Around The Web

Desert solar power partners Desertec Foundation and Dii split up

The Guardian - Fri, 2013-07-05 20:16
Relationship breaks down between the two main advocates of a European energy revolution driven by desert solar power

The two main advocates of a European renewable energy revolution driven by a vast grid of desert solar power have split, each accusing the other of poor communication.

Both the Desertec Foundation and the Desertec Industrial Initiative (Dii) say their plans to generate power from deserts across the world remains uncompromised despite the decision, which was made by the Foundation at an extraordinary board meeting last week.

Continue reading...
Categories: Around The Web

Whales flee from military sonar leading to mass strandings, research shows

The Guardian - Wed, 2013-07-03 15:00
Studies are missing link in puzzle that has connected naval exercises to unusual mass strandings of whales and dolphins

Whales flee from the loud military sonar used by navies to hunt submarines, new research has proven for the first time. The studies provide a missing link in the puzzle that has connected naval exercises around the world to unusual mass strandings of whales and dolphins.

Beaked whales, the most common casualty of the strandings, were shown to be highly sensitive to sonar. But the research also revealed unexpectedly that blue whales, the largest animals on Earth and whose population has plummeted by 95% in the last century, also abandoned feeding and swam rapidly away from sonar noise.

Continue reading...
Categories: Around The Web

Humans – the real threat to life on Earth

The Guardian - Sun, 2013-06-30 09:05
If population levels continue to rise at the current rate, our grandchildren will see the Earth plunged into an unprecedented environmental crisis, argues computational scientist Stephen Emmott in this extract from his book Ten Billion

Earth is home to millions of species. Just one dominates it. Us. Our cleverness, our inventiveness and our activities have modified almost every part of our planet. In fact, we are having a profound impact on it. Indeed, our cleverness, our inventiveness and our activities are now the drivers of every global problem we face. And every one of these problems is accelerating as we continue to grow towards a global population of 10 billion. In fact, I believe we can rightly call the situation we're in right now an emergency – an unprecedented planetary emergency.

We humans emerged as a species about 200,000 years ago. In geological time, that is really incredibly recent. Just 10,000 years ago, there were one million of us. By 1800, just over 200 years ago, there were 1 billion of us. By 1960, 50 years ago, there were 3 billion of us. There are now over 7 billion of us. By 2050, your children, or your children's children, will be living on a planet with at least 9 billion other people. Some time towards the end of this century, there will be at least 10 billion of us. Possibly more.

Continue reading...
Categories: Around The Web

How a giant tree's death sparked the conservation movement 160 years ago | Leo Hickman

The Guardian - Thu, 2013-06-27 22:00
160 years ago a giant sequoia in California was cut down, becoming the inspiration for the national park system

Today marks the 160th anniversary of a seminal, but largely forgotten moment in the history of the conservation movement.

On Monday, 27 June, 1853, a giant sequoia – one of the natural world's most awe-inspiring sights - was brought to the ground by a band of gold-rush speculators in Calaveras county, California. It had taken the men three weeks to cut through the base of the 300ft-tall, 1,244-year-old tree, but finally it fell to the forest floor.

Continue reading...
Categories: Around The Web

Local, self-sufficient, optimistic: are Transition Towns the way forward?

The Guardian - Sat, 2013-06-15 17:00
Locally grown food, community-owned power stations, local currencies … can small-scale actions make a difference? Yes, according to the Transition network – in fact, it's our only hope

Late last year, Rob Hopkins went to a conference. Most of the delegates were chief executive officers at local authorities, but it was not a public event. Speaking in confidence, three-quarters of these officials admitted that – despite what they say publicly – they could not foresee a return to growth in the near future.

"One said: 'If we ever get out of this recession, nothing will be as it was in the past,'" Hopkins recalls. "Another said: 'Every generation has had things better than its parents. Not any more.' But the one that stunned me said: 'No civilisation has lasted for ever. There is a very real chance of collapse.'"

Continue reading...
Categories: Around The Web

Fishing ban proposed near Rockall after rare scientific finds

The Guardian - Sat, 2013-06-15 04:56
Unique gas vent found in seabed and two new species of shellfish uncovered during survey near Scottish islet

Fishing is expected to be banned near the Atlantic islet of Rockall after a rare methane gas vent in the seabed and two new shellfish species were discovered by British scientists.

The methane, which leaks through a so-called "cold seep" vent in the ocean floor, was found last year by scientists working with the government agency Marine Scotland. It is the first of its kind to be found near UK waters and only the third in the north-east Atlantic.

Continue reading...
Categories: Around The Web

RSPB accused of hypocrisy for killing hundreds of birds on its reserves

The Guardian - Fri, 2013-06-14 02:38
Countryside Alliance says charity's actions look 'extraordinarily hypocritical' in light of its recent comments on other culls

The RSPB has admitted killing hundreds of birds on its reserves, prompting an accusation of "extraordinary hypocrisy" from the Countryside Alliance.

The RSPB recently criticised the licenced destruction of buzzard eggs and nests to protect a pheasant shoot and said a cull of lesser black-backed gulls should be halted. But on Thursday the charity revealed it too had destroyed lesser black backed gulls and other birds that were harming native species.

Continue reading...
Categories: Around The Web

'Badger-friendly' milk to be sold in just three UK supermarkets

The Guardian - Wed, 2013-06-05 19:39
Waitrose, Marks & Spencer and Asda say they will not sell milk that has come from dairy farms inside cull zones

Only three UK supermarkets – Waitrose, Marks & Spencer and Asda – can guarantee they will sell milk that does not come from dairy farms inside zones where badger culls are due to take place, according to a survey by campaigners.

The survey also revealed that milk certified as organic will not be guaranteed as coming from farms outside the cull zones in Somerset and Gloucestershire.

Continue reading...
Categories: Around The Web

Jellyfish surge in Mediterranean threatens environment – and tourists

The Guardian - Tue, 2013-06-04 04:14
A project is tracking the phenomenon as global warming and overfishing boost numbers of the venomous sea creature

Scientists across the Mediterranean say a surge in the number of jellyfish this year threatens not just the biodiversity of one of the world's most overfished seas but also the health of tens of thousands of summer tourists.

"I flew along a 300km stretch of coastline on 21 April and saw millions of jellyfish," said Professor Stefano Piraino of Salento University in southern Italy. Piraino is the head of a Mediterranean-wide project to track the rise in the number of jellyfish as global warming and overfishing clear the way for them to prosper.

Continue reading...
Categories: Around The Web

'Canned hunting': the lions bred for slaughter

The Guardian - Mon, 2013-06-03 16:00
Canned hunting is a fast-growing business in South Africa, where thousands of lions are being bred on farms to be shot by wealthy foreign trophy-hunters

They are adorably cute, with grubby brown fur so soft it seems to slip through my fingers like flour. It is only when one of the nine-week-old cubs playfully grabs my arm with its teeth and squeezes with an agonising grip that I remember – this is a lion, a wild animal. These four cubs are not wild, however. They are kept in a small pen behind the Lion's Den, a pub on a ranch in desolate countryside 75 miles south of Johannesburg. Tourists stop to pet them but most visitors do not venture over the hill, where the ranch has pens holding nearly 50 juvenile and fully-grown lions, and two tigers.

Continue reading...
Categories: Around The Web

Why Britain's barren uplands have farming subsidies to blame | George Monbiot

The Guardian - Thu, 2013-05-23 01:48
The hills have been grazed to destruction and it's time we begin to challenge the irrational aspects of the farming funding system

Even before you start reading the devastating State of Nature report, published today, you get an inkling of where the problem lies. It's illustrated in the opening pages with two dramatic photographs of upland Britain (p6). They are supposed to represent the natural glories we're losing. In neither of them (with the exception of some distant specks of scrub and leylandii in the second) is there a tree to be seen. The many square miles they cover contain nothing but grass and dead bracken. They could scarcely provide a better illustration of our uncanny ability to miss the big picture.

The majority of wildlife requires cover: places in which it can shelter from predators or ambush prey, places in which it can take refuge from extremes of heat and cold, or find the constant humidity that fragile roots and sensitive invertebrates require. Yet, in the very regions in which you might expect to find such cover (trees, scrub, other dense foliage) there is almost none. I'm talking about the infertile parts of Britain, in which farming is so unproductive that it survives only as a result of public money. Here, in the places commonly described as Britain's "wildernesses", almost nothing remains. And the "almost" has become radically smaller over the past 20 years.

Continue reading...
Categories: Around The Web

Record Burmese python caught in Florida

The Guardian - Wed, 2013-05-22 01:21
Snake, which measured 18.8ft and weighed 128lbs, was caught alongside rural road in Miami Dade county

Wildlife officials say a Burmese python nearly 19ft (5.8m) long has been captured in Florida.

Continue reading...
Categories: Around The Web

DR Congo waits on funding for world's largest hydropower project

The Guardian - Wed, 2013-05-22 00:44

Complete set of Grand Inga dams on the Congo River would generate a massive 40,000MW of electricity

The dream of harnessing the mighty Congo with the world's largest set of dams has moved closer, with the World Bank and other financial institutions expected to offer finance and South Africa agreeing to buy half of the power generated.

In the past 60 years French, Belgian, Chinese, Brazilian and African engineers have all hoped to dam the river.

Continue reading...
Categories: Around The Web

India acts to save Asiatic lion by moving it – but hard work has only just begun | Kavitha Rao

The Guardian - Tue, 2013-05-07 21:39
Ambitious plan to translocate lions from Gujarat to Madhya Pradesh finally gets green light with Supreme Court ruling

Wildlife is under threat in most of India, but there's one state that's clinging to its fauna, if rather too tightly. The state of Gujarat – whose Gir forest shelters the world's only Asiatic lion population – has lost a bitter battle over an ambitious translocation project.

For over 18 years, conservationists have been attempting to move a pride of Gir lions to the Kuno sanctuary in the state of Madhya Pradesh. But the Gujarat government stubbornly refused to let the lions go. Meanwhile, an impatient Madhya Pradesh government bizarrely suggested introducing African cheetahs, whose Asiatic cousin once roamed the area.

Continue reading...
Categories: Around The Web

PR smokescreen cannot hide the holes in climate teaching proposals | Bob Ward

The Guardian - Mon, 2013-04-29 21:05
The new national curriculum provide a less in-depth introduction to climate change, and misses out vital information about risks

The Department for Education this month ended a consultation on its controversial proposals for the national curriculum amid protests about its plans to cut back on the teaching of climate change.

The education secretary, Michael Gove, launched his review of the curriculum in January 2011, but it has been beset by problems and delays, including complaints about of a lack of transparency and resignation threats from key advisers. It has also been hit by criticisms over suggestions that climate change would be omitted from a new slimmed-down version of the curriculum, which would be taught in English schools from September 2014.

Continue reading...
Categories: Around The Web

The week in wildlife – in pictures

The Guardian - Sat, 2013-04-27 01:45
Wales's oldest oak is felled by gale force winds after standing for 1,285 years in our pick of this week's images from the natural world Continue reading...
Categories: Around The Web

The dirty fossil fuel secret behind Burma's democratic fairytale | Nafeez Ahmed

The Guardian - Fri, 2013-04-26 22:18
South-east Asian country's untapped natural wealth is being opened up, regardless of the environmental and human costs

New evidence has emerged that the systematic violence against ethnic Rohingya in Burma - "described as genocidal by some experts" - is being actively supported by state agencies. But the violence's links to the country's ambitions to rapidly expand fossil fuel production, at massive cost to local populations and to the environment, have been largely overlooked.

Over 125,000 ethnic Rohingya have been forcibly displaced since waves of violence swept across Burma's Arakan state last year, continuing until now, according to the New York-based Human Rights Watch's (HRW) latest sobering report. The "ethnic cleansing" campaign against Arakan's Muslim minority, although instigated largely by Buddhist monks rallying local mobs, has been the product of "extensive state involvement and planning", according to HRW's UK director David Mepham.

Continue reading...
Categories: Around The Web

Inside a genetically modified salmon farm in Panama - video

The Guardian - Fri, 2013-04-26 00:10
Genetically modified salmon produced by US firm AquaBounty grow faster and fatter than their natural counterparts – and the firm that designed them hopes to have FDA approval to bring the first GM animal to consumers' plates this week. Online campaign group Avaaz visited the firm's ramshackle farm in the lush western highlands of Panama at 1,500m above sea level in the town of Boquete Continue reading...
Categories: Around The Web

Amazon v the Amazon: internet retailer in domain name battle

The Guardian - Thu, 2013-04-25 21:57
Brazil and Peru governments say company should not profit from an address that refers to an important geographical area

When you see the word "Amazon", what's the first thing that springs to mind – the world's biggest forest, the longest river or the largest internet retailer – and which do you consider most important?

These questions have risen to the fore in an arcane, but hugely important, debate about how to redraw the boundaries of the internet. Brazil and Peru have lodged objections to a bid made by the US e-commerce giant for a prime new piece of cyberspace: ".amazon".

Continue reading...
Categories: Around The Web

GM salmon's global HQ – 1,500m high in the Panamanian rainforest

The Guardian - Wed, 2013-04-24 23:34
Supersized genetically modified salmon grown fast and fat and after years of wrangling, are ready for market – but is the market ready for them? And why is the firm hidden away in Panama?

It is hard to think of a more unlikely setting for genetic experimentation or for raising salmon: a rundown shed at a secretive location in the Panamanian rainforest miles inland and 1,500m above sea level.

Continue reading...
Categories: Around The Web

Pages

Subscribe to Sustainable Engineering Society aggregator - Around The Web