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Chasing Ice movie reveals largest iceberg break-up ever filmed - video
Your memories of the 1952 great smog
I remember as a nine year old in 1959 living in South Ealing barely being able to see to catch the bus to school and my dad having to be guided home by a policeman with a torch – he was on our road at the time but had become completely disorientated. The policeman had a torch and used that to read the road name and house number.
Continue reading...How to buy a 'green' Christmas tree
Leo Hickman writes:
Continue reading...60 years since the great smog of London - in pictures
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Pitcairn Islands' underwater treasures revealed - in pictures
Norway's plan to kill wolves explodes myth of environmental virtue | George Monbiot
One of the biggest political shocks of the past decade has been the transformation of Canada. Under the influence of the tar barons of Alberta, it has mutated from a country dominated by liberal, pacific, outward-looking values to a thuggish petro-state, ripping up both international treaties and the fabric of its own nation.
Prepare to be shocked again. Another country, whose green and humanitarian principles were just as well-established as Canada's, is undergoing a similar transformation. Again, it is not the people of the nation who have changed – in both cases they remain, as far as I can tell, as delightful as ever – but the dominant political class and its destruction of both national values and international image.
Continue reading...World's most expensive coffee tainted by 'horrific' civet abuse
It's the world's most expensive coffee and is made from faeces, but connoisseur drinkers should feel most squeamish about the "horrific" abuse that mars its production process, animal welfare groups have claimed.
Kopi Luwak, or civet coffee, is created mainly in Indonesia from beans of coffee berries that are fed to Asian palm civets – small, cat-like creatures found in south-east Asia.
Continue reading...The week in wildlife – in pictures
'Humane' fishing net wins Dyson award
A young British designer has won a prestigious international award for creating a "humane" net to make fishing more sustainable by preventing small fish from being trapped.
Dan Watson devised a system based on a series of escape rings for fish – which can be fitted to a fisherman's trawler net – in response to the problem of overfishing and the controversial and wasteful practice of throwing away healthy and edible fish or other creatures as so-called bycatch.
Continue reading...World's rarest whale seen for first time after New Zealand beaching
The spade-toothed beaked whale is so rare that nobody has seen one alive, but scientists have proof the species still exists.
Two skeletons were identified as belonging to the species after a 17-foot whale and her calf beached themselves in New Zealand in 2010. Scientists hope the discovery will provide insights into the species and into ocean ecosystems.
Continue reading...How can you get rid of clothes moths?
When you look at the size of a clothes moth – and sometimes I look at the size of a clothes moth five times a day prior to mashing it violently against a wall/carpet/treasured coat – it seems extraordinary how useless the human race is at killing this most destructive of pests. Without difficulty, people wipe out badgers, cats, other human beings. How hard can it be to kill a scrap of animated dust that lives on old sweat and cardigans?
True, weaponry has advanced, a little, since I was first infested. Two decades ago, when a soft Nicole Farhi cardigan emerged for its first outing with ragged holes already dotting the moth-favoured breast region, the best on offer was mothballs and those bits of amusingly-shaped cedar that are as effective at combating moths as, say, snowballs would be at wiping out the Taliban.
Continue reading...Why wet wipes are wreaking havoc on sewers
Time was when British bottoms were built to withstand the crinkliest, shiniest toilet paper available, and in some cases even to enjoy it. But there has been a fundamental softening in recent years, seen in a growing preference not only for quilted loo roll, but now for wet wipes. The musician Will.i.Am is one leading exponent of damp bottom-wiping. The consequences for our drains, though, are disastrous.
"If you swill a piece of toilet roll around in some water, it takes seconds for it to disintegrate," explains Simon Evans from Thames Water. "Wet wipes should never be put down drains, because they don't break down – even if the packaging says they are 'biodegradable' or 'flushable'. Only human waste and loo roll should go down our sewers."
Continue reading...Talking beluga whale named Noc is revealed
A Beluga whale named Noc learned to warble in a human voice that was so convincing it fooled a diver into thinking someone was shouting at him to get out of the water, US researchers have revealed.
Continue reading...How will climate change affect food production?
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Food is one of society's key sensitivities to climate. A year of not enough or too much rainfall, a hot spell or cold snap at the wrong time, or extremes, like flooding and storms, can have a significant effect on local crop yields and livestock production. While modern farming technologies and techniques have helped to reduce this vulnerability and boost production, the impact of recent droughts in the USA, China and Russia on global cereal production highlight a glaring potential future vulnerability.
There is some evidence that climate change is already having a measurable affect on the quality and quantity of food produced globally. But this is small when compared with the significant increase in global food production that has been achieved over the past few decades. Isolating the influence of climatic change from all the other trends is difficult, but one recent Stanford University study found that increases in global production of maize and wheat since 1980 would have been about 5% higher were it not for climate change.
Continue reading...Arctic sea ice melt 'may bring harsh winter to Europe'
The record loss of Arctic sea ice this summer may mean a cold winter for the UK and northern Europe. The region has been prone to bad winters after summers with very low sea ice, such as 2011 and 2007, said Jennifer Francis, a researcher at Rutgers University.
"We can't make predictions yet … [but] I wouldn't be surprised to see wild extremes this winter," Francis told the Guardian.
Continue reading...Scottish fish farmers use record amounts of parasite pesticides
Scottish fish farmers have been forced to use record amounts of highly toxic pesticides to combat underwater parasites that prey on salmon, raising fears of significant damage to the marine environment.
Data released by the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (Sepa) shows a 110% increase in the use of chemicals to treat sea lice in the past four years, mainly because the parasite is becoming resistant to treatment. During that same period, however, salmon production has increased only by 22%, to 158,000 tonnes.
Continue reading...Yangtze finless porpoise: China's national treasure disappearing fast
It's been an hour and the group of volunteers aboard the rickety fishing boat are still yet to spot a Yangtze finless porpoise, known as jiangzhu or "river pig". Thirty years ago, when they numbered 2,000, the mammals could be seen from the shore here dancing on Dongting Lake in the sludge-coloured waves. Now there are about 85 jiangzhu here. As Xu Yaping, the patrol's chief, peers through the haze, and coal barges and dredgers churn the lake, the chance of encountering this ancient creature seems remote.
The jiangzhu's survival is not guaranteed. Since the official extinction of the baiji, a river dolphin, in 2007, the porpoise is the only cetacean inhabiting the Yangtze River and two connecting freshwater lakes, Dongting and Poyang, China's largest. It's estimated there are around 1,200 jiangzhu living in the wild – two-thirds less than a decade earlier. The species is decreasing at a rate of 6.4% a year, making it rarer than China's national treasure, the giant panda.
Continue reading...'Vast reservoir' of methane locked beneath Antarctic ice sheet
A vast reservoir of the potent greenhouse gas methane may be locked beneath the Antarctic ice sheet, a study suggests.
Scientists say the gas could be released into the atmosphere if enough of the ice melts away, adding to global warming.
Continue reading...Argentinian politicians unveil plan to shoot seagulls that attack whales
Saving the whales is something Argentinians take so seriously that authorities in Patagonia have launched a 100-day plan to shoot seagulls that have learned to attack the big mammals as they surface to breathe.
Environmentalists say the plan is misguided. They say humans are the real problem, creating so much garbage that the gull population has exploded.
Continue reading...Track cycling for the first time: 'frightening but instantly addictive' | Trevor Ward
The first thing that strikes me as I emerge from the tunnel into the middle of Manchester velodrome is the banked sections of curved track at either end of the arena.
They tower over me, pitched at a frighteningly steep angle of 42 degrees. A lone rider glides past above me. It looks like a fairground Wall of Death ride.
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