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We know diesel vehicles are the key culprit, but when it comes to both long-term solutions and emergency measures the govenment has been asleep at the wheel

Cutting toxic levels of city air pollution to safer levels is simple, but not easy – it requires resolve. Yet, despite the key culprit in the UK being well known – diesel vehicles – the government has been asleep at the wheel for years.

Levels of nitrogen dioxide have been illegally high across much of the UK since 2010. In 2015 86% of major urban areas broke annual limits. Cutting this pollution means choking off diesel emissions and there is a wide range of effective measures available.

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The week’s top environment news stories and green events. If you are not already receiving this roundup, sign up here to get the briefing delivered to your inbox

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A swimming baby elephant, diving penguins and jumping impalas are among this week’s pick of images from the natural world

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A south London road breaches its EU annual air pollution limit for 2017 in just five days.

Pushback will be needed against an impending swarm of climate zombie myths

Climate myths are like zombies – you shoot them through the heart, walk away thinking they’re dead, and then they pop back up behind you and try once again to eat your brain.

So it is with Stage 1 climate denial and the myth that the Earth isn’t warming. It’s so persistent that it’s related to the 5th, 9th, and 49th-most popular myths in the Skeptical Science database. Climate deniers have been peddling the myth ‘no warming since [insert date]’ for over a decade.

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The quality of forensic science work in England and Wales is putting the integrity of the criminal justice system at risk, the regulator warns.

Brixton Road in Lambeth has already broken legal limits for toxic air for the entire year, with many other sites across the capital set to follow

London has breached its annual air pollution limits just five days into 2017, a “shameful reminder of the severity of London’s air pollution”, according to campaigners.

By law, hourly levels of toxic nitrogen dioxide must not be more than 200 micrograms per cubic metre more than 18 times in a whole year, but late on Thursday this limit was broken on Brixton Road in Lambeth.

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It now owns five of the world’s six largest solar-module manufacturing firms and the largest wind-turbine manufacturer

China is cementing its global dominance of renewable energy and supporting technologies, aggressively investing in them both at home and around the globe, leaving countries including the US, UK and Australia at risk of missing the growing market.

A report by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (Ieefa) found China’s dominance in renewables is rapidly spreading overseas, with the country accelerating its foreign investment in renewable energy and supporting technologies.

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A notorious egg thief is on the run after stealing bird eggs worth up to £5,000, after authorities in Brazil lost track of him.

Residents of the new eco hamlet in Pembrokeshire can expect greatly reduced fuel bills and shared use of an electric car

Most of the houses in the Welsh village of Glanrhyd are of traditional construction – walls made out of hefty local stone, roofs of grey slate. They can get chilly when the winter winds whistle through the gaps.

The six houses that make up the “eco hamlet” of Pentre Solar look and feel very different. They are built using light, bright timber sourced from a nearby valley. The houses are carefully insulated, airtight and powered by solar panels.

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A late list of new year resolutions include a return to mountain biking and a position in the commuting slow lane

New year resolutions are, of course, traditionally made before 1 January, not nearly a week into 2017. But I shall disregard convention – below are my cycling-related hopes for the current year.

Some are personal, some more general. I should also stress that these aren’t my sole hopes for humanity, just some specific Bike Blog-based ones. New bike lanes would be great, but I’m more keen overall on peace for all and a continued avoidance of a nuclear holocaust.

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Stricter EU emissions testing for large vehicles means modern diesel cars produce 10 times more NOx per litre of fuel

Modern diesel cars produce 10 times more toxic air pollution than heavy trucks and buses, new European data has revealed.

The stark difference in emissions of nitrogen oxides (NOx) is due to the much stricter testing applied to large vehicles in the EU, according to the researchers behind a new report. They say the same strict measures must be applied to cars.

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Stoke Abbott, Dorset Every limb is a puzzle, whether to remove or keep, how to split, where to interlace

Thunk! The billhook bites deep and splits the hazel slantwise. With a heave and a twist on the trunk, the young tree shakes its embryonic catkins against the sky and swishes down to lie lengthwise with the others. Then begins the business of trimming the prone sapling and weaving it in so it becomes both hedge and living fence.

Hedge laying is an ancient craft. Small tree trunks are sliced with a shallow, diagonal cut and then bent sideways. A thin bridge of wood remains to connect the laid tree to the live root. The horizontal trees, called pleaches or plashes, are interlaced and held in place with posts and crooks – pieces of forked stick driven into the ground. New side shoots grow outwards and upwards, regenerating the hedge from a thick, stock-proof, base.

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One of the 10 largest icebergs ever recorded is ready to break away from Antarctica, scientists say.

Matt Horn bitten twice after he found 11-year-old Braeden, who has autism, playing with the reptile

A Melbourne father and his 11-year-old autistic son have been bitten by a tiger snake that slithered into their suburban home.

Matt Horn was bitten twice as he tried to protect his son, Braeden, who had been bitten while playing with the snake in the hallway of their Diamond Creek home.

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The factory is producing lithium-ion batteries both for Tesla’s energy storage products and electric vehicles

Zinc metals producer Sun Metals is to build a 100MW solar PV plant was part of plans to expand its refinery near Townsville, in northern Queensland, in what is a landmark development in the Australian renewable energy landscape.

Fossils of ancient plants shed light on how the family that includes crops such as potatoes evolved.

2016 was Australia's hottest on record for ocean temperatures, and was marked by widespread bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef towards the end of summer.

For Australia’s climate, 2016 was a year of two halves. The year started with one of the strongest El Niño events on record in place in the Pacific Ocean, and the opening months of 2016 were generally hot and dry, especially in northern and eastern Australia.

From May onwards there was a dramatic change in the pattern, with heavy rain and flooding a regular feature of the middle months of the year.

Overall temperatures were the fourth warmest on record in 2016, capping off Australia’s hottest decade. We track these events and more in the Bureau of Meteorology’s annual climate summary released today.

Dry to start

At the start of 2016, many parts of Australia were significantly affected by drought. Long-term drought had existed since 2012 through much of inland Queensland and adjacent northern areas of New South Wales, while shorter-term drought affected Tasmania, central and western Victoria, and parts of South Australia.

While some rain fell between January and April in these areas, it was generally not enough to have much impact on the rainfall deficiencies. Tasmania was hit especially hard, with low water storages restricting hydroelectric production, and long-lived and extensive bushfires in central and western parts of the state a feature of the summer period.

January to April, normally the wettest time of the year across Australia’s far north, was also much drier than normal with rainfall well below average in the Kimberley, the Northern Territory Top End, and on Cape York Peninsula.

It was the least active Australian tropical cyclone season since comprehensive satellite records began in 1970, with only three cyclones in the region, none of them severe, and only one of which made landfall.

The rains are here

Widespread heavy rains began in May – something well predicted by seasonal forecast models - as the El Niño ended and conditions in the Indian Ocean became very favourable for Australian rainfall, with unusually warm waters between Western Australia and Indonesia. Each month from May to September was wetter than average across most of the continent, with heavy rains extending into areas such as inland Queensland where the winter is normally the driest time of the year.

The wet conditions culminated in September, when nationally averaged rainfall was nearly three times the average. It was the wettest September on record for New South Wales and the Northern Territory, and in the top four wettest for every state except Western Australia and Tasmania.

May to September was the wettest on record over Australia, with some locations in inland New South Wales breaking previous records for the period by nearly 200 millimetres. Rainfall returned to more normal levels in eastern mainland Australia from October onwards, although Tasmania remained wet, and a tropical low brought widespread heavy rains extending from the Kimberley south through central Australia as far south as South Australia and Victoria in the year’s final days.

Despite flood damage in places and some rain-affected harvests, the wet conditions were generally positive for agriculture. They also led to large increases in water storage levels in many areas, especially in the Murray-Darling Basin and in Tasmania.

Flooding and storms were also a feature of this period. In early June, an East Coast Low affected almost the whole east coast from southern Queensland southwards.

Northern Tasmania saw some of its most severe flooding on record, and the Sydney region suffered significant coastal erosion with some property damage. The heavy September rains led to major flooding on several inland rivers, particularly the Lachlan River in central New South Wales, and went on to produce the highest flood since the early 1990s on the Murray River in South Australia as the waters moved downstream.

An intense low-pressure system in South Australia at the end of September caused major wind and flood damage there. In Tasmania, which had further flooding in November, the seven months from May to November were the wettest on record, after the seven months from October 2015 to April 2016 had been the driest on record.

Over Australia as a whole, it was the 17th wettest year on record with rainfall 17% above the long-term average. Tasmania had its second-wettest year on record, despite the dry start, and South Australia its fourth-wettest. Below-average rainfalls in 2016 were largely confined to parts of the northern tropics, coastal areas of southern Queensland and northern New South Wales, and some parts of coastal Western Australia. Heavy rains in the year’s final week were enough to lift Adelaide to its second-wettest year on record, while Uraidla, in the Adelaide Hills, had the largest annual rainfall total at any South Australian site since 1917.

The heat is on

It was the fourth-warmest year on record for Australia, with temperatures 0.87℃ above average nationally, 0.33℃ short of the record set in 2013.

The year got off to a very warm start; it was the warmest autumn on record for Australia, and the first half of the year was also the warmest on record, although there were no individual heatwaves on the scale of those experienced in 2013 or 2014.

The second half of the year was less warm. During the wet months in mid-year, heavy cloud cover led to cool days but warm nights, then a cool October resulted in spring temperatures almost exactly matching the long-term average. A warm start and cooler finish is typical of a post-El Niño year as rainfall typically changes from below to above average.

It was the warmest year on record in many parts of the northern tropics, along much of the east coast, and in parts of Tasmania. Darwin, Brisbane, Sydney and Hobart all had their warmest year on record. The warmth on land in these coastal areas was matched by warmth in the oceans.

Sea surface temperatures in the Australian region were the warmest on record, with the first half of the year especially warm. The record warm waters contributed to extensive coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef, and also affected fisheries in Tasmania.

Temperatures were closer to average in other parts of the country, including inland areas of the eastern states, South Australia and most of Western Australia. In a few parts of southern Western Australia, which had its coldest winter since 1990, temperatures in 2016 were slightly below average (one of only a handful of land areas in the world where this was the case), and there was some frost damage to crops in what was otherwise a very productive year for Australia’s grain-growers.

2016 continues a sequence of years with Australian temperatures well above average. While 2016 did not set a record, the last four years all rank in Australia’s six warmest, and the last ten years have been Australia’s warmest on record. 2016 is also almost certain to be the hottest year on record globally.

Blair Trewin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.