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Why logs are twice as dirty as diesel
We think of wood burning as natural, but experiments show that wood smoke contains shocking levels of harmful particles
Walk round many suburbs on a winter’s night and your nose will tell you that wood burning is being used for home heating. A recent UK government survey found that 7.5% of UK homes now burn wood. The vast majority use it for supplementary heating or decoration. Wood burning is most popular in the south-east where it is used by around 16% of households and it is least popular in northern England and Scotland where it is used by less than 5%.
We think of wood burning as being natural and therefore less harmful to the environment when compared with fossil fuels. However, particle pollution from UK wood burning is now estimated to be more than double diesel exhaust.
Reduce EU quotas to stop overfishing | Letters
This week EU fisheries ministers meet to decide the north-east Atlantic fishing quotas for 2017 at their annual December conference. Let’s hope our minister, George Eustice, does not repeat his performance of last year, when – in the face of a desperate need to end overfishing – he acquired for the UK a 2016 quota that exceeded scientific advice by more than any other EU country and proclaimed this as a good deal. Overfishing is “a good deal” only for the short-term interests of the smallest but wealthiest sector of the fishing industry, whose mega-trawlers hoover up the stocks, destroy their habitats and exacerbate their chronic over-exploitation. It is to be hoped that Eustice will also conform to another requirement of the common fisheries policy – the provision of a greater share of the quota to the small, under 10-metre, boats that constitute the largest part of the fleet, fish more sustainably, employ more fishermen, provide real benefits for their communities and enhance their prospects of both survival and a renewed prosperity. While representing about 80% of the Welsh and English fleet, they have just 6% of the quota.
John Stansfield
Bristol
• Join the debate – email guardian.letters@theguardian.com
Continue reading...Windfarm in Barnaby Joyce's NSW electorate gets $120m CEFC loan
Clean Energy Finance Corporation loan comes three months after minister slammed SA’s over-reliance on wind power
The Clean Energy Finance Corporation has made a multi-million dollar loan for a new windfarm in Barnaby Joyce’s electorate.
It comes three months after Joyce slammed the South Australian government’s over-reliance on wind power, and linked SA’s damaging September blackout on the state’s lack of coal-fired baseload power.
Continue reading...Sloths can swim
Cleaning up charcoal's dirty image in Kenya – in pictures
Demand for charcoal in sub-Saharan Africa is surging. While foreign investors focus on renewables, domestic companies are findings ways to make it cleaner and more efficient. Photographs and words by Nathan Siegal
The ethical guide to the Anthropocene
We humans have polluted our world into a new geological epoch
If you’re feeling unsettled by the Brexit/Trump future, consider this: since the 1950s humans have ramped up the pressure on the planet to such an extent that we have very likely propelled ourselves into a new geological epoch – the Anthropocene. Now that’s what geologists call change. The thing that freaks me out is that it’s rarely mentioned.
To unwrap that: for the past 10,000 years or so, we have hung out comfortably in what we call the Holocene epoch. During this period we have been able to rely on the Earth’s systems to dampen the effects of “forcings”. These are different factors that affect the Earth’s climate, such as volcanic eruptions and solar variations.
Continue reading...Australia's changing landscape through Google timelapse – video
Google’s timelapse project allows users to see how anywhere in the world has changed in the past 32 years using Landsat satellite images. These images of Australia show the extent of development around its largest cities, as well as the changes brought by projects such as the Cubbie Station cotton plantation in Queensland, the Fimiston goldmine in Western Australia and mining development in the New South Wales Hunter Valley.
Google’s satellite timelapses show the inconvenient truth about our planet
Continue reading...The winner of the Bragg Prize
Doctors call for ban on diesel engines in London
Another day, another dead wildlife ranger. We must do more to help them
Every year more than 100 wildlife rangers are murdered in the line of duty. Why do they get so little support? And where is the outrage?
Cameroonian ranger killed by wildlife poachers
As we sat by the campfire, Gervais, a ranger from the forests of Malawi, slowly pulled back his hair to expose a 20cm scar left by a machete attack that nearly killed him. Poachers, he told me.
I was at an international rangers’ conference, held 13 years ago in a national park on the southern tip of mainland Australia. Another ranger, Jobogo Mirindi from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), showed me a photo taken five years before. Arranged football team-style were 30 or so of his smiling colleagues. Six rangers’ heads were circled in red; those were the only ones still alive.
Continue reading...Cameroonian ranger killed by wildlife poachers
Two to three rangers are being shot a week as poachers step up their predations on the world’s wildlife
Another day, another dead wildlife ranger. We must do more to help them
A Cameroonian ranger was ambushed and killed by ivory poachers on Wednesday while patrolling to protect elephants and gorillas. During the last morning of a 10-day patrol in Lobéké National Park, Bruce Danny Ngongo was shot three times, once in the thigh and twice in the hip.
“[Ngongo fell after] an ambush by a gang of poachers heavily armed with Kalachnikov [sic] who immediately opened fire on the surveillance staff,” said Lobéké National Park director Achille Mengamenya Goue, in a letter sent on the evening of the incident to Cameroon’s forestry and wildlife minister, Philip Ngole Ngwese.
Continue reading...An elemental challenge for climbers and storm-watchers
Bosherston, Pembrokeshire To stand on the cliff as green combers thud into the walls beneath, roar into the cave and recoil in white chaos is to become aware of even rock’s fragility
The bird ledges on Mowing Word, a cock’s spur of a limestone point on the south Pembrokeshire coast, are empty now. The guillemots and razorbills that jostle, cackle and croon here through the spring months, their single eggs perilously free from nests’ constraints, are far out to sea, searching for food.
The cliff on wild days is storm-watchers’ domain. To stand on top as green combers thud into the walls beneath, roar into the cave and recoil in white chaos is to become aware of even rock’s fragility. Sometimes the whole narrow headland shakes beneath your feet, and white spume that looks so light lashes the skin.
Continue reading...World’s oldest known seabird lays an egg at age of 66
Laysan albatross known as Wisdom is also the world’s oldest known breeding bird in the wild and has had a few dozen chicks
The world’s oldest known seabird is expecting – again.
Biologists spotted the Laysan albatross called Wisdom at Midway Atoll national wildlife refuge earlier this month after she returned to the island to nest.
Continue reading...Helping native birds survive the hot dry periods
Cryogenic storage offers hope for renewable energy
Eat poo, have sex and die happy as a beetle in dung
Japan ISS Kounotori: Spacecraft launched to try to clear space junk
A Big Country
Anti-fracking activist spared jail after refusing to pay court £55,000
Tina Louise Rothery – part of a protest group known as the Nanas – staged a three-week occupation of a field near Blackpool
An anti-fracking campaigner has been spared jail after she refused to pay more than £55,000 of legal fees to the oil and gas firm Cuadrilla.
Tina Louise Rothery, 54, had been ordered to pay £55,342 of fees to the British company and a group of landowners, or face a 14-day prison sentence, after she sought to stop an injunction that would prevent protesters gathering on a stretch of land being considered for shale gas exploration.
Continue reading...National Geographic nature photographer of the year 2016 – in pictures
The annual National Geographic nature photographer of the year attracts thousands of entries from across the globe. Here’s a selection of the winning images
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