As energy firms race to meet challenges of storing power, critics worry about fluctuations in the depth of the loch

Brian Shaw stood at the edge of Loch Ness and pointed to a band of glistening pebbles and damp sand skirting the shore. It seemed as if the tide had gone out.

Overnight, Foyers, a small pumped-storage power station, had recharged itself, drawing up millions of litres of water into a reservoir high up on a hill behind it, ready for release through its turbines to boost the UK’s electricity supply. That led to the surface of Loch Ness, the largest body of freshwater in the UK, falling by 14cm in a matter of hours.

Video footage, described as ‘callous’ and ‘pretty dreadful’, shows Sam Jones grabbing the joey from its mother at night

A US hunting influencer who shared video of herself snatching a baby wombat away from its mother is being investigated for a potential breach of her Australian visa.

The footage, with scenes described as “callous” by the RSPCA and “pretty dreadful” by the foreign affairs minister, Penny Wong, showed the Montana-based influencer Sam Jones grabbing the wombat joey at night as it was walking with its mother.

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EPA takes aim at almost every major pollution rule in what environmentalists call act of ‘malice toward the planet’

Donald Trump’s administration is to reconsider the official finding that greenhouse gases are harmful to public health, a move that threatens to rip apart the foundation of the US’s climate laws, amid a stunning barrage of actions to weaken or repeal a host of pollution limits upon power plants, cars and waterways.

Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued an extraordinary cavalcade of pollution rule rollbacks on Wednesday, led by the announcement it would potentially scrap a landmark 2009 finding by the US government that planet-heating gases, such carbon dioxide, pose a threat to human health.

Blood tests on migratory chicks fed plastics by their parents show neurodegeneration, as well as cell rupture and stomach lining decay

Ingesting plastic is leaving seabird chicks with brain damage “akin to Alzheimer’s disease”, according to a new study – adding to growing evidence of the devastating impact of plastic pollution on marine wildlife.

Analysis of young sable shearwaters, a migratory bird that travels between Australia’s Lord Howe Island and Japan, has found that plastic waste is causing damage to seabird chicks not apparent to the naked eye, including decay of the stomach lining, cell rupture and neurodegeneration.

Oil giants retreat on climate pledges, embrace Trump-era fossil fuel policies at CERAWeek in Texas

At a major oil and gas conference in Texas this week, companies publicly retreated from their flashy climate pledges of years past, redoubling their commitment to planet-warming fossil fuels.

The withdrawals illustrate the companies’ allegiance not to ordinary Americans, but to their shareholders and the climate-skeptical Trump administration, advocates said.

The US president is making energy deals with Japan and Ukraine, and in Africa has even touted resurrecting coal

Donald Trump’s repeated mantra of “drill, baby, drill” demands that more oil and gas be extracted in the United States, but the president has set his sights on an even broader goal: keeping the world hooked on planet-heating fossil fuels for as long as possible.

In deals being formulated with countries such as Japan and Ukraine, Trump is using US leverage in tariffs and military aid to bolster the flow of oil and gas around the world. In Africa, his administration has even touted the resurrection of coal, the dirtiest of all fossil fuels, to bring energy to the continent.

Mangroves are being destroyed and residents displaced to make way for an airport to serve president Nayib Bukele’s vision of a tax-free economic hub

When Nayib Bukele launched his presidential campaign in the eastern department of La Unión in 2018, the new outsider politician stood in a street packed with supporters and promised a new airport. La Unión and the rest of El Salvador’s eastern region have historically been neglected by governments, with few infrastructure projects and widespread poverty.

Just a month later, Bukele travelled to Germany to lobby for his project. “Munich airport is interested in operating our new airport that we will build in La Unión,” he said.

Injecting pollutants into the atmosphere to reflect the sun would be extremely dangerous, but the UK is funding field trials

Some years ago in the pages of the Guardian, we sounded the alarm about the increasing attention being paid to solar geoengineering – a barking mad scheme to cancel global heating by putting pollutants in the atmosphere that dim the sun by reflecting some sunlight back to space.

In one widely touted proposition, fleets of aircraft would continually inject sulphur compounds into the upper atmosphere, simulating the effects of a massive array of volcanoes erupting continuously. In essence, we have broken the climate by releasing gigatonnes of fossil-fuel carbon dioxide, and solar geoengineering proposes to “fix” it by breaking a very different part of the climate system.

Raymond T Pierrehumbert FRS is professor of planetary physics at the University of Oxford. He is an author of the 2015 US National Academy of Sciences report on climate intervention

Michael E Mann ForMemRS is presidential distinguished professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Our Fragile Moment: How Lessons from Earth’s Past Can Help Us Survive the Climate Crisis

Mining companies are poised to mine the deep sea – but opposition is growing. What is the environmental cost, and are these metals actually needed?

Research shows apex predators are increasing in numbers and excreting important nutrients into Top End waterways

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The growing saltwater crocodile population in the Northern Territory has led to the creatures gorging on nine times more prey than they did 50 years ago, with the apex predators contributing important nutrients to Top End waterways, new research suggests.

Saltwater crocodile populations have increased exponentially in recent decades, from less than 3,000 in 1971, when a ban on hunting was introduced, to more than 100,000 animals today.

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Swings between drought and floods striking from Dallas to Shanghai, while Madrid and Cairo are among cities whose climate has flipped

Climate whiplash is already hitting major cities around the world, bringing deadly swings between extreme wet and dry weather as the climate crisis intensifies, a report has revealed.

Dozens more cities, including Lucknow, Madrid and Riyadh have suffered a climate “flip” in the last 20 years, switching from dry to wet extremes, or vice versa. The report analysed the 100 most populous cities, plus 12 selected ones, and found that 95% of them showed a distinct trend towards wetter or drier weather.

Tiny bits of plastic can end up in water and soil at alarming levels, said lead author of University of Missouri paper

Fertilizers that shed microplastics are increasingly spreading on America’s cropland, research shows, raising new worry about the soil contamination and safety of the US food supply.

A peer-reviewed University of Missouri paper found common types of controlled-release fertilizers are often encapsulated with plastic and can be so small that they could be considered microplastics. Those are designed to break down into even smaller pieces of plastic once spread in fields.

In addition to layoffs and hiring freezes, a ‘God squad’ can effectively veto ESA protections for endangered species

Donald Trump’s administration, backed by House Republicans and Elon Musk’s Doge agency, are carrying out an attack on the Endangered Species Act (ESA) and federal wildlife agencies that, if successful, will almost certainly drive numerous species into extinction, environmental advocates warn.

The three-pronged attack is designed to freeze endangered wildlife protections to more quickly push through oil, gas and development projects, opponents say.

Annual survey by IQAir based on toxic PM2.5 particles reveals some progress in pollution levels in India and China

Nearly every country on Earth has dirtier air than doctors recommend breathing, a report has found.

Only seven countries met the World Health Organization’s guidelines for tiny toxic particles known as PM2.5 last year, according to analysis from the Swiss air quality technology company IQAir.

Chris Wright signals abandonment of Biden’s ‘irrational, quasi-religious’ climate policies at industry conference

The world needs more planet-heating fossil fuel, not less, Donald Trump’s newly appointed energy secretary, Chris Wright, told oil and gas bigwigs on Monday.

“We are unabashedly pursuing a policy of more American energy production and infrastructure, not less,” he said in the opening plenary talk of CERAWeek, a swanky annual conference in Houston, Texas, led by the financial firm S&P Global.