Feed aggregator

The sending, sorting and filtering of spam email alone accounts for 33bn units of electricity each year

• More carbon footprints: the internet, cycling a mile, others
• Understand more about carbon footprints

Our recent piece on the carbon footprint of the internet generated plenty of coverage, so next up in our map of the world's carbon emissions is … email.

Continue reading...

Human emissions dwarf volcanic emissions, but a big eruption can nonetheless kick out a huge amount of CO2.

• More carbon footprints: the internet, cycling a mile, more
• Understand more about carbon footprints

If you have been a victim of the rumour, persistent in some circles,
that volcanic CO2 emissions dwarf those of human activity, now is the
time to be liberated.

Continue reading...

China is speeding ahead with its massive tree-planting project to combat climate change - but questions still remain over the great green wall's effectiveness

• In pictures: China's Great Green Wall in Heilongjiang
• China's Great Green Wall under threat from insatiable demand for wood

Dubbed "The Great Green Wall," a human-made ecological barrier designed to stop rapidly encroaching deserts and combat climate change is coming up across China. By 2050, the artificial forest is to stretch 400 million hectares – covering more than 42 percent of China's landmass.

China already has the largest human-made forest in the world, covering more than 500,000 square kilometres, and the Communist Party this year announced it had reached its stated goal of 20 percent forest cover by 2010. The government envisions a line of trees stretching 4,480 km from Xinjiang province in the far west to Heilongjiang province in the east.

Continue reading...

Making a new car creates as much carbon pollution as driving it, so it's often better to keep your old banger on the road than to upgrade to a greener model.

• More carbon footprints: nuclear war, cycling a mile, more
• Understand more about carbon footprints

The carbon footprint of making a car is immensely complex. Ores have to be dug out of the ground and the metals extracted. These have to be turned into parts. Other components have to be brought together: rubber tyres, plastic dashboards, paint, and so on. All of this involves transporting things around the world. The whole lot then has to be assembled, and every stage in the process requires energy. The companies that make cars have offices and other infrastructure with their own carbon footprints, which we need to somehow allocate proportionately to the cars that are made.

Continue reading...

Dan Chung reports on the standoff between Peruvian police and protesters campaigning against an irrigation project that could leave communities around the town of Espinar without water Continue reading...

Anti-whaling activist Paul Watson speaks out on relationships with whales, protest versus intervention and veganism

Paul Watson doesn't care what you think. The captain of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society has been putting himself between whales and harpoon ships for more than 30 years, preventing the killing of countless cetaceans. He's been called a terrorist, a greater threat than Al-Qaeda, a liar. None of it bothers him.

"I am here to say things people do not want to hear and do things people do not want to see. I am here to piss people off – that is my job," the 59-year-old Watson says in Ron Colby's 2008 documentary Pirate for the Sea.

Continue reading...

As the Malay Bajau people risk destroying the reefs that sustain them, photographer James Morgan captures a centuries-old culture close to extinction

• The last of the sea nomads Continue reading...

For generations they have lived on the ocean, diving and fishing, and rarely setting foot on land. But now these marine nomads risk destroying the reefs that sustain them

• In pictures: the last Bajau sea nomads

Diana Botutihe was born at sea. Now in her 50s, she has spent her entire life on boats that are typically just 5m long and 1.5m wide. She visits land only to trade fish for staples such as rice and water, and her boat is filled with the accoutrements of everyday living – jerry cans, blackened stockpots, plastic utensils, a kerosene lamp and a pair of pot plants.

Diana is one of the world's last marine nomads; a member of the Bajau ethnic group, a Malay people who have lived at sea for centuries, plying a tract of ocean between the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia. The origins of the Bajau diaspora are recounted in the legend of a princess from Johor, Malaysia, who was washed away in a flash flood. Her grief-stricken father ordered his subjects to depart, returning only when they'd found his daughter.

Continue reading...

Omar Aziz was hooked on crack for 13 years and stole bikes to feed his habit. He explains how to protect your bike from thieves

• How to stop your bike being stolen
• Will anything stop the bike thieves?

Omar Aziz started stealing bikes when he was 17 and carried on until he finally weaned himself off crack cocaine at the age of 29. Now he wants to make amends. He is volunteering in his local area and he agreed to advise Guardian readers how not to get their bikes stolen.

Aziz stole a lot of bikes to feed his habit: "When I sell one thing I go and buy my drugs, smoke it, when it finishes, I have to go and get more. I nick another bike," he said.

Continue reading...

Proposed legislation would allow state-owned Scottish Water to use vast landbank and pipe network for renewable energy projects

The state-owned utility Scottish Water is to be given new powers to build windfarms, hydro schemes and "green" power stations in partnership and competition with established energy companies.

The company, one of the country's last remaining state-owned firms, could generate £300m or more in extra revenues by using its 80,000 acres of land and vast pipe network for renewable energy projects.

Continue reading...

The Guardian's head of environment, Damian Carrington, and energy editor Terry Macalister look at BP's report into the Deepwater Horizon explosion on 20 April, which killed 11 workers and began America's biggest ever oil spill Continue reading...

When Mark Diacono started cultivating a West Country smallholding, he decided to let his taste buds call the shots. So it was out with the potatoes… and in with the cardoons, medlars and olives

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a bit of garden will plant it with potatoes, onions and carrots. Faced with a world of possibilities, a special madness takes over and we fill our precious patch with the cheapest, most widely available food we can think of. I did exactly the same the first year I grew anything. Never again. All those summer hours spent watering and weeding for a few sackfuls of maincrop veg was a good way of finding out what other interesting things I'd rather be doing. I wanted to grow some of what I ate, but this wasn't it.

The following year, in 2004, on our way back from our wedding party, we came to Otter Farm for the first time. I had my own business advising local authorities and government agencies about managing the landscape, but I had the urge to keep animals and to grow some veg and plant some trees at the same time, but that was as detailed as my mind had it. I certainly wasn't thinking of a business – just growing some of what my wife and I wanted to eat.

Continue reading...

With his new book, Danish scientist Bjørn Lomborg has become an unlikely advocate for huge investment in fighting global warming. But his answers are unlikely to satisfy all climate change campaigners

Few statisticians can have inspired more passion than Bjørn Lomborg, the Danish academic who became famous as the author of the controversial (some would say contrarian) Skeptical Environmentalist, which set him up as perhaps the world's best-known critic of the dominant scientific view of global warming and the ensuing climate change.

Continue reading...

The number of coal trucks suggest strains on China's energy supply that are equal to those on its transport system

It is not easy to wake a coal truck driver at 2am, but I had to do it at least twenty times last night to get home from the massive traffic jam on the border between Hebei and Inner Mongolia.

Several miles ahead, the roads had been cleared but the drivers had spent so long motionless that most of them had long since switched off their engines, turned off their headlamps and curled up in their cabs to sleep. We were stuck behind their snores.

Continue reading...

Common sense would suggest you'd be mad to cycle without brakes, but it can be done by skilled riders – although not legally

The odd emergency stop is an inescapable fact of life for the cyclist, which is why it seems odd to me that there are thousands of riders in the UK merrily cruising along without brakes. And they are breaking the law.

There are BMXs, often fitted with a freewheel and stopped with a trainer to the tyre, the braver subsection of fixed-gear riders and those whose bike is badly maintained to the point where there are no working brakes to speak of.

Continue reading...

Scientists warn that temperature rise of between 2C and 7C would cause ice to melt, resulting in 23ft rise in sea level

The entire ice mass of Greenland will disappear from the world map if temperatures rise by as little as 2C, with severe consequences for the rest of the world, a panel of scientists told Congress today.

Greenland shed its largest chunk of ice in nearly half a century last week, and faces an even grimmer future, according to Richard Alley, a geosciences professor at Pennsylvania State University

Continue reading...

Research suggests a boom in cycling among affluent 'mid-life crisis' men and car owners

Much has been written about a war between cyclists and drivers, as if the two groups were such polar opposites that they could never cross in a Venn diagram. But according to new research, people who cycle the most are likely to own at least two cars.

Regular cyclists – those who cycle at least once a week – are also disproportionately likely to read broadsheet newspapers, be well educated, have a household income of at least £50,000 per year and shop at Waitrose, claims the latest Mintel report, Bicycles in the UK 2010. In addition, they are twice as likely to be men as women.

Continue reading...

Darwin's name for the bee was replaced in the 20th century

Whatever happened to the humblebee, the old name for the bumblebee, asked Angus Doulton of Oxfordshire in a letter to the Guardian last week.

When Darwin, or indeed any of his contemporaries, wrote of the animated bundles of fluff, he would have called them humblebees. But they weren't humble in the sense of lowly beings doing the drudge work of nectar and pollen collecting; rather they would have been celebrated for the powerful evolutionary interaction with the flowers they had visited for millions of years. Darwin would have called them humblebees because, as they fly, they hum. Simple.

Continue reading...

Alarms and safety mechanisms on gulf disaster oil rig were disabled, chief technician at Transocean reveals

Vital warning systems on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig were switched off at the time of the explosion in order to spare workers being woken by false alarms, a federal investigation has heard.

The revelation that alarm systems on the rig at the centre of the disaster were disabled – and that key safety mechanisms had also consciously been switched off – came in testimony by a chief technician working for Transocean, the drilling company that owned the rig.

Continue reading...

Our competition giving common names to 10 rare UK species means we now have a cultural connection that will help their conservation cause

• Queen's executioner beetle wins species naming competition
• See the full list of winners

It's the most successful exercise in crowd-sourcing I've ever seen. We asked our readers to solve a problem, and they've done far more than that: they have created something beautiful.

The problem is this: it is hard to persuade people to care about something they can't pronounce. English species are disappearing at the rate of two a year. But many are vanishing unnoticed and unmourned by almost everyone, partly because we have no cultural connection to them. Scientific names, which are given in Latin or ancient Greek, are essential to proper classification, but to most people they are cold, incomprehensible and offputting.

Continue reading...