A powerful storm with winds of up to 180mph has struck the Bahamas and may hit areas of the eastern US seaboard as it travels west, according to BBC News. Hurricane Dorian, which has already torn the roofs from buildings and caused extensive flooding, is expected to trigger “life-threatening” storm surges, the report continues. Reuters reports Dorian is the second strongest Atlantic storm on record. Sky News notes that as the category five hurricane approaches, parts of Georgia and South Carolina are being evacuated, although its exact path is difficult to predict. Its coverage also includes comments released by the US National Hurricane Center saying Dorian “will move dangerously close to the Florida east coast late Monday through Tuesday night”, The Daily Telegraph notes that communities there have also been told to evacuate. The Washington Post reports that the storm may hit Florida at the “worst possible time for storm-surge flooding”. In an interview with Fox New Sunday, Florida senator Rick Scott alluded to research that suggests climate change has increased the strength of storms. “We know the climate’s changing and we know our storms seem to be getting bigger,” he noted. Meanwhile, a piece in Forbes discusses the mechanisms by which rising temperatures may contribute to stronger hurricanes. A piece in National Geographic says that while it is difficult to link any one storm such as Dorian to climate change, recent studies suggest that warmer waters could make hurricanes more intense, slower moving and more likely to trigger dangerous floods. Bloomberg notes that scientists “weigh in on the topic of climate change and hurricanes cautiously”, but says the last two decades have seen “some of the most powerful and destructive hurricane seasons on record”.

According to the Guardian and Metro, at least one death has already been reported by local media in connection with the storm. The New York Times and CNN carry live updates on Dorian’s progress.

Greta Thunberg joined other young protesters outside the UN headquarters in New York on Friday to call for more action to tackle climate change, according to the Associated Press. After completing her voyage across the Atlantic in a sailing boat, the teenage climate activist plans on attending the UN secretary-general’s climate action summit in September. Hundreds of American teenagers joined the action, with some telling the Guardian they were protesting for the first time. The Times reports that after intense coverage of her trip, Thunberg is now “lying low” in New York, with details of her hotel known to only a handful of people. An opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal asks if the “flight shame”that prompted the young Swede to travel by boat not plane would spread to the US following her arrival. An opinion piece in the Guardian by two academics states that, in light of these teenage protests, “educators must join students in demanding climate justice”. Reuters reports that, taking inspiration from Thunberg, activists from across Latin America were converging in Chile to discuss the best ways to fight climate change.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, Extinction Rebellion launched a four-day “occupation” of Manchester on Friday, according to the Independent. The news website reports that activists blocked roads, installed a makeshift garden, an Angel of the North sculpture made from waste plastic and a yellow boat emblazoned with the words “Planet before Profit”. MailOnline compares the protests to those that had taken place in London earlier this year, which “crippled” the capital’s transport routes and saw more than a thousand arrests. Separately, the Daily Mail reports on the police response to Extinction Rebellion splinter group Heathrow Pause, which intends to shut down the airport using drones. The paper includes a statement from Scotland Yard noting the drone-based protest brought “unique challenges”.

The total share of UK electricity produced by coal dropped to a record low of 0.7% between April and June, according to BusinessGreen, reporting on the latest government figures. The website notes that the figures demonstrate the ongoing phaseout of coal across the country as renewables become more competitive. The Guardian also reports the story, along with a government statement that coal “will soon be a distant memory” as the UK moves towards its net-zero greenhouse gas emissions target for the economy. Carbon Brief has produced interactive pieces monitoring the status both of the UK’s remaining coal plants and those around the world.

In a separate piece, the Guardian says that reliance on electricity imports in the UK has reached a “record high” and adds that there are “fears” this could mean homes and businesses face higher energy bills in the case of a no-deal Brexit.

More than a dozen leading environmental charities, including Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, have written a letter to UK chancellor Sajid Javid ahead of his announcement about spending priorities for the year ahead on Wednesday, the Guardian reports. The groups have sent a costed roadmap to the chancellor, the paper reports, which they say would allow the country to tackle the “climate emergency”. It would involve government spending on climate action increasing from roughly £17bn a year to at least £42bn over the next three years, the newspaper notes.

An editorial in the Guardian looks at the growing trend in developed countries of people switching to plant-based diets. It notes that “diet is among lifestyle changes urgently needed if developed nations are to have a hope of meeting targets for reduced carbon emissions” and says the trend of major companies embracing this new market is to be welcomed. It notes that countries that drove the consumption of meat products in the past will not be the same in the future, but says this “doesn’t mean the rich world can go on eating beef and lamb with impunity”.

The Washington Post examines the recent decision by the US Environmental Protection Agency under president Donald Trump to lift limits on methane emissions from the drilling and transport of natural gas. “Not only would this be bad for the environment, but also it might well do more harm than good for the fossil fuel industry,” the editorial notes. It goes on to outline the significant role that methane has as a greenhouse gas, trapping 80 times as much heat in the atmosphere as CO2 over a 20-year time span. The editorial then mentions that many in the fossil fuel industry have embraced previous efforts to regulate methane leaks and concludes that the new proposal is “counterproductive in every conceivable sense”. An editorial in Bloomberg has a similar theme, noting that environmentalists and “Big Oil” were at least partly united in opposition to the idea. “No wonder oil majors aren’t impressed. To be sure, the industry isn’t united in opposition – but the heavyweights understand the costs of bad publicity are more than a few million dollars each year,” it notes.

Polar bears actively forage in the late spring and early summer, a new study finds, around the time that Arctic sea ice reaches its minimum level for the year. This suggests that “even minor advances in the timing of [ice] break-up may have detrimental effects on foraging opportunities, body condition, and subsequent reproduction and survival” of polar bears, the authors say. The researchers studied the body conditions of more than 1,000 polar bears in the Canadian Arctic from 2010-17.