U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres called Wednesday for a "windfall" tax on profits of fossil fuel companies to help pay for the fight against global warming, calling them the "godfathers of climate chaos."

Guterres spoke in a bid to revive the world's focus on climate change at a time when elections, inflation and conflict in places like Ukraine, Gaza and Sudan have seized the spotlight.

A large, brightly colored invasive species called the Joro spider is on the move in the United States. Populations have been growing in parts of the South and East Coast for years, and many researchers think it's only a matter of time before they spread to much of the continental U.S.

But spider experts say we shouldn't be too worried about them.

Month after month, global temperatures are setting new records. Meanwhile, scientists and climate policymakers warn of the growing likelihood that the planet will soon exceed the warming target set at the landmark Paris 2015 climate talks.

Making sense of the run of climate extremes may be challenging for some. Here's a look at what scientists are saying.

A toddler was killed and his mother was injured when a tornado struck suburban Detroit without warning, while five people were injured when a tornado in Maryland collapsed structures and trapped people inside.

Officials in Livonia, Michigan, said the tornado tore through several neighborhoods on Wednesday afternoon and developed so quickly that there was no advance notice from the National Weather Service or others that would have normally led to the activation of warning sirens.

The first heat wave of the season has arrived earlier than usual across much of the U.S. Southwest, with dangerously hot conditions that produced triple-digit temperatures on Tuesday.

Forecasters say temperatures are likely to top 110 degrees Fahrenheit (43.3 Celsius) in some areas by Thursday.

The rate Earth is warming hit an all-time high in 2023 with 92% of last year's surprising record-shattering heat caused by humans, top scientists calculated.

The group of 57 scientists from around the world used United Nations-approved methods to examine what's behind last year's deadly burst of heat. They said even with a faster warming rate they don't see evidence of significant acceleration in human-caused climate change beyond increased fossil fuel burning.

In a lush jungle at the foothills of a volcano in Indonesia's Aceh province, the song of gibbons in the trees mixes with the laughter of the seven forest rangers trekking below them. An hour into their patrol, the rangers spot another mammal in the forest with them.

"Where are you going? What are you doing?" they pleasantly ask a man walking past, farming tools in hand. "Remember to not cut down trees wherever you go, OK?"

Brazil has hundreds of millions of cows, but one in particular is extraordinary. Her massive, snow-white body is watched over by security cameras, a veterinarian and an armed guard.

Worth $4 million, Viatina-19 FIV Mara Movéis is the most expensive cow ever sold at auction, according to Guinness World Records. That's three times more than the last recordholder's price. And — at 1,100 kilograms (more than 2,400 pounds) — she's twice as heavy as an average adult of her breed.

A woman's body has been recovered from a car that sank into floodwater in Bavaria, police said Tuesday, bringing the confirmed death toll in flooding across southern Germany to five.

Persistent heavy rain led to widespread flooding over the weekend. While the situation has now eased in southwestern Germany, water levels remained high in parts of Bavaria, particularly on the Danube and in the Rosenheim area in the southeast. Some major railway lines, including several leading to Munich, were still blocked or disrupted.

The death toll in floods across a large part of southern Germany rose to two on Monday as the body of a missing woman was found. Chancellor Olaf Scholz visited the flooded region and officials warned that water levels could rise further in some areas.

The body of the 43-year-old, whom rescuers had been looking for since Sunday morning, was found in a basement in the Bavarian town of Schrobenhausen, police told German news agency dpa. A firefighter was found dead in nearby Pfaffenhofen on Sunday after an inflatable boat he and colleagues were using capsized.