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All three chicks at Cairngorms osprey nest die
Trump's Fox News deputy national security advisor fooled him with climate fake news | Dana Nuccitelli
What does it say about the Trump administration that the president was fooled by a dumb, long-debunked climate myth?
As Politico reported, Trump’s deputy national security adviser, KT McFarland, gave him a fake 1970s Time magazine cover warning of a coming ice age. The Photoshopped magazine cover circulated around the internet several years ago, but was debunked in 2013. Four years later, McFarland put the fake document in Trump’s hands, and he reportedly “quickly got lathered up about the media’s hypocrisy … Staff chased down the truth and intervened before Trump tweeted or talked publicly about it”.
Continue reading...The Arnavon Islands: turtle breeding ground becomes first national park for Solomon Islands
My month with California’s conspiracy theorist farmers
Tammi Riedl and her partner believe ‘chemtrails’ are damaging our health. They prove conspiracies have gone mainstream – and aren’t just for the right wing
Standing between beds of golden beets and elephant garlic in the garden of Lincoln Hills, a small organic farm in Placer County, California, Tammi Riedl looks up and points to a stripe of white haze running across a cloudless blue sky.
“See that?” she asks, raising her eyebrows. “What do you think that is?”
Continue reading...Adani rail line to Abbot Point not a priority, says Infrastructure Australia
Agency says it has not received a submission on the rail line from Queensland government and has not conducted any cost-benefit analysis
Infrastructure Australia has not identified a proposed rail line linking the controversial Adani coalmine with the Abbot Point port as a priority, and it has not consulted the body which is expected to stump up a concessional loan.
The chief executive of Infrastructure Australia, Philip Davies, told a Senate estimates hearing on Monday that the rail line – which has been pushed assiduously by the federal resources minister, Matt Canavan – was not “something we’ve currently identified” as a priority project.
Continue reading...How Australia can meet 2°C target at no net cost to business
Lancashire's poster-place for the access revolution
Clougha Pike, Forest of Bowland Once forbidding and forbidden, ringfenced for shooting, this is still a secret, silent place
Find a big map and you’ll see there’s a monstrous, heart-shaped blank in the middle of north-west England. You’ve passed it probably, but the big roads skirt it with such circuitous subtlety you don’t notice you’re orbiting something. For years, unless you paid to shoot things, it might well have remained more a brooding feeling than a sight, its extent out of view beyond this brow or that.
But then wildest Bowland became the poster-place for the second access revolution. The first was Kinder Scout, for its trespass in 1932,which legitimised the case for national parks. Bowland epitomised the unfinished business: the Countryside Rights of Way Act.
The great divide over Australia’s energy future
Know your NEM: Renewables too late to save next summer’s prices
UBS: Electric vehicles to reach cost parity with petrol cars by 2018
World’s largest floating solar PV plant connected to grid in China
How Tesla became the world’s top owner of solar assets
Redflow says can’t compete with lithium batteries on price in home market
Brexit barriers 'would harm science', say universities
Kinder kids connect with the bush, and learn how to handle an alpaca
Electric vehicles: Big energy join big auto to drive Aus EV uptake
Energy market in crisis: We need a plan, and new rules
Reproductive rebels
'Recycling in Australia is dead in the water': three companies tackling our plastic addiction
Only a small proportion of plastics consumed in Australia is collected for recycling, but it’s what happens after that that could make a difference
There’s no escaping plastic in modern life. In Australia, more than 1.5m tonnes of the crude oil derivative is consumed each year, not including plastics imported in finished products or their packaging. And most of this ends up on a centuries-long path to degradation in landfill or the world’s waterways and oceans. One recent sobering analysis has estimated that by 2050, the weight of plastics in the oceans will match that of fish.
Reducing consumption by avoiding the use of disposable plastic shopping bags, for instance, and reusing plastic containers are important waste-reduction measures. But what role does recycling play?
Continue reading...Cock-of-the-rock rules the roost in Peru's Manu cloud forest
We had come to see one of the greatest bird spectacles in the world: the courtship display of the Andean cock-of-the-rock
Our guide unlocked the wooden door. “Here” he announced to his still sleepy audience “are the keys to paradise.” José Antonio has probably used this line before, but none of us was complaining. For as dawn broke over the Manu cloud forest, in the heart of Peru, we were assembling on a wooden platform perched on the edge of the mountainside. We had come to see one of the greatest bird spectacles in the world: the courtship display of the Andean cock-of-the-rock (Rupicola peruvianus).
Cocks-of-the-rock (note the pedantic plural) are very striking birds indeed. About the size of a collared dove, though much plumper, they sport a prominent crest, which they use to intimidate their fellow males, and attract females, in the avian equivalent of the red deer rut.
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