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Brushes with the wild: readers' best wildlife photographs of 2017
As the year draws to a close, we celebrate the finest wildlife photos our readers’ have snapped this year – from fantastic foxes to thirsty chamois calves
Continue reading...Fake news is a threat to humanity, but scientists may have a solution | Dana Nuccitelli
“Technocognition” proposes that we use technology and psychology to break through the mental barriers that make people deny threats like climate change
People are very good at finding ways to believe what we want to believe. Climate change is the perfect example – acceptance of climate science among Americans is strongly related to political ideology. This has exposed humanity’s potentially fatal flaw. Denying an existential threat threatens our existence.
But that’s exactly what many ideological conservatives do. Partisan polarization over climate change has steadily grown over the past two decades. This change can largely be traced to the increasingly fractured and partisan media environment that has created an echo chamber in which people can wrap themselves in the comfort of “alternative facts” (a.k.a spin and lies) that affirm their worldviews. We’ve become too good at fooling ourselves into believing falsehoods, which has ushered in a dangerous “post-truth” era, with no better example than the subject of climate change.
Does this croc found in Australian suburb belong to you?
County diary: lines made by walking
Wenlock Edge, Shropshire Thawing snow highlights the paths people – and animals – take through the landscape
A thin white track up the field marked where footsteps of schoolchildren, dog walkers and ramblers had compacted the snow and turned it to ice. When the thaw came only the narrow ice track remained: white, opalescent, slippery and dangerous to walk on. People took to the sides of the path, already claggy from before the snow, making the white line through dark earth even more pronounced.
I was reminded of the work of the land artist Richard Long. A Line Made by Walking (1967), Long’s photograph of a simple line that he had walked through short grass, had been really inspiring for me – as enigmatic as a ley line, a ghost image, ephemeral and transient. It had an important influence on how I saw marks in the landscape as a kind of writing.
Continue reading...Summer snake catchers
Don't let your pet accidentally get drunk this silly season (sorry Tiddles)
It’s time to join the renewables revolution | Letters
The government’s decision to allow pension funds to dump investments in fossil fuels (Boost for fossil fuel divestment as UK eases pension rules, 18 December) is a major step forward but, with such progress on the issues around “fiduciary duty”, it is increasingly puzzling that MPs are still denied a say over where our pensions are invested – and blocked from holding our trustees to account. Over the last few years, I have repeatedly urged ministers to take action to clean up the MPs’ pension scheme, but they’ve been consistently obstructive. A failure to clean up this fund would be a dereliction of duty.
If the government is serious about handing people control over their investments, they should urgently get their own house in order, by forcing the parliamentary pension fund to be more transparent – and to lead the way by divesting our savings from climate-wrecking fossil fuels.
Caroline Lucas MP
Green, Brighton Pavilion
Sea smoke phenomenon on Lake Superior, Minnesota
Ian Langford obituary
Ornithologist, conservationist and publisher with a special interest in wildlife art
Ian Langford, who has died of oesophageal cancer aged 61, was a conservationist and publisher with a special interest in wildlife art. He showcased the work of artists who were also passionate about conservation, such as John Threlfall and Carry Akroyd. The Langford Press art books he issued were sumptuous large-format volumes packed with pictures and sketches based on the patient observation of natural landscapes and animals.
Modest, generous, always brimming with ideas, Langford was a man of many parts. He was first and foremost an ornithologist, but served a long apprenticeship as a trainee craftsman, and also spent some time as a community tutor in Scotland. For several years, he and his wife, Angela, ran a specialist book shop in Wigtown, an experience that led to the establishment of Langford Press in 2001.
Continue reading...Buzz off: hive thieves cashing in on thriving beekeeping market
Hobby’s increasing popularity, and the rising cost of some queens, thought to be driving thefts of bees and hives
Thieves are cashing in on an increasingly lucrative beekeeping market by snatching entire hives, with 135 reported thefts over the past six years.
New figures show that hundreds of thousands of bees have been taken from apiaries across England and Wales since 2011.
Continue reading...US government climate report looks at how the oceans are buffering climate change | John Abraham
A key chapter of the US Global Change Research Program Report deals with how the oceans are being impacted by human carbon pollution
In the recently released US Global Change Research Program Report, one of the chapters I was most interested in was about the changes we’ve observed in the world’s oceans. The oceans are really the key to the climate change issue, whether that be in quantifying how fast it’s happening or how much will happen in the future. As humans emit greenhouse gases (particularly carbon dioxide), we see some major changes that cannot be explained naturally.
The oceans are important because they act as a buffer; that is, they absorb much of the effects of greenhouse gases. In fact, the oceans absorb a lot of human carbon pollution. This is a big help for us because without the oceans, the climate would change much faster.
Country diary: the way through the woods leads to a mysterious grotto
Hartburn, Northumberland Carved into the cliff is a narrow entrance, like a grotesque mask
Our footsteps are quieted by fallen leaves as we enter Hartburn Glebe, a curve of ancient semi-natural woodland hugging the steep sides of the Hart Burn. There is something of Kipling’s poem The Way Through the Woods about it, a past glimpsed beneath the undergrowth. There was “once a road through the wood”. The Devil’s Causeway, a Roman road that ran north-east to the Tweed, passed through here, seen now as a holloway under woodrush and conifers.
Related: The 10 best woods and forests for views
Continue reading...The best of the wildlife photography awards 2017 – in pictures
Winning images from national and international wildlife photography competitions of the year
Continue reading...Annus mirabilis: all the things that went right in 2017
It was a tale of two years – the best of times and the worst of times. But not everything went wrong – from Mata’s 1% to orangutans, we look at the good
How was it for you? A bit grim? Many people will be eager to see the back of 2017, the year of Trump, Twitter, terrorism, Yemen, Libya and the plight of the Rohingya, as well as environmental degradation and almost daily doomsday warnings about the multiplying threats to sustainable life on earth.
But the big, bold headlines tell only half the story – perhaps not even that much. Away from the hysteria of daily news, it is possible to discern progress, joy, breakthroughs and that rarest commodity of all: optimism.
Continue reading...$180bn investment in plastic factories feeds global packaging binge
Colossal funding in manufacturing plants by fossil fuel companies will increase plastic production by 40%, risking permanent pollution of the earth
The global plastic binge which is already causing widespread damage to oceans, habitats and food chains, is set to increase dramatically over the next 10 years after multibillion dollar investments in a new generation of plastics plants in the US.
Fossil fuel companies are among those who have plooughed more than $180bn since 2010 into new “cracking” facilities that will produce the raw material for everyday plastics from packaging to bottles, trays and cartons.
Continue reading...World’s largest plastics plant rings alarm bells on Texas coast
Communities voice fears of impact that new facility on farmland just north of Corpus Christi will have on environment
Donald Trump’s state visit to Saudi Arabia in May will perhaps be best remembered by his participation in an all-male sword dance where he awkwardly waved a ceremonial blade in step with his cabinet and their Saudi counterparts.
But a little-noted deal signed prior to the ceremony is set to worsen a vast problem the world has yet to fully confront – plastic pollution.
Continue reading...I won't be alone at Christmas, I have a dog
Norway leads way on electric cars: 'it’s part of a green taxation shift'
Nearly a third of all new cars sold in the country this year will be plug-in models and experts expect that share to skyrocket
While tourists explore Oslo’s history in the grounds of the centuries-old Akershus fortress, below their feet is a harbinger of the city’s future.
Here in the catacombs sit scores of Teslas, Nissan Leafs and BMW i3s, plugged into the charging points of the world’s largest public garage for electric cars.
Continue reading...UK frackers are running out of time
Binding carbon commitments and the falling cost of renewables could prove a perfect storm for investors
The UK’s shale gas industry is in a race against time to establish itself before climate change regulations shut it down. As its stands, the frackers are off the pace.
With no wells yet tested for gas flow, the industry does not yet know if large-scale production is possible or what the cost of the gas will be, and it won’t know until 2020 at best. Protests and planning problems have delayed exploration, but the real difficulty is the UK’s legally binding carbon targets.
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