The Indian business tycoon and former Tata Group chairman Ratan Tata has died, aged 86.

Tata, who had headed India’s largest conglomerate for over 20 years, had been receiving intensive care at Mumbai hospital, according to Reuters.

He was famous for making large acquisitions, including buying the British tea firm Tetley in 2000 for $432m and the Anglo-Dutch steelmaker Corus in 2007 for $13bn, which at the time was an unprecedented takeover of a foreign firm by an Indian company. Tata Motors then acquired two of Britain’s most recognisable car brands: British Jaguar and Land Rover, from Ford Motor Co.

“It is with a profound sense of loss that we bid farewell to Mr Ratan Naval Tata, a truly uncommon leader whose immeasurable contributions have shaped not only the Tata Group but also the very fabric of our nation,” the company said.

Tata was described as a “a visionary business leader, a compassionate soul and an extraordinary human being” by the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi.

In a statement announcing Tata’s death Natarajan Chandrasekaran, the current chairman of Tata Sons, said: “On behalf of the entire Tata family, I extend our deepest condolences to his loved ones. His legacy will continue to inspire us as we strive to uphold the principles he so passionately championed.”

After gaining a degree in architecture from Cornell University in the United States, Tata returned to his homeland in India and, in 1962, began working for the company his great-grandfather had founded nearly a century earlier.

Three decades later, Ratan Tata took over from his uncle JRD Tata, ushering in a global outlook and an era of high growth. He shook up the company’s hierarchy by enforcing retirement ages and promoting young people to senior positions.

Tata oversaw the construction of the Indica, the first car model designed and built in India. He also oversaw the design of the Nano, which was promoted as the world’s cheapest car, contributing initial sketches for both models.

The Indica was a commercial success. The Nano, however, was discontinued after safety issues and a poor marketing campaign. It ended Tata’s dream of producing an affordable car for all Indians.

He was an licensed pilot, and was known for being quiet, modest and an animal lover. “My love for dogs as pets is ever strong and will continue for as long as I live,” the industrialist, who never married, said in a 2021 interview.

“There is an indescribable sadness every time one of my pets passes away, and I resolve I cannot go through another parting of that nature. And yet, two-three years down the road, my home becomes too empty and too quiet for me to live without them, so there is another dog that gets my affection and attention, just like the last one.”

In 2008, the Indian government awarded him the Padma Vibhushan, the country’s second-highest civilian honour.

Feeding wild raccoons around her home had seemed harmless enough, if odd, for one woman in the north-west for 35 years – until about 100 of them surrounded her home and demanded food.

The woman, who has not been named, was essentially trapped in her home near Poulsbo, Washington, and scared as the animals can be aggressive. She called the sheriff’s office, saying the raccoons were around her place day and night after their population “exploded” about six weeks ago.

“Somehow, the word got out in raccoon land and they all showed up to her house expecting a meal,” Kevin McCarty, a spokesperson for the Kitsap county sheriff, told local NBC station 9News.

He sent deputies to help the woman.

“They were shocked. They had never seen that many raccoons in one place. Nobody ever remembers being surrounded by a swarm of raccoons. This was a first,” he told the TV station.

The sheriff’s office even posted about it on social media with some extraordinary footage, showing the raccoons as if they had decided to hold a convention in a back yard.

Neighbors have not exactly been thrilled about the animals, who can be threatening and are often nicknamed trash bandits, for their dark fur color across the eyes making them look like masked thieves, or trash pandas, for their proclivity to dive into trash cans looking for scraps.

“I’d say it’s been about the last month or so I’ve noticed it,” Wendy Cronk, who lives nearby, told 9News. “I’ve had several raccoons in the yard recently. My dogs have gotten in a scuffle several times with a raccoon. I’ve even had to take one of my dogs to the vet after tussling with a raccoon. And I’ve also noticed there’s been a lot more hit raccoons up on the main road here.”

Cronk said she hopes it gets resolved soon.

“I just hope that somebody steps in and helps her take care of this problem … and hopefully she’ll quit doing it,” said Cronk.

Tim Bradley (Letters, 1 October) and Adam Halawi (Letters, 7 October) are comparing apples and pears. Most heat pumps in the UK are used to heat water for radiators or underfloor heating. Tim’s heat pump is heating air that is being ducted throughout his Swedish property. Assuming his ducting was already in place, all that would have needed changing was the heat source. But Adam’s radiators will need replacing with larger units due to the lower operating temperature, and I suspect his insulation will need upgrading.
David Anson
Sheffield

Your report (Squeezed out: last accordion maker in France to close shop after 105 years, 5 October) reminded me of the definition of a gentleman: one who can play the accordion, but doesn’t.
Dr Richard Carter
Putney, London

Zoe Williams thinks that Labour politicians should wear a uniform to stop fashion sleaze (7 October). She is being ironic, I hope, as the 20th-century history of political uniforms didn’t go well.
John Davies
Lancaster

The Housemartins, Everything But the Girl, Mick Ronson, the Bootleg Beatles, Blur and Oasis were all mentioned in your sports pages in Tuesday’s print edition. Is this proof that sport is the new rock’n’roll?
Neil Cole
Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire

Re bitterns (Letters, 7 October), our Irish musical heritage includes a song lamenting the death of a bittern, still sung today: An Bunnan Buidhe (The Yellow Bittern).
Jim Morrison
New Barnet, London

Several Florida jails and prisons are refusing to evacuate their residents ahead of Hurricane Milton despite being in the evacuation zone of the storm.

Manatee county jail, which has 1,200 incarcerated people and is located on the south-east side of Tampa Bay, in the path of the hurricane that was roaring towards it across the Gulf of Mexico on Wednesday, will not be evacuating, a representative of the jail told Newsweek on Tuesday.

The jail falls within the Zone A evacuation area, the outlet further reported. Those in Zone A could face a storm surge of up to 11ft and are supposed to be evacuated first, according to the Manatee county evacuation guide.

“We do not issue evacuation orders lightly,” said the Manatee county public safety director, Jodie Fiske, Newsweek reported. “Milton is anticipated to cause more storm surge than [Hurricane] Helene. So, if you stayed during Helene and got lucky, I would not press my luck with this particular system.”

Hurricane Helene hit north-western Florida near Tallahassee less than two weeks ago and the impact in the state and in many states further north, especially North Carolina, remains massive.

But a deputy with Manatee county jail told Newsweek that the jail would reportedly be stocked with sandbags and other supplies and in the event of flooding residents would be moved to the top floor of the jail. The Guardian could not reach a representative of the jail for comment.

Multiple jails and prisons in hurricane-hit states have previously failed to evacuate incarcerated people during a natural disaster, despite being located in a mandatory evacuation zone.

In South Carolina, at least two prisons were not evacuated during Hurricane Florence in 2018. “In the past, it’s been safer to leave them there,” a spokesman for the South Carolina department of corrections said, the BBC reported.

During Hurricane Katrina in 2005, hundreds of incarcerated people were left in the Orleans parish prison for four days during the deadly storm. Those incarcerated were left locked in their cells amid rising flood waters and without food or water.

Other Florida jails and prisons have also said they will not evacuate during Milton. Correctional facilities in the counties of Sarasota, Hernando, Pasco, Charlotte and Lee will also remain in place during the storm, according to 10 Tampa Bay, a local outlet.

Family members of those incarcerated are worried about their loved ones’ safety.

Julie Reimer, a Florida resident, told 10 Tampa Bay that she had relatives in both the Charlotte correctional institution and Hardee correctional institution.

Reimer, who is being identified by her maiden name due to fears of retaliation, said she was told by officials in both jails that they would not be evacuating. “They said their buildings are able to sustain a storm like this,” Reimer said to 10 Tampa Bay. “They seem to think this storm is not serious.”

Reimer told 10 Tampa Bay: “When my son was sentenced, he was not given a death sentence,” she said.

The category 5 Hurricane Milton is expected to double its wind field by the time it makes landfall in the US late Wednesday or early Thursday, with up to 15ft (4.5 metres) of storm surge along a low-lying stretch of the Florida coast that includes the cities of Tampa, St Petersburg and Sarasota.

Described as the “storm of a century”, with sustained winds still registering at 160mph (257km/h), Milton turned north-east overnight about 300 miles (480km) south-west of Tampa, aiming for heavily populated and highly vulnerable communities. It is expected to weaken slightly when it makes landfall to a category 4 with sustained wind speeds of about 130mph.

“Milton has the potential to be one of the most destructive hurricanes on record for west-central Florida,” the National Hurricane Center warned.

In an 8am update, the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, said it was not clear exactly where the eye of the storm would come ashore but the impact would be “broader than that … absolutely every place on the west coast of Florida could get major storm surge.”

DeSantis later said 8,000 national guard members would be activated and he had spoken with Joe Biden about Florida’s needs. “Everything that we’ve asked for, the administration has approved,” he said.

“If you are in a single storey home that is hit by a 15ft storm surge, which means that water comes in immediately, there’s nowhere to go,” said the mayor of Tampa, Jane Castor.

“So if you’re in it, basically that’s the coffin that you’re in.”

Deanne Criswell, the director of Fema, said at a news conference that she would travel to Florida on Wednesday – and would send more agency personnel to the state. “I want the people to hear it from me directly: Fema is ready.”

Authorities have issued mandatory evacuation orders across 11 Florida counties with a combined population of about 5.9 million people and said anyone choosing to stay behind must fend for themselves.

Before Helene hit, residents staying behind were encouraged to write their name and social security numbers on their bodies for easier postmortem identification.

Under current projections, the surge is expected to hit Fort Myers Beach, an area still recovering from Hurricane Ian two years ago that smashed a causeway to outlying islands.

The area was also hit by Hurricane Helene two weeks ago, raising concerns that discarded furniture, appliances and debris from that storm will become projectiles in this next one. DeSantis said the state deployed more than 300 dump trucks that had removed 1,300 loads of debris.

One resident said he had seen bull sharks swimming in the flooded streets after Helene.

No matter exactly where Milton comes ashore, the damage is expected to be extensive, with seawater funneling up through coastal channels inland. Cody Fritz at the US National Hurricane Center storm surge team told NBC News: “Florida’s west coast is very sensitive to storm surge. It doesn’t take much to push water over land that would be dry. It’s extremely vulnerable.”

Kara Doran, a US geological survey scientist, said the risk of permanent change to the coastline “cannot be overstated as I believe communities are more vulnerable to this storm’s impacts due to the erosion that occurred recently from Helene”.

Residents trying to leave have been faced with gas shortages and gridlocked roads. There are few hotels to shelter in and no flights out of the area. Ashley Khrais, a resident of Holiday, Florida, just inland from the coast, told NBC: “it seems very, very scary, but there’s no way to leave.”

Mark Prompakdee, 71, a resident of a trailer park near St Petersburg, said he planned to sit the storm out in a minivan parked on higher ground at a high school. “They’re saying, ‘Get out of here,’” he said. “Where?”

But many people appeared to have heeded the warnings. “If there’s any good news here, we toured Fort Myers beach yesterday [and] it looks like people have listened to those warnings,” said Jay Gray of NBC News.

Efforts to protect property with sandbags and by boarding up windows had been done “with the knowledge that this could be the most powerful storm many in this area have ever seen, and they’ve seen plenty”, Gray said.

The National Weather Service warned that as Milton began moving onshore on Wednesday “conditions will be favorable for tornado development, even far away from the expected landfall”.

With area airports now closed, operators said they would not reopen until damage had been assessed. A spokesperson for Tampa international airport told Scripps News that safety was critical for their operations and it could not act as a shelter for travelers stuck there since it is located in an evacuation zone.

When diplomats struck a deal to save nature in 2022, pledging to halt biodiversity loss by the end of the decade, Europe was seen as a credible leader in fraught negotiations. The EU cajoled others into stepping up their game as it championed a target to protect 30% of the land and sea by 2030.

But two years later, as delegates meet in wildlife-rich Colombia for Cop16 – the international summit to save nature – Europe’s own enthusiasm for saving species appears to be endangered.

EU leaders scaled back plans to cut pollution and protect habitats after angry protests from farmers at the start of the year. A law to restore nature was turned into a political punching bag, barely securing majorities in key votes to rubber-stamp the deal, and a regulation to reduce deforestation will be delayed by a year, the commission announced last week.

The backsliding has alarmed conservationists and scientists, who fear that biodiversity loss is being pushed to the sidelines on the eve of the world’s most significant nature negotiations.

Guy Pe’er, an ecologist at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, said the new line on nature was “exceptionally worrying” because the EU was perceived as a leader. “If other areas of the world take the same line, this can put us at a global risk of accelerating losses,” he said.

The most vocal opponents of Europe’s nature protection plans are far-right parties, which completely oppose the EU’s “green deal”, and centre-right parties, which nominally back the project but have repeatedly tried to weaken it. Both groups gained seats at the expense of the Greens in European parliament elections in June, in a rightward shift that has been echoed in national and regional elections across the continent.

EU member states agreed to downgrade protection of wolves in September, drawing criticism from conservationists who say it sends a “shameful signal” in the run-up to the summit. The move came shortly after Ursula von der Leyen, the returning commission president, announced her top team, with a shift in rhetoric that emphasised economic growth over the green agenda that characterised her previous term.

Pe’er said: “Instead of resilience, sustainability and planetary boundaries – not to speak of nature or biodiversity – we now hear the words competitiveness, boosting our economy, and helping the industry.

“This is not a small change to the tone of the green deal,” he said, “but rather a fundamental alteration of the underlying philosophy.”

Europe’s recent efforts to protect nature have been mixed. The EU failed to meet its 2020 biodiversity targets and risks falling short of its 2030 protection targets, too. In 2021, most of its member countries failed to pay their fair share of a $20bn (£15.3bn) a year commitment to protect nature, according to an analysis from the ODI in June.

Just eight of the 27 member states have revised their national biodiversity strategies and action plans, and only the same number have submitted pledges to protect nature.

In June, however, the EU passed a landmark law to restore nature, rather than just protect it. It has also pushed through contested environmental rules on deforestation and sustainable supply chains – albeit in watered-down forms – to force action in countries from which it imports food and goods.

Guido Broekhoven, a policy researcher at WWF, which recently released a tracker of national biodiversity strategies, said: “Other countries keep a close eye on its developments because ambitious action by the EU has a knock-on effect elsewhere.

“Passing the nature restoration law was a step in the right direction, but it’s the implementation that really matters now,” he said. “The increasing pressure to delay implementation of the deforestation regulation, or worse, is also concerning.”

Europe’s willingness to pay for nature protection abroad could also suffer from the rise of parties railing against migration and foreign aid. The Global Biodiversity Framework estimates an extra $700bn a year in biodiversity financing is needed between now and 2030 – 35 times more than what rich countries have promised poor ones.

Špela Bandelj Ruiz, a Greenpeace biodiversity campaigner, said: “The last UN biodiversity summit got a good deal on paper, but this must be followed with action to protect Indigenous people’s rights, restore destroyed nature and finance all this fairly.”

Nature is declining at unprecedented rates as the extinction of species accelerates, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (Ipbes) found in a scientific assessment in 2019. Although the biodiversity crisis does not receive the same attention and funding as climate breakdown, it has risen on the geopolitical agenda in recent years, allowing delegates to secure a significant global agreement in 2022 to stem biodiversity loss.

David Obura, chair of Ipbes, said the forthcoming Cop16 summit would be the “first milestone” since then to agree on how to assess progress towards meeting the 2030 targets. It would also be an important space to share information on commitments, implementation and “gaps that urgently need to be filled” to halt and reverse the loss of biodiversity.

Campaigners have warned of the growing threat to nature protection from far-right parties, which scored big wins in Austria’s recent election and performed well in three German states last month, but also warned politicians from elsewhere against aping their rhetoric.

“We need healthy nature to have a hope for a safe future and resilient societies,” said Bandelj Ruiz. “Politicians from anywhere on the spectrum must recognise that they have a responsibility to protect their citizens and leave a livable planet for future generations.”

Find more age of extinction coverage here, and follow biodiversity reporters Phoebe Weston and Patrick Greenfield on X for all the latest news and features

A plan by the British government to burn biomass imported from countries including North Korea and Afghanistan has been described as “bonkers”, with critics saying it undermines the credibility of the UK’s climate strategy.

A bioenergy resource model, published in late summer, calculates that only a big expansion in the import of energy crops and wood from a surprising list of nations would satisfy the UK’s plan to meet net zero.

The government wants biomass to play a “significant role” in decarbonising all sectors of the economy in the years leading up to 2050, and has provided more than £20bn to businesses using it in the power and heat sectors over the past two decades.

About a third of the biomass used in the UK is imported. In 2021, 9.1m tonnes of wood pellets for use in energy production came from abroad – about 76% from North America and 18% from the EU. But there is not enough wood in these regions to supply the large expansion in bioenergy that the government is banking on.

The resource model sets out potential domestic and overseas sources of bioenergy. Only the most ambitious scenario outlined in the document would theoretically provide enough biomass to meet this demand, and it involves a huge increase in imports.

According to an assessment by Mary Booth, director of the Partnership for Policy Integrity, this includes a list of countries that seem “improbable” as sources of significant volumes of agricultural and forestry biomass, including North Korea, Afghanistan, Bhutan and the Maldives.

Booth criticised the way the model addresses changes in land use, and its assumption that energy crop area will increase exponentially globally and crop yields will increase by more than 50%. “This is all against a background of increasing climate change when whole regions are facing famine due to weather-induced crop failures,” she said. “It’s bonkers.”

As well as being unclear whether such a large volume of biomass would be available to the UK, the model does not attempt to explain how existing deforestation problems in countries such as Brazil or the lack of transparency in a dictatorship such as North Korea would comply with sustainability rules.

More fundamentally, Booth questioned the model’s assumption that bioenergy can actually limit greenhouse gas emissions.

Scientists and environmental campaigners have long disputed claims that burning wood for energy is climate neutral, saying forests are unlikely to be replaced quickly enough to absorb the carbon emissions required to slow the climate crisis. A recent report showed that Drax, the UK’s largest power station, was responsible for four times more carbon emissions than the country’s last remaining coal-fired plant which closed last month.

Critics also question the government’s reliance on extensive use of carbon capture and storage to neutralise emissions from burning biomass. Drax’s operator plans to develop a “bioenergy with carbon capture and storage” project using more government subsidies, but there are no such plants functioning with such systems in the world.

The former energy secretary Kwasi Kwarteng has also said importing wood to burn did not “make any sense”.

Furthermore, serious concerns have been raised about the affect of large-scale use of biomass on biodiversity, air quality, agriculture and soil health in the UK and abroad, as well as the potential for violation of Indigenous people’s land rights.

The government recognises some of these concerns. In a biomass strategy published last year it said only biomass use that complied with strict criteria was considered to be low carbon and to offer genuine CO₂ emissions savings, and that it was considering strengthening these criteria.

But in January, a National Audit Office (NAO) report concluded that the government could not show its current arrangements were adequate to give it confidence that the industry was meeting sustainability standards.

Several months later, Drax agreed to pay £25m after the energy industry regulator Ofgem found it had submitted inaccurate data on the sourcing of wood pellets from Canada.

A spokesperson for the Department of Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) said the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) “is clear that biomass sourced in line with strict sustainability criteria can be used as a low carbon source of energy. We will continue to monitor biomass electricity generation to ensure it meets required standards.”

However, the IPCC itself says biomass should not automatically be considered “even in cases where the biomass is thought to be produced sustainably”.

DESNZ said it planned to consult on developing a “cross-sector sustainability framework” but would make no further comment because the biomass strategy and bioenergy resource model were subject to continuing litigation.

The rewilding charity the Lifescape Project, backed by the Partnership for Policy Integrity, has launched a legal case claiming the biomass strategy was illegal and would undermine the UK’s ability to achieve net zero by 2050.

Frances Lawson, a lawyer at Lifescape, said the strategy hanged on the resource model, which strengthened her organisation’s argument that the government’s wider approach to bioenergy was “irrational”.

Booth said the UK had backed itself into a corner by putting so much reliance on biomass in its plans to tackle the climate crisis. “They’re afraid to say the truth – that we all need to use a lot less energy,” she said.

The NAO said that if biomass could make the contribution to achieving net zero that the government expected, it may need to increase activity in other areas to reach its 2050 target. “This could include increasing the capacity of other types of greenhouse gas removal technology, encouraging greater behaviour change, or further innovation.”

As Hurricane Milton bears down on Florida, fueled by a record-hot Gulf of Mexico, a new analysis has shown how the Gulf’s heat that worsened last month’s Hurricane Helene was 200 to 500 times more likely because of human-caused global heating.

Helene, one of the deadliest storms in US history, gathered pace over the Gulf before crashing ashore with 140mph winds.

The new analysis found climate change increased by 10% the amount of rainfall hurled down by the hurricane, which left more than 220 people dead across six states as it barreled north two weeks ago, flattening and drowning towns, tearing up roads and severing water supplies. It also made Helene’s winds about 13mph, or 11%, more intense.

The burning of fossil fuels has made storms as severe as Hurricane Helene about 2.5 times more likely than they were in the pre-industrial age, the multinational group of scientists at the World Weather Attribution group stated. Should the world warm by 2C above this pre-industrial period, which will occur without major cuts to emissions, storms such as Helene will get a further 10% more rainfall, the study found.

“The heat that human activities are adding to the atmosphere and oceans is like steroids for hurricanes,” said Bernadette Woods Placky, chief meteorologist at Climate Central, part of the attribution group, who added that storms like Helene and Milton are becoming “explosive” because of excess heat.

A study by Climate Central published on Monday found the sea surface temperature around Milton’s path was 400-800 times more likely because of the climate crisis.

“If humans keep heating the climate, we will keep seeing storms rapidly morph into monster hurricanes, leading to more destruction,” she said.

The speedy analysis of Helene comes before the impending landfall of Milton which also grew in strength over the Gulf of Mexico, stunning scientists by ballooning from a category one storm to a category five event, with maximum winds of 180mph, in just nine hours.

It is set to hit the Tampa area late on Wednesday, prompting dire warnings from the city’s mayor that residents will die if they don’t evacuate.

Both storms rapidly intensified over the Gulf, with researchers pointing to exceptional seawater heat as a key factor in fueling the hurricanes. Since this summer, the surface and deeper waters of the Gulf have been at record, bathtub-like temperatures, with Milton set to pass over a patch of water close to Tampa that is around 2-3C hotter than usual.

Hurricanes gain strength from hotter oceans and a warmer atmosphere, with this heat adding to the pace of the storms while also loading them with extra moisture that is then unleashed as pounding rainfall, causing the sort of catastrophic flooding that submerged communities as far inland as western North Carolina when Helene hit.

“The Gulf is still at an anomalously high temperature and when you have these warm temperatures you are more likely to get rapidly intensifying hurricanes,” said Brian “, a climate scientist at the University of Miami.

Other factors, such as countervailing wind shear that can dissipate hurricanes, are also important in storm formation but the Gulf’s lengthy fever has had experts increasingly concerned about the potential for events like Helene and Milton, McNoldy said.

“We were nervously waiting, wondering if a hurricane will take advantage of all this heat,” he said. “It’s like there was a powder keg, waiting for a spark. Now we have that spark. Milton is a remarkable storm, it’s exceptional in all history in terms of its intensification rate.”

Scientists noted that a warmer atmosphere is also able to hold more water vapor at a rate of about 7% per degree of warming. Currently, the world has warmed by at least 1.3C since the pre-industrial era and there are fears that this may be accelerating.

“What many people don’t realize is that only 1% of this extra heat is going into the atmosphere: so our records of global temperature only reflect 1% of the total increase in the earth’s heat content,” said Katharine Hayhoe, the chief scientist of the Nature Conservancy and a professor at the Texas Tech University. “Eighty-nine percent of this heat is going into the ocean where it is contributing to rising sea levels, deadly marine heatwaves, and stronger and more rapidly intensifying hurricanes.”

Coming just a month before a US presidential election that has barely featured the climate crisis as a campaign issue, the twin hurricanes have provided US voters a stark reminder of the forces unleashed by a warming planet that can touch upon almost every aspect of life.

Donald Trump, who has called the climate crisis a “hoax” and a “scam” and has promised to slash environmental regulations for oil and gas companies in return for campaign donations, had to cancel an appearance in Miami this week because of Milton’s impact.

His opponent Kamala Harris, meanwhile, has acknowledged the dangers posed by global heating but has largely steered clear of the topic during rallies and interviews.

“Climate change is in our face right now and people are making that connection,” said Kathie Dello, the state climatologist for North Carolina, which was badly ravaged by Helene. “There’s this realization that we are seeing things we have never seen before, that we are vulnerable to climate change and we aren’t prepared for the impacts.

“Climate itself is never the No 1 election issue but the economy suffers from hurricanes, we have schools closed, people without food, shelter and water. Climate is all tied to that.”

The solution, according to the UN, is to halt the burning of fossil fuels. “Our future is in our hands,” says Hayhoe.

In the early summer of this year, a ship set sail around the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard. But this wasn’t any ordinary ship. For almost 40 years the Joides Resolution drilled into the ocean floor to collect samples and data that helped scientists to study Earth’s history and structure. Expeditions on the vessel have made a vital contribution to our understanding of the climate crisis, the tectonic plates theory, the origin of life on Earth and natural hazards such as earthquakes and eruptions. Yet the two-month voyage around Svalbard was to be its last.

The National Science Foundation (NSF), the US agency that provided scientists at Texas A&M University with funds for the ship, announced last year it would not give money for the drilling vessel past September 2024. It was a declaration that shocked the global scientific community and meant that Svalbard would be the ship’s final outing.

“Being deprived of this workhorse is devastating because we can’t get these data in any other way,” says Thomas Ronge, the project manager of the Svalbard expedition. “We are losing our potential to read the history book of climate change.”

To understand the significance of the loss of the drilling vessel, it is useful to look at the evolution of this type of exploration and what it has attempted to achieve – in many cases successfully.

It began in earnest in the early 1960s, when a group of scientists embarked on a mission to drill down from a floating barge, called Cuss I, to the border between the crust, the Earth’s outermost layer, and the mantle, the next and thickest layer. Project Mohole, as it was known, was recorded by the novelist and amateur oceanographer John Steinbeck in an article for Life magazine. “This is the opening move in a long-term plan of exploration of the unknown two-thirds of our planet that lies under the sea,” he wrote. “We know less about this area than we do about the moon.”

That mission was ultimately unsuccessful but it laid the foundations for scientific ocean drilling, the concept of which is simple. Strata of sediments accumulate underwater, eventually becoming rock under pressure. Unlike on land, where disparate factors change the ground conformation in unpredictable ways, layers on the sea floor usually pile up at a regular pace and remain untouched. The deeper you drill, the further back in time you can go.

After the failure of Mohole came the drill ship Glomar Challenger and, from 1985, the Joides Resolution. As recently as last year, 62 years after the Mohole project recounted by Steinbeck, scientists aboard the Joides managed to extract rock samples from the Earth’s mantle for the first time. “We did it,” said one of the expedition members to the New York Times. “We now have a treasure trove of rocks that will let us systematically study the processes that people believe are relevant to the emergence of life on the planet.”

Yet such discoveries, at least using a US-funded vessel, appear unlikely in the near future.

“[The end of the funding] is a huge loss to science and to everyone,” says Adriane Lam, a researcher at Binghamton University in New York, who was aboard the Joides this summer for the ship’s last expedition. “The stuff we’re finding has huge implications for things like where people live and may not be able to live in the future if the Earth keeps warming up.”

On its last expedition, the Joides drilled into the sea floor to help scientists understand how an ice sheet in the Arctic Ocean collapsed thousands of years ago. Analysing how the Svalbard ice sheet melted, researchers hope to be able to model the possible collapse of a vulnerable equivalent in the west Antarctic.

The NSF attributed its decision to end its funding to rising costs and a lack of financial support from the International Ocean Discovery Program’s partners. But many see the expenditure for the ship as paltry compared with its benefits. To put it in perspective, the total NSF budget for 2023 was close to $10bn (£7.5bn); the $71m spent on the Joides is 0.7% of that.