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Australia’s natural wonder is in mortal danger. Bleaching caused by climate change has killed almost a quarter of its coral this year and many scientists believe it could be too late for the rest. Using exclusive photographs and new data, a Guardian special report investigates how the reef has been devastated – and what can be done to save it

It was the smell that really got to diver Richard Vevers. The smell of death on the reef.

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Jon Brodie from James Cook University says to give the Great Barrier Reef even a fighting chance to survive, Australia needs to spend $1bn a year for the next 10 years to improve water quality. If we don’t do that now, he says, we might need to just give up on the reef. ‘Climate change is happening much more quickly and much more severely than most scientists predicted’

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Terry Hughes from James Cook University in Queensland leads a taskforce measuring the condition of the Great Barrier Reef amid a global coral bleaching event that is ‘off the scale’. ‘The kind of bleaching we’re seeing now is an entirely modern phenomenon,’ he says. ‘We’re now in a very precarious position, where every El Niño that comes along, every five or six years, can potentially bleach the entire Great Barrier Reef’

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Richard Vevers from the Ocean Agency had never experienced anything like the devastation he witnessed in May diving around the dead and dying coral reefs off Lizard Island on the Great Barrier Reef. When his team emerged from the water, he says, ‘We realised we just stank – we stank of the smell of rotting animals.’ The reefs around the island have been ravaged by coral bleaching caused by climate change

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Paul Crocombe from Adrenalin Dive in Townsville has been taking tourists to the Great Barrier Reef for more than 20 years. ‘We were really fortuntate this time with the coral bleaching that the majority of the mortality is a long way north of here,’ he says. With the reef in danger, he adds, accurate information is needed

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Dead and dying coral at Lizard Island on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. The once brilliant coral is blanketed by seaweed – a sign of extreme ecosystem meltdown. These exclusive photographs are from a series taken by not-for-profit the Ocean Agency as part of its work around the world documenting the longest coral bleaching event in history

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Tiny bird flies 59,650 miles from its breeding grounds in Farne Islands in the UK to Antarctica and back again, clocking the longest ever migration recorded

A tiny bird from the Farne Islands off Northumberland has clocked up the longest migration ever recorded. The Arctic tern’s meandering journey to Antarctica and back saw it clock up 59,650 miles, more than twice the circumference of the planet.

The bird, which weighs just 100g, left its breeding grounds last July and flew down the west coast of Africa, rounded the Cape of Good Hope into the Indian Ocean and arrived in Antarctica in November. Its mammoth trek was recorded by a tiny device attached to its leg, weighing 0.7g - too light to affect its flight.

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GREAT MOMENTS IN SCIENCE: There may be a whole range of reasons why it's not good to water plants in the middle of the day, but is burning the plant's leaves one of them? Dr Karl investigates the physics of plants and water.

Europe’s influence on cleaning up the air Britons breathe is driven by the 2008 clean air directive but dates back much further

The UK government freely says that almost all its efforts to cut air pollution in recent years have been driven by EU legislation.

There is one reason why air pollution was a big issue in the London mayoral campaign and why the government is facing a legal challenge on its clean-up plans: the EU’s 2008 clean air directive.

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The hunt for a cancer cure should be treated with as much urgency as the Ebola outbreak, says US Vice-President Joe Biden.

Report recommends breeding the endangered species – which is the world’s smallest porpoise – in captivity, but some experts disagree

Mexican authorities should consider trapping some of the few remaining vaquita marina porpoises in order to attempt breeding the endangered species in captivity or semi-captivity, conservationists have recommended.

Related: Mexico urged to act and save world's smallest porpoise – the little sea cow

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Fire significantly added to our ability to change the world. Fire image from www.shutterstock.com

Over the past year, carbon dioxide (CO₂) levels in the atmosphere have risen faster than any period in the past 55 million years. That’s the finding of my study published in Global Change Biology.

From April 2015 to April 2016, CO₂ levels rose by 4.6 parts per million (ppm), reaching a level of 407.42ppm at Mauna Loa observatory, Hawaii. This rate has increased in the past 200 years and forms a unique spike, reflecting accelerating global warming reinforced by the recent El Niño.

CO₂ levels above 400ppm have not been observed in the Earth’s climate record since the Pliocene, 5.3-2.6 million years ago, when sea level was about 25 metres higher than at present.

While climate change has gained scientific attention in the past 50 years, and political action in the last 25, humans have been altering the atmosphere much longer than that.

About 7,000 years ago, the development of agriculture, burning and land clearing is believed to have led to a small rise in CO₂ in the atmosphere (around 20-25ppm). Methane also rose by a small amount from 5,000 years ago.

These small rises didn’t lead to increasing temperatures, because the overall temperature trend until the 18th century was cooling.

Humans have since increased CO₂ from 280ppm before the Industrial Revolution to over 400ppm. Together these global changes, driven by our use of energy, have led scientists to define a new geological age, the Anthropocene.

A new age

Although not yet officially recognised, the Anthropocene is widely considered to have begun in the 18th century with the release of greenhouse gases (CO₂, methane and nitrogen oxides), land clearing, chemical pollution and other human activities. These changes have accelerated since the 1950s.

Some think the Anthropocene began much earlier, linked to the first rise in greenhouse gases around 7,000 years ago. In evolutionary terms, it can be suggested the blueprint for anthropogenic global warming originated earlier still with the harnessing of fire.

The only natural parallel with the speed of climate changes over the last few decades is during mass extinctions, when the pace of change exceeds the ability of species to adapt. Mass extinctions in the past have been triggered by large-scale volcanic events or asteroid impacts.

This time it’s us causing the changes. The unique ability of an organism to trigger a mass extinction has a possible precedent in the history of Earth.

As US palaeontologist Peter Ward explains in Under Green Sky (2008), the Permian-Triassic mass extinction (about 251 million years ago) was, at least in part, caused by toxic gas released by purple-green algae from the oceans.

Fire and ice

What has made humans so effective at causing environmental change? There are two essential factors.

First, with the exception of humans, no species has ever been able to harness combustion in order to magnify its energy output. Humans mastered fire at least 1 million years ago, and possibly earlier.

Fire has allowed us to cook. Consequently, we were able to increase our protein consumption, hunt, protect ourselves from cold and wild animals, move into inhospitable climate, clear the land, smelt metals and construct machines.

Fire vastly increased the amount of energy available for people to use. Human respiration dissipates 2–10 calories per minute, a camp fire covering one square metre releases approximately three to four orders of magnitude more, and the output of a 1,000 megawatt-hour power plant expends yet higher orders of magnitude than the energy produced by human respiration.

Second, humans have been blessed by a relatively stable climate over the past 7,000 years, although mean global variations of less than 1℃ were sufficient to cause serious disruption to agriculture and a decline to collapse of civilisations.

Ice core evidence for the concentration of greenhouse gases and atmospheric temperatures during the last 740,000 years suggests highly unstable and often extreme climates during the ice ages (glacial) and during abrupt cooling phases (called “stadials”) during warmer (interglacial) periods, preventing the development of farming.

A stable climate developed around 7,000 years ago. This allowed large-scale Neolithic production of extra food and thereby the emergence of villages, towns and later cities. This opened the way for Homo sapiens to expand its population and trigger energy output by huge amounts.

Thus, despite their high intelligence, humans were largely restricted to hunting and gathering until they mastered fire and then until the climate stabilised enough to allow farming.

The future

Since the onset of the industrial age, humans have released more than 600 billion tonnes of carbon, pushing mean global temperatures up by around 1°C globally, or 1.5°C on the continents.

Allowing for the cooling effects of sulphur aerosols (which reflect sunlight), the rise in temperatures is closer to 2°C, a mean global temperature similar to the Pliocene (2.6 - 5.3 million years ago). More recently the rise of atmospheric CO₂ accelerated, to rates higher than 3ppm per year during 2012-2016.

While we know a lot about what may happen in a warming world, widely agreed projections of future temperatures do not include the possibility of abrupt climate tipping point events.

Following the peak of previous warm periods, the Atlantic Mid-Ocean Circulation (AMOC) has repeatedly collapsed due to the melting Greenland ice sheet and flow of cold meltwater into the ocean, triggering much colder temperatures, followed by further warming. Examples are the cold Younger Dryas (12,900-11,700 years ago) and the collapse of the North American ice sheet about 8,200 years ago.

A future AMOC collapse may be signified by a growing cold region southeast of Greenland in the North Atlantic. An AMOC collapse will trigger a sharp decline in temperatures in the North Atlantic region for a limited but unspecified period. With high atmospheric CO₂ levels, such a collapse would be followed by renewed warming.

Recent history inexorably links human civilisation to the Earth’s climate. Given its mastery of fire and nuclear fission, humanity would need to be both wise and in control if it is to avert the energy released from these sources from threatening nature and its own future.

This article is based on Climate, Fire and Human Evolution (2016) by Andrew Glikson.

Andrew Glikson 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.

British Lung Foundation research finds those in poorer areas up to twice as affected as those in rich boroughs

People living in some of London’s most deprived areas have up to twice as much chance of dying from life-threatening lung conditions – from cancer to asthma – as those in the richest areas, new research has shown.

The research, by the British Lung Foundation charity, prompted the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, to call for urgent measures to improve air quality and reduce pollution in the capital.

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Vote Leave campaign head mocks partly-EU funded conservation project to revive numbers of little terns as ‘aphrodisiacs for birds’

For Brexit campaigners trawling for examples of apparently badly spent EU cash to hold up for public opprobrium, a project that involves leaving plaster models of birds on beaches may have seemed easy to mock.

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Proposal for temporary licence extension for chemical used in weedkiller, to study concerns over cancer risks, fails to get sufficient majority in voting

EU nations have refused to back a limited extension of the pesticide glyphosate’s use, threatening withdrawal of Monsanto’s Roundup and other weedkillers from shelves if no decision is reached by the end of the month.

Contradictory findings on the carcinogenic risks of the chemical have thrust it into the centre of a dispute among EU and US politicians, regulators and researchers.

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Companies say offshore wind will generate electricity as cheaply as fossil fuels within a decade if properly supported

A group of offshore wind companies have pledged that the technology will generate electricity as cheaply as fossil fuels in Europe within a decade – but only if policymakers across the EU take the steps needed to ensure such growth as a matter of urgency.

The pledge(pdf) and the challenge to ministers are designed to reposition offshore wind as having a strong future in the EU. The European commission has tended to emphasise gas as the priority source of energy security.

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Two whale sharks destined for an ocean theme park in China were rescued after an 18-month investigation by Wildlife Conservation Society, covered by investigative photojournalist Paul Hilton. The operation, supported by Indonesia’s marine police, revealed where the protected species were being illegally caught and kept in sea pens by a major supplier of large marine megafauna to the international wildlife trade

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Solving the problem of climate change will require daring actions

The climate system is a unifying ethical field that extends from the physical to the metaphysical and connects your actions to my well-being, and vice-versa, no matter how remote your life is from mine. The Golden Rule we have always treated as an abstract moral recommendation is now visibly playing out its logic in the physical world.

This period in history must be about useful innovations that rescue Earth systems from collapse and dignify human beings everywhere. We must dare to imagine, explore, and remake the limits of our experience, together.

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Helen Pidd chooses her favourite bike clobber for 2016 after extensive testing in Mallorca ... and Manchester

Hurray! Summer is finally here and with it comes the best ever choice of women’s cycling gear. I’ve been testing a load of kit for the past few months in my native Manchester, plus sneaking off to Mallorca with my club to test the wicking properties of various jerseys and seeing which chamois offer best protection to my delicate bits. Here are my favourites:

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University lecturer Doreen Collyer named as victim of second fatal shark attack in Western Australian waters within five days as authorities seek to kill animal

The second shark victim in West Australian waters within five days has been named as university lecturer Doreen Collyer, as authorities try to catch and shoot the animal believed responsible.

Collyer, a lecturer with the school of nursing and midwifery at Perth’s Edith Cowan University, was hailed as a much-loved and respected colleague, mentor and teacher.

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