Roger Federer blames the heat for his upset loss to John Millman in a night game on September 3 at the U.S. Open. The unusual heat index of 95 that evening in New York is in keeping with expectations for climate change.

California compels the organizers of the Mavericks big-wave surf contest to pay winners in the female and male divisions equal prize money, since the competition is held on public property. 

Seven thousand insects, spiders, and lizards are stolen from the Philadelphia Insectarium and Butterfly Pavilion. Authorities suspect an inside job: The thieves left behind several staff uniforms pinned to a wall with knives. 

Four mountain lion kittens are discovered in the Santa Monica Mountains near Los Angeles. The kittens are healthy but badly inbred; lions in the area are cut off from other California cats by the area’s freeways.  

William Happer, President Trump’s newly appointed senior director for emerging technologies at the National Security Council, says that carbon dioxide “would be a benefit” to society and compares climate science to “Nazi propaganda.”

The ACLU says that the Trump administration is working with local law enforcement agencies to suppress protests in opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline. 

Two Republican representatives on the House Committee on Natural Resources open investigations of the World Resources Institute, the Center for Biological Diversity, and the Natural Resources Defense Council, suggesting that their international environmental advocacy makes them agents of foreign governments. The groups reject the “McCarthyist” charges. 

A moose, exhausted from swimming across Lake Champlain from New York to Vermont, returns to the water to escape people trying to take its picture and drowns. 

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, attending the Pacific Island Forum on the island of Nauru, tells the low-lying island nations that the threat to them from North Korea is greater than that from climate change. Zinke also offers support for Australia’s decision to scale back its climate action. 

A man fishing in County Tyrone, Ireland, pulls up the intact head and antlers of an extinct Great Irish elk from Lough Neagh. 

In his Supreme Court confirmation hearing, Brett Kavanagh asserts that “there are a large number of cases where I’ve ruled in favor of environmentalist interests.” In one of these supposed pro-environmental cases, Kavanagh ruled against the NRDC and the Sierra Club. In an analysis of his positions on 18 cases involving the EPA, Earthjustice finds that 16, or 89 percent, were anti-environmental. 

Acting EPA administrator Andrew Wheeler says that whoever wrote the anonymous op-ed in The New York Times saying that Donald Trump is amoral and unhinged should resign.