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Zero emission milestone reached as country is powered by just wind, solar and hydro-generated electricity for 107 hours

Portugal kept its lights on with renewable energy alone for four consecutive days last week in a clean energy milestone revealed by data analysis of national energy network figures.

Electricity consumption in the country was fully covered by solar, wind and hydro power in an extraordinary 107-hour run that lasted from 6.45am on Saturday 7 May until 5.45pm the following Wednesday, the analysis says.

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Look inside a life-size model of a submarine which the Chinese hope will take humans to the very bottom of the ocean - the Mariana Trench, in the Pacific.

Deep underground, beneath Daya Bay in the south of China, scientists are hunting for the oddest particles in the cosmos - neutrinos.

Government plans to fell Poland’s Białowieża forest have divided families, led to death threats against green campaigners and allegations of an ‘environmental coup’ by government and state timber interests

Europe’s last primeval forest is facing what campaigners call its last stand as loggers prepare to start clear-cutting trees, following the dismissal of dozens of scientists and conservation experts opposed to the plan.

Poland’s new far right government says logging is needed because more than 10% of spruce trees in the Unesco world heritage site of Białowieża are suffering from a bark beetle outbreak. But nearly half the logging will be of other species, according to its only published inventory.

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The Greens were not invited to an election debate over the environment and climate change, and they're not altogether pleased about it.

More than 30 green groups sign statement after damning report says extending regional forestry agreements ‘would constitute an irrational decision on environmental, economic and social grounds’

More than 30 environmental groups have signed a statement demanding that agreements allowing the logging of Australian native forests not be renewed.

Australia’s 10 regional forestry agreements (RFAs) were signed between 1997 and 2001, each running for 20 years, with the first two expiring in 2017.

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SOCIAL NETWORKS: There is a limit to how many people you can have in your social network - now a study reveals why, and how many relationships you need to maintain that network.

The records keep on falling Thermometer image from www.shutterstock.com

We’re not even halfway through the year but already you may have heard talk of 2016 being the hottest on record. But how can scientists be so sure we’re going to beat the previous record, set just last year?

Even before the end of 2015, the UK Met Office was forecasting with 95% confidence that 2016 would beat the record. Since then, that confidence has grown still further, as record after record has tumbled. April 2016 broke the record for the hottest April after we had experienced the hottest February and March on record already this year.

NASA climatologist Gavin Schmidt recently estimated at least a 99% likelihood of 2016 being hotter than 2015.

The role of El Niño

The main reason why scientists are so sure that 2016 will be the hottest year is El Niño, which is associated with warmer sea surface temperatures in the eastern Pacific Ocean. The 2015-16 El Niño was among the strongest on record and has increased global average temperatures.

Even though the El Niño is now decaying, the second year of a major El Niño event is often associated with much warmer than normal conditions and is typically warmer than the first.

For instance, the 1997-98 El Niño was by some measures the strongest on record, and contributed to 1998 becoming the hottest year on record globally at the time.

Since the start of this year, we have seen global temperature records smashed time and time again. This means that much colder temperatures for the second half of the year would be needed for 2016 not to surpass the 2015 record.

Even a strong La Niña event (the cooler opposite of El Niño), which some analysts are forecasting, is unlikely to produce cold enough temperatures.

One thing that could prevent 2016 becoming a record-breaking hot year is a major volcanic eruption in the tropics. Volcanic eruptions at low latitudes can eject aerosols high into the atmosphere reducing the amount of energy from the sun reaching the Earth’s surface.

Previous eruptions such as Pinatubo in 1991 and Tambora in 1815 (which caused 1816 to be “the year without a summer”) reduced temperatures across much of the globe.

However, it is the year after the eruption that often experiences the most severe cooling, so an eruption would have to be pretty soon and very strong to scupper 2016’s chances of being the hottest year on record.

What about climate change?

The role of climate change is smaller because we’re comparing 2016 with last year (the previous record). Over such short periods of time, the contribution from global warming doesn’t change much.

However, scientists estimated that 2015 was about 1℃ hotter than it would have been without human-caused climate change. As the human influence on the climate has not increased greatly since last year this 1℃ estimate will also apply to 2016.

The highly likely record temperature of 2016 will join the previous 17 record-breaking hot years back to 1937 which were all made more likely due to human-caused climate change (the rising global temperatures were even noticed as far back as 1938).

So even if El Niño is driving the 2016 record, we can say that the temperatures of this year (and indeed the temperatures associated with all the records over the last few years) would be virtually impossible without climate change.

An omen for the future?

We expect 2016 to beat the 2015 record for global average temperature as the decaying El Niño event pushes up surface temperatures.

This year, we’ve already seen devastating events associated with unusually warm temperatures, like the mass coral bleaching in the Great Barrier Reef, which has been largely attributed to human-induced climate change.

In future, we can expect to see more extreme heat events, like we’ve already seen in 2016, impacting society and ecosystems across the world.

And even though 2016 is likely to be the hottest year by some margin, we wouldn’t bet on this record lasting too long. While 2017 is very likely to be cooler due to a possible La Niña, with the strong warming trend the world’s experiencing it’s only a matter of time before we have another record-breaking hot year.

Only if we substantially reduce our greenhouse gas emissions now will we see the benefit of fewer record heat events in the future.

Andrew King receives funding from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science.

Ed Hawkins receives funding from the Natural Environment Research Council (UK).

The fossil fuel industry, fee-hungry lawyers, banks and those that stay silent are profiting from the reef’s destruction. It’s time for them to say no more

It’s the worst crisis ever to hit the Great Barrier Reef and the extent of the devastation is only just coming to light. The reef is in the middle of the worst bleaching event ever seen, with unusually warm water killing as much as half the corals in the northern sections, with the trend set to continue for the next 20 years.

Who’s to blame for this destruction? And which businesses are profiting from the activities that are causing this havoc?

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Refugees are forced to flee conflict zones. They have no other choice unlike most migrants who leave their homes voluntarily to improve living conditions

She spent endless days and nights fleeing a warzone as a tiny child, first on foot through the darkness and then by boat after they shut the borders in her native Sierra Leone.

But when Yarrie Bangurra saw the camp she was supposed to be staying in, she couldn’t understand what it was her family had come to.

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EARLY LIFE: Seaweed-like fossils found in rocks in China dated to around 1.56 billion years ago are the earliest known examples of larger organisms made up of many cells built like our own.

For much of this year, up to 1,700 kilometres of the Murray River has been hit by a serious outbreak of potentially toxic blue-green algae, which has flourished in the hotter-than-average conditions. After three months, the river is now recovering with the arrival of wet weather. But we are unlikely to have seen the last of these poisonous microbes.

Large blue-green algal blooms are a relatively new phenomenon in inland waterways. In 1991 an algal bloom affected more than 1,000 km of the Darling River, the first time such an event had been reported in an Australian river, and one of the few times internationally. It was an environmental disaster, killing livestock and striking a telling blow against Australia’s reputation as a clean, green farming nation.

The response was decisive: a state of emergency was declared, and the bloom ultimately gave rise to significant investment by state and federal governments into freshwater research, particularly in the Murray-Darling Basin.

Why no emergency now?

Fast forward two and a half decades to the latest bloom afflicting the Murray River, one of Australia’s most socially, economically and culturally significant waterways. The past decade has seen four similar blooms on the Murray River: in 2007, 2009, 2010 and now. Yes, they have garnered press attention, but there has not been the same call to arms that we saw when the Darling River was struck in 1991.

It is almost as if such significant environmental events are now simply seen as the new normal. Why the apparent complacency?

The 2007, 2009 and 2010 algal blooms on the Murray River all happened during the Millennium Drought, and hence were probably ascribed to an aberration in the weather. In reality, the situation may have more to do with how we manage water in Australia – particularly during periods of scarcity, such as the one we may well be entering now.

Those three earlier events all started in Lake Hume, a large reservoir in the Murray River’s upper reaches, originally created in the 1930s to help “drought-proof” Australia. All of the blooms began after the water level was drawn down to below 10% of the lake’s capacity. At these low levels, disturbances (such as when transferring water between the Snowy River and Murray River systems) can easily lead to the mixing of warm surface waters (ideal for bloom formation) with nutrient-rich water at the bottom of the reservoir (ideal for feeding the bloom).

The resulting blooms were then released downstream into the Murray River by managed water releases from Lake Hume. The blooms most likely reformed in other constructed water bodies downstream – most notably Lake Mulwala, a shallow reservoir about 250 km along the river from Lake Hume.

Lake Mulwala’s principal purpose is to create hydraulic pressure to allow irrigation water to be diverted into farmland in southern New South Wales and northern Victoria. As a result, its shallow depth and mostly still waters make it an ideal incubator for blue-green algae.

The climate factor

This year’s algal bloom on the Murray River is different. The main blue-green alga in the current outbreak, Chrysosporium ovalisporum, has previously been reported in the river, but generally in very low numbers. It has never before formed a bloom in the Murray River since monitoring began in 1978. But crucially, this species flourishes in very warm temperatures; overseas blooms of this species have occurred when water temperatures reach 26℃.

The other difference between the current and earlier blooms is that, when this year’s event started, Lake Hume was much fuller, at about 30% capacity. So reservoir operation probably had less to do with the bloom’s formation than other factors, such as the climate. Both the maximum and minimum temperatures were consistently above the long-term average during the past few months, as was the amount of sunlight reaching the surface of Lake Hume.

We still do not know exactly what triggered this year’s bloom, but if it was indeed a result of unusually warm temperatures, it is very likely that we will see more blooms of this type in the future.

Are we really ready for recurrent blue-green algal blooms on the Murray River? These blooms come at a significant economic cost: drinking water has had to be specially treated to remove potential toxins, and the bloom has impacted on regional tourism, coinciding with the Labour Day and Easter long weekends. It also hit farmers, who had to get drinking water for their livestock from elsewhere.

More importantly, what do these frequent blooms say about how we manage water in this country – especially as we start to see the impacts of climate change on our environment? Dwindling water could mean more than just drought – it could also fill much of the water that remains with poisonous microbes.

Darren Baldwin has received funding from the Murray-Darling Basin Authority to study blue-green algal blooms in the Murray River , including the current bloom.

Chairman of UN’s joint meeting on pesticide residues co-runs scientific institute which received donation from Monsanto, which uses glyphosate

A UN panel that on Tuesday ruled that glyphosate was probably not carcinogenic to humans has now become embroiled in a bitter row about potential conflicts of interests. It has emerged that an institute co-run by the chairman of the UN’s joint meeting on pesticide residues (JMPR) received a six-figure donation from Monsanto, which uses the substance as a core ingredient in its bestselling Roundup weedkiller.

Professor Alan Boobis, who chaired the UN’s joint FAO/WHO meeting on glyphosate, also works as the vice-president of the International Life Science Institute (ILSI) Europe. The co-chair of the sessions was Professor Angelo Moretto, a board member of ILSI’s Health and Environmental Services Institute, and of its Risk21 steering group too, which Boobis also co-chairs.

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Beautiful places threatened by mass tourism

Thai authorities have closed the celebrated scuba-diving destination to visitors – but it’s not the first ‘honeypot’ site to take such action

Related: Thailand closes 'overcrowded' Koh Tachai island to tourists

The trouble for Koh Tachai was that its beaches were just a little too white, its coral reef too colourful, its marine life too dazzling. Now you can’t go there, because Thai authorities have shut it to tourists – the latest and most drastic response to a booming and increasingly itinerant global population.

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More cycling, better public transport and car bans - cities from Delhi to Zurich are using a range of initiatives to lower traffic pollution and improve health

Paris

Paris bans cars in many historic central districts at weekends, imposes odd-even bans on vehicles, makes public transport free during major pollution events and encourages car- and bike-sharing programmes. A long section of the Right Bank of the river Seine is now car-free and and a monthly ban on cars has come into force along the Champs-Elysées.

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2017 finance bill will set price at €30 a tonne in a bid to stir European action to cut emissions and drive forward the Paris climate agreement

France will set a carbon price floor of about €30 ($33.95) a tonne in its 2017 finance bill as the government seeks to kickstart broader European action to cut emissions and drive forward last year’s landmark international climate accord.

The French government said last month that it would unilaterally set a carbon price floor in the absence of a broader European initiative to strengthen carbon pricing, hoping the move will spur other countries to act. It did not, however, give an indication on pricing.

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Report’s author says City Hall publicised positive conclusions but held back the finding that deprived schools were disproportionately affected by toxic air

The author of a report on how London’s illegal air pollution disproportionately affects deprived schools has said City Hall under Boris Johnson held back the study’s negative findings, while publicising the positive ones.

The Guardian revealed an unpublished Greater London authority (GLA) report on Monday that showed how deprived schools in the capital were disproportionately affected by toxic air, leading the new mayor, Sadiq Khan, to accuse Johnson of burying the report.

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More than 100 of the world’s poorest and most poorly governed countries have no or limited monitoring of the polluted air their citizens are breathing

More than 1 billion people live in countries that do not monitor the air they breathe, according to data released by the World Health Organisation (WHO).

Guardian analysis has revealed a great air pollution blindspot stretching the length of Africa, across large parts of the former Soviet Union, south-east Asia and the Caribbean. In 92 countries the monitoring equipment and staff needed to measure one of the world’s most deadly pollutants - particulate matter (PM) - are simply not available.

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Governments have begun work on implementing the 2015 Paris Agreement to limit global warming.