of climate change”. Then last week, foreign affairs minister Justin Tckatchenko, confirmed Papua New Guinea would withdraw from high-level talks at the summit, which begins on 11 November in Baku, Azerbaijan, describing it as “a total waste of time”.

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Severe drought puts nearly half a million children at risk in Amazon – report

Warming climate has caused rivers used for transport to dry up, leaving children with little food, water or school access, says Unicef

Two years of severe drought in the Amazon rainforest have left nearly half a million children facing shortages of water and food or limited access to school, according to a UN report.

Scant rainfall and extreme heat driven by the climate crisis have caused rivers in what is usually the wettest region on Earth to retreat so much that they can no longer be traversed by boats, cutting off communities.

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This year ‘virtually certain’ to be hottest on record, finds EU space programme

Copernicus Climate Change Service says 2024 marks ‘a new milestone’ and should raise ambitions at Cop29 summit

It is “virtually certain” that 2024 will be the hottest year on record, the European Union’s space programme has found.

The prognosis comes the week before diplomats meet at the Cop29 climate summit and a day after a majority of voters in the US, the biggest historical polluter of planet-heating gas, chose to make Donald Trump president.

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Nearly all of US states are facing droughts, an unprecedented number

More than 150 million people and 318m acres of crops are affected by droughts after summer of record heat

Every US state except Alaska and Kentucky is facing drought, an unprecedented number, according to the US Drought Monitor.

A little more than 45% of the US and Puerto Rico is in drought this week, according to the tracker. About 54% of land in the 48 contiguous US states is affected by droughts.

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Trump donor fined for pollution leads a fight to end methane emission penalties

Detailed plans from 30 oil and gas producers come amid historic levels of potent planet-heating emissions

A powerful US oil and gas industry lobby group has drawn up detailed plans to kill off penalties for emitting methane, a potent planet-heating gas that’s increasing at the fastest rate in decades, with this effort led by a major donor to Donald Trump whose company has just been fined for methane pollution.

Leaked internal documents from the American Exploration & Production Council (AXPC), a group of 30 oil and gas producers, outline a push to repeal a fee levied on methane emissions should the former US president win this week’s election and Republicans gain control of Congress.

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Spain floods: searchers scour car parks and malls amid fears death toll will rise

Day after king and PM pelted by angry residents, search focuses on areas where people could have been trapped

Hundreds of civil and military emergency workers are searching shopping centres, garages and underground car parks for more victims of floods in the Valencia region that have killed at least 214 people, as public anger mounts over Spanish authorities’ handling of the disaster.

Yellow and amber weather warnings were in place for parts of Valencia and neighbouring Catalonia on Monday, with people in the affected areas advised to stay off the roads and keep away from the coast and rivers.

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Mud and insults thrown as Spanish king and PM visit flood-hit town

King Felipe heckled in Paiporta, one of the municipalities worst affected by last week’s floods

Hundreds of people have heckled Spain’s King Felipe and Queen Letizia, as well as the prime minister and the regional leader of Valencia – throwing mud and shouting “murderers” – as the group attempted an official visit to one of the municipalities hardest hit by the deadly floods.

The scenes playing out in Paiporta on Sunday laid bare the mounting sense of abandonment among the devastated areas and the lingering anger over why an alert urging residents not to leave home on Tuesday was sent after the flood waters began surging.

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‘We didn’t realise how hard it is’: small farmers in Europe struggle to get by

Brutal economic situation has inflicted misery on farmers who struggle to turn a profit and forced some to look for alternative streams of revenue

When Coen van den Bighelaar first spoke to school friends about taking over their parents’ dairy farms, he was the only one of the four to voice serious doubts. Fresh out of university, he was making more money in a comfortable office than his father did toiling for twice as long in the field.

But six years later, Bighelaar has followed in his parents’ footsteps, while his friends’ enthusiasm has waned. One quit farming to take a job in logistics. Another opened a daycare centre to supplement the income from selling milk. A third is thinking about buying land and moving to Canada.

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Spain’s apocalyptic floods show undeniable truths: the climate crisis is getting worse and Big Oil is killing us | Jonathan Watts

The devastating flooding should spur this month’s Cop29 climate conference to press for immediate action, not look away

Move on. Nothing to see here. Just another ordinary, everyday apocalypse.

If past experience is any guide, the world’s reaction to the floods in Spain last week will be similar to that of motorway drivers at a crash scene: slow down, take in the horror, outwardly express sympathy, inwardly give thanks that fate picked someone else – and foot on the accelerator.

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Spain floods: 10,000 troops and police drafted in to deal with disaster

Pedro Sánchez orders largest peacetime troop deployment to deal with flooding that has killed 211 people

Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, has ordered the country’s largest peacetime military deployment, announcing that 10,000 troops and police officers will be drafted in to help deal with the aftermath of this week’s devastating floods, which have killed at least 211 people in eastern, southern and central regions.

Speaking after chairing a meeting of the flood crisis committee, Sánchez said the government was mobilising all the resources at its disposal to deal with the “terrible tragedy”, which stuck hardest in the eastern region of Valencia. He also acknowledged that much of the help still wasn’t getting through and called for unity and an end to political bickering and blame games.

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Finland exports snow-saving mats to ski resorts hit by climate crisis

Preserving previous year’s snow for start of season can combat increasingly unpredictable winters

Before the arrival of electric fridges and freezers, people across Finland would saw a block of ice from a river or lake before the spring thaw, thickly cover it in an insulating layer of sawdust and stack it in barns, pits or ice cellars to protect produce from the warm air of the summer months.

Amid global heating and increasingly unpredictable shorter winters, a modern twist on the traditional jään säilöminen (ice preservation) technique is now being touted as a way to save Europe’s struggling low- and medium-altitude ski resorts.

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Almost two dozen countries at high risk of acute hunger, UN report reveals

Sudan, South Sudan, Mali, Palestine and Haiti rated at level of highest concern in latest six-monthly analysis

Acute food insecurity is expected to worsen in war-stricken Sudan and nearly two dozen other countries and territories in the next six months, largely as a result of conflict and violence, an analysis by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization and World Food Programme has found.

The latest edition of the twice-yearly Hunger Hotspots report, published on Thursday, provides early warnings on food crises and situations around the world where food insecurity is likely to worsen, with a focus on the most severe and deteriorating situations of acute hunger.

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Spain floods: number killed passes 150 as scientists say climate change ‘most likely explanation’ – as it happened

At least 155 people have reportedly died with more rain forecast for the flood-hit region of Valencia

Experts have been giving their reaction to yesterday’s disaster - sounding a warning about our preparedness and ability to cope.

Extreme weather events are becoming more intense, are lasting longer and are occurring more frequently as a result of human-induced climate change, scientists say.

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Spain flood death toll expected to rise amid anger over lack of preparedness

Victims say ‘water was already here’ by the time warning was issued, as military prepares to start searching worst-hit areas

Rescue workers in Spain are searching for more victims after deadly floods, as questions are raised about how one of the world’s most developed nations failed to respond adequately to such an extreme storm.

Torrential rains that began at the start of the week led to flooding that has left at least 95 people dead, the deadliest such disaster in the western European country since 1973.

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Spain’s deadly floods and droughts are two faces of the climate crisis coin

Scientists say violent weather battering Mediterranean is a harbinger of what the rest of Europe can soon expect

Residents of Chiva, a small town on the outskirts of Valencia, can expect a grim future of worsening drought as the planet heats up and the country dries out. But on Tuesday, they also witnessed a year’s worth of rainfall in a matter of hours.

The torrential rains that flooded southern and eastern Spain on Tuesday night, ripping away bridges and tearing through towns, have killed scores of people. Fossil fuel pollution plays a role in warping both extremes of the water cycle: heat evaporates water, leaving people and plants parched, but hot air can hold more moisture, increasing the potential for catastrophic downpours.

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‘Wicked problem’: five charts that show how the climate crisis is making Australia more dangerous

A report by BoM and CSIRO checks ‘vital signs of Australia’s climate’ – and shows temperature trends will only worsen

“It is a wicked problem,” says Dr Karl Braganza at the Bureau of Meteorology, after running through Australia’s latest State of the Climate report.

The effects of rising heat on land and in the oceans, coupled with rising greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, are changing Australia’s climate rapidly and “flowing through to how our society, economy and other things operate”.

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Mount Fuji snowless for longest time on record after sweltering Japan summer

As of 29 October, the iconic mountain was still without snow, marking the longest period since records began 130 years ago

Japan’s Mount Fuji remained snowless on Tuesday, marking the latest date that its slopes have been bare since records began 130 years ago, the country’s weather agency said.

The volcano’s snowcap begins forming on 2 October on average, and last year snow was first detected there on 5 October.

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Climate crisis caused half of European heat deaths in 2022, says study

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.

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NSW police fight to stop Newcastle port ‘protestival’ in second court challenge to protests in a month

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

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.

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