Feed aggregator

As Day Zero looms and the South African city gets set to run out of water, experts say lessons learned during Melbourne’s brush with a similar fate may help avert a global crisis

In December 2017, Seona Candy drove through the vineyards of the Franschhoek Valley near Cape Town towards the banks of the Sonderend river. In the late 1970s, the waterway was dammed to create the biggest reservoir in South Africa’s Western Cape. Behind the thick walls of the Theewaterskloof dam lay the capacity to hold 480 million cubic metres of water, nearly half of Cape Town’s water supply.

“When I got there, it was mostly dust,” Candy says.

Continue reading...

Hedgehogs are continuing to decline in the UK, particularly in rural areas, according to a new report.

A Scandinavian system for recycling bottles is thought likely to be adopted in the UK.

Responding to growing market demand, LONGi will invest $309 million, including about $240 million in construction investment and roughly $68 million in working capital, to double the capacity of its cell and module factory in Andhra Pradesh from 500MW to 1GW respectively.

The rocket's payload is Elon Musk's own Tesla, and two of the three rocket segments have landed.

Greensmith Energy, a part of the technology group Wärtsilä, has successfully completed two grid-scale energy storage systems in partnership with E.ON Climate & Renewables in Texas.

South African City of Cape Town could run out of drinking water in a matter of months, and that's sparked the question if Australia is prepared for similar crisis.

The world's most powerful rocket successfully lifts clear of its pad on historic maiden flight.

Wild cheering greets the launch of the maiden flight of the new rocket.

A car, a golf ball, a pie... and other items items dispatched on cosmic journeys over the years.

To answer this question from Fiona, age 6, we need to know some things about clouds and light. Justin Peter, Senior Climatologist, Australian Bureau of Meteorology Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.

Hoang Duc Binh had posted footage on Facebook of fishermen protesting following a huge chemical spill from a steel plant

A court in central Vietnam has sentenced an activist to 14 years in jail for livestreaming fishermen marching to file a lawsuit against a Taiwan-owned steel plant’s spill of toxins into the ocean.

Hoang Duc Binh, 34, was convicted of abusing democratic freedoms to infringe on the interests of the state, organisation and people, and opposing officers on duty, following a trial on Tuesday by the people’s court in Nghe An province, lawyer Ha Huy Son said.

Continue reading...

Move makes it the largest university fund in the UK to ditch all coal, oil and gas holdings, following a long student campaign

The University of Edinburgh is dumping all its fossil fuel investments, making it the largest UK university endowment fund to be completely free of all coal, oil and gas holdings.

The decision was announced on Monday and followed a long student campaign. More than 60 UK universities have now divested from fossil fuels, with the University of Sussex the latest to make the move.

Continue reading...

A new paper shows that climate myths consistently fail critical thinking tests

Climate myths are often contradictory – it’s not warming, though it’s warming because of the sun, and really it’s all just an ocean cycle – but they all seem to share one thing in common: logical fallacies and reasoning errors.

John Cook, Peter Ellerton, and David Kinkead have just published a paper in Environmental Research Letters in which they examined 42 common climate myths and found that every single one demonstrates fallacious reasoning. For example, the authors made a video breaking down the logical flaws in the myth ‘climate changed naturally in the past so current climate change is natural.’

Continue reading...

SkyPixel has announced the winners of its annual aerial photography competition and the results are breathtaking. The contest, which ran from October to December, received more than 44,000 submissions from people in 141 countries, across the categories of landscape, portrait and story. The grand prize was awarded to Florian Ledoux, a photographer from France, who captured a polar bear jumping across ice floes in Nunavut, Canada

Continue reading...

Helen Pidd was cycling through stationary traffic when a passenger opened his door into her path

As soon as the car door hit me I thought: finally. After cycling regularly for 15 years it always seemed something of a miracle that I had never been knocked off.

My second instinct was to feel sheepish. Was it my fault?

Continue reading...

While the hole over Antarctica has been closing, the protective ozone is thinning at the lower latitudes, where the sunlight is stronger and billions of people live

The ozone layer that protects people from the sun’s ultraviolet radiation is not recovering over most highly populated regions, scientists warned on Tuesday.

The greatest losses in ozone occurred over Antarctica but the hole there has been closing since the chemicals causing the problem were banned by the Montreal protocol. But the ozone layer wraps the entire Earth and new research has revealed it is thinning in the lower stratosphere over the non-polar areas.

Continue reading...

Capacity is growing fast and turbines getting bigger – some almost as large as the Shard

Britain accounted for more than half of the new offshore wind power capacity built in Europe last year, as the sector broke installation records across the continent.

Continue reading...

Air BP has become the first aviation fuelling provider to achieve carbon neutrality.

Younicos has signed an agreement with TerraForm Power to install and commission a 10 MW battery-based energy storage system upgrade at the site of the Kaheawa wind farm on the island of Maui, Hawaii.