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The Guardian view on the heatwave: still hope on climate change | Editorial
The documentary broadcaster Ira Glass, the man behind the hit radio programme This American Life, is in Britain this week with his theatre show, Three Acts, Two Dancers, One Radio Host. The production, a collaboration with the experimental dancers of Monica Bill Barnes & Company, puts storytelling and dance together in an improbable but, the reviews say, endearing and entertaining combination. The dancers like to bring dance into places were no one expects it. Mr Glass does the same with documentary. The collaborators are united in wanting to tell serious stories in an engaging manner.
Not many subjects defeat Mr Glass’s creativity. But climate change, he admits, is beyond even his midas touch with a tale. “Any minute I’m not talking about climate change it’s like I’m turning my back on the most important thing that’s happening to us,” he said recently. The trouble with it is that it is “neither amusing nor surprising”. It is “resistant to journalism”.
Continue reading...Tidal energy support ebbs and flows | Letters
Steve Emsley is wrong when he compares tidal lagoons with Hinkley and asks why tidal energy is not even being discussed (Letters, 17 August). The latest estimated cost of the lagoon proposed for Swansea Bay is £1.3bn. Hinkley would produce 65 times as much electricity, all day, every day – true “baseload”. Tidal lagoons would produce variable amounts (four times as much on a spring tide as on a neap tide in Swansea and a bigger difference further up the Severn estuary) and the generation would be intermittent (four three-hour blocks a day) – that’s not “baseload”.
Lagoons could only produce 8% (about 25TWh a year) of the UK’s electricity requirements (a figure challenged by tidal energy experts), if five others followed Swansea, each many times larger and much more costly than Swansea (many times more than £5bn in total). But consent for the next two (huge lagoons further up the Severn estuary off Cardiff and Newport) is most unlikely because of various EU environmental designations (special area of conservation, special protection area etc). As to why no one is discussing them: in fact, Charles Hendry is conducting a review of tidal lagoons to assess, among other things, whether they could play a cost-effective role in the UK energy mix (see www.hendryreview.com). Some think the review was prompted by belated government realisation that the figures bandied around for lagoons just don’t add up.
Phil Jones
Ynystawe, Swansea
Star snapped before and after nova explosion
New species of fossil dolphin found
The coral die-off crisis is a climate crime and Exxon fired the gun | Bill McKibben
This week we’re staging protests on the ‘crime scene’ of the world’s affected reefs to send a signal that we’re not going to let fossil fuel firms get away with murder
Coral reefs are probably Earth’s most life-packed ecosystem; those who’ve had the privilege of diving in the tropics know the reef as an orderly riot of colour and flow, size and shape.
Which is why a white, dead reef is so shocking – as shocking in its way as a human corpse lying on the street, which still takes the form of the living breathing person it used to be, but now suddenly is stopped forever, the force that made it real suddenly and grotesquely absent.
Continue reading...Visitors rush to the Great Barrier Reef to catch it before it’s gone
Survey finds that 69% of visitors to the world’s largest coral reef system are motivated by the fear that it might disappear, reports Climate Home
In a reversal of the normal travel bucket list, tourists are rushing to see the Great Barrier Reef before it dies.
Half of the reef’s coral has disappeared in the past three decades due to a combination of warming ocean temperatures, coastal development, invasive starfish and agricultural runoff.
Continue reading...A deep sea dive into Bermuda’s hidden depths – video
Guardian environment reporter Oliver Milman joins a group of scientists on an underwater expedition off the Bermuda coast to help chart its hidden depths and gauge the general health of the area’s reef and coral. Travelling in a two-man submersible, Milman and submarine pilot Kelvin Magee go on a journey 500ft below the surface
Continue reading...The deep ocean: plunging to new depths to discover the largest migration on Earth
The deep ocean makes up 95% of Earth, yet only 0.0001% has been explored – the Guardian joined a mission off Bermuda looking deeper than ever before
Video: a dive into Bermuda’s hidden depths
The largest migration on Earth is very rarely seen by human eyes, yet it happens every day. Billions of marine creatures ascend from as far as 2km below the surface of the water to the upper reaches of the ocean at night, only to then float back down once the sun rises.
This huge movement of organisms – ranging from tiny cockatoo squids to microscopic crustaceans, shifting for food or favourable temperatures – was little known to science until relatively recently.
Continue reading...How the fossil fuel industry's new pitch is more like an epitaph than a life lesson
New fossil fuel advocacy group launched to celebrate an industry that’s driving dangerous climate change
Bright and glistening with all the glory of youth and promise, her eyes glance upwards. A jet crosses a cloudless sky.
A field of wheat sways in the breeze. She opens her arms in a wide embrace, open to the horizon.
Continue reading...Application for exceptional circumstances permit for artwork containing feathers from native species
'Industrial' farms should lose subsidies
The Queen and David Attenborough urged to cut ties with charity linked to Finland mining plans
Flora and Fauna International has been hired by a British mining firm to assess the environmental value of a national park in the Arctic circle
Environmentalists and indigenous reindeer herders are calling on the Queen, Sir David Attenborough and Stephen Fry to disassociate themselves from a charity contracted to help a mining operation in a national park in Finland.
Fauna and Flora International (FFI), whose patron is the Queen, has been hired by the British-listed mining company Anglo American to assess the environmental value of Viiankiaapa, a stunning 65 sq km (25 sq mile) habitat for 21 endangered bird species in the Arctic circle.
Continue reading...'We have to stop the bulldozers': swaths of koala habitat lost, say activists
Queensland’s relaxed land-clearing laws have allowed 84,000ha of habitat to be destroyed and must be rolled back, say WWF and Australian Koala Foundation
A relaxation in Queensland’s tree clearing laws led to the destruction of 84,000 hectares of critical koala habitat in the two years after the national icon was listed as vulnerable, according to new mapping by conservationists.
That koala habitat made up about 14% of all land cleared between mid-2013 and mid-2015 was an alarming revelation, WWF and the Australian Koala Foundation said.
Continue reading...Scotland's rare mountain plants disappearing as climate warms, botanists find
Research by the National Trust for Scotland shows rare mountain plants in the Highlands and islands are retreating higher or disappearing entirely
There is clear evidence that some of Britain’s rarest mountain plants are disappearing due to a steadily warming climate, botanists working in the Scottish Highlands have found.
The tiny but fragile Arctic plants, such as Iceland purslaine, snow pearlwort and Highland saxifrage, are found only in a handful of locations in the Highlands and islands, clustered in north-facing gullies, coires and crevices, frequently protected by the last pockets of late-lying winter snow.
Continue reading...On the trail of Scotland's rare mountain plants - in pictures
Ecologists and botanists have been working with highly skilled mountaineers in a series of intensive studies to map and track mountain plants and help ecologists understand the impact and speed of climate change
Continue reading...An abandoned tin mine blossoms above ground
Drakewalls, Tamar Valley The spoil tips and the dressing floors where ore was processed have been covered in earth, and seeded with grass and flowers
Up the hill from Gunnislake, Drakewalls mine was the first stop for the Man Engine on the huge mechanical puppet’s celebratory journey through the world heritage mining landscapes of Cornwall this summer. Now the site is quiet again, bereft of the admiring crowds. Consolidated ruins of engine houses and chimneys remain from the 19th century, when this mine was the largest tin producer in east Cornwall, employing 398 people at its peak. Wolframite, a tungsten mineral, was separated from the tin ore and, by 1890, arsenic and copper were also being produced and loaded in sidings that connected to the new mineral railway. Contemporary reports described underground caverns that could be “traversed only by boat”. Earlier opencast excavations were filled in, but there remains a walled-in linear chasm or “gunnis”, choked with ferns and bushes. Come 1895, production was almost finished: “Coals stopped, mine stopped, water risen in the shaft.”
Continue reading...China plans to fast-charge electric vehicle production
First act of Coalition’s “innovation” government: strip funds from ARENA
Fossil fuel industry holding Australian economy to ransom
Rule changes for emissions reduction fund likely to push prices higher
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