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The march of the exploding zombie caterpillar
Name: Zombie caterpillars.
Age: Not very old, and dead before their time, after a tragic life in which their bodies were taken over by a malign force.
Continue reading...The eco guide to microplastics
Seafood eaters consume up to 11,000 tiny pieces of plastic a year. Scary, isn’t it?
I’m officially declaring this the Summer of Plastic. With the rising tide of plastic waste – 38.5 million plastic bottles a day in the UK alone and production set to quadruple by 2050 – the plastic pollution crisis in our oceans has become the breakout issue.
Activists are stepping it up from quiet beach cleans to strident zero-tolerance campaigns. In terms of severity, Surfers Against Sewage (sas.org.uk) rates plastic pollution up there with climate change. Its campaign, Wasteland, urges us to boycott throwaway plastics now. Meanwhile, Greenpeace continues to hound soft-drinks brands, mapping their alarming use of plastic and abject failure to take responsibility.
Continue reading...Blue Whale: World's largest heart on display in rare exhibition
Review into energy costs launched by government
Red Admiral spotting: desperately seeking a British butterfly revival
By any standards, it was a poor day to count butterflies. Denbies Hillside, on the south-facing flank of the North Downs – supposedly a summer haven for lepidopterists – was swept by wind and heavy showers. Butterflies, like humans, take a poor view of such conditions and had made themselves scarce.
Such are the discomforts of involvement in the Big Butterfly Count. The national survey has seen thousands of members of the British public counting butterfly species across the nation. It has been a damp and cold process on occasion.
Continue reading...Rock, water, sky and solitude in Snowdonia
Talsarnau, Gwynedd Not another person was visible in this elemental landscape. But there was activity on the waters of Llyn y Dywarchen
Beyond the water-lily lake of Llyn Tecwyn Isaf, in Snowdonia national park, the farm road zigzags steeply to Caerwych, from whence a splashy path slips round beneath Y Gyrn to climb into a region of marshy flats where bog asphodel and creeping spearwort flower. Recent waymarking lures you on through terrain problematical in mist to the bronze age trackway.
A short, gentle, ascent leads to Bryn Cader Faner’s corona of outward-pointing rocks atop a grassy bluff. It’s one of the most beautiful bronze age monuments in Britain.
Continue reading...Extreme weather 'could kill up to 100,000 a year' in Europe by 2100
Changing cities for the future
Any louder and that frog will explode [part two]
Brexit could leave Britain with a bare larder, farmers warn
NFU says UK produces only 60% of its own food and must increase production to avoid food insecurity after leaving EU
Britain must increase home-grown food production and build stronger supply chains to face Brexit uncertainties, the National Farmers Union has said.
In an annual calculation to draw attention to the UK’s decline in food self-sufficiency, the NFU said the national larder would be bare this Sunday if Britain opted for a cliff-edge departure from Europe and imports became unavailable.
Continue reading...With political will, we could easily solve our transport problems | Letters
George Monbiot makes some useful points in his article bemoaning the influence of the lobbying power of the motor industry (We must break the car’s chokehold on Britain, 2 August). He proposes a modal transport shift to more coach travel and investment in nuclear power plants to power our electric cars. He ignores completely, as usual, the solar option with smaller electric cars and electric bikes and charged by photovoltaics on homes, at work and in public places. In 1993, I bought Hannibal, the 750kg fibreglass Kewet El Jet electric car that we used for a decade to take the children to school, go shopping and to train and bus stations. This first British solar car was largely powered by the 4kWp PV roof on my Oxford ecohouse. Monbiot also ignores the huge trend towards using electric bikes that can be easily solar charged at home or work. We love our cars and bikes, but the trick is to make them much smaller, lighter and solar powered, used locally and to connect with public transport systems for longer distances, so decrying any need for building inevitably toxic new nuclear power stations at all. Car size does matter now if we, as a society, are serious about surviving safely into the 22nd century, so let’s have less of Jeremy Clarkson on TV and more solar-powered Good Lives. It’s the mindset that has to change first, then the hardware.
Emeritus Professor Sue Roaf
Oxford
• George Monbiot and several of your readers (Letters, 28 July and 31 July) have drawn attention to the folly of the government’s 2040 initiative. It does not need 2020 hindsight to see that the demands on electricity generation will rocket in order to support a nation using only electric cars. Where will this electricity come from and at whose expense?
Continue reading...The man who makes animals 'fly'
Alligator found at Somerset lake
Industrial meat production is killing our seas. It's time to change our diets
America’s addiction to cheap meat, fed on corn and soy in vast indoor factories, comes at a high cost to our own health and that of the planet
- Callum Roberts is professor of marine conservation, at the University of York, UK
Every spring, as the snows thaw, water rushes down the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, spreading life, then death into the Gulf of Mexico. The floodwaters are laden with fertilisers washed from fields and factory farms. As spring turns to summer, excessive nutrients first drive a huge bloom of living plankton, then cause death on a gargantuan scale as a dead zone blossoms across the seabed. Most years it grows swiftly to over 5,000 square miles of seabed, killing everything that cannot outrun it.
Related: Why meat eaters should think much more about soil | John Sauven
Continue reading...Fewer cars not cleaner ones key to tackling air quality
Week in wildlife: amorous ladybirds and an adopted hawk - in pictures
An unlucky zebra and the UK’s first pair of breeding night herons are also among our pick of images from the natural world
Continue reading...SENG Vic News August 2017
London should lead in showing electric cars will not tackle air pollution
The government’s new strategy does not go far enough in recognising fewer vehicles, not just cleaner ones, are the answer
With more and more of the world’s population living in cities, we need to get urban transport right. That means making sure that people and goods can move around easily and cheaply. It also means ensuring that city transport systems don’t damage people’s health, as diesel and to a lesser extent petrol are currently doing in London and other UK cities.
Electric cars are not the answer to air pollution, says top UK adviser
Prof Frank Kelly says fewer not cleaner vehicles are needed, plus more cycling and walking and better transit systems
Cars must be driven out of cities to tackle the UK’s air pollution crisis, not just replaced with electric vehicles, according to the UK government’s top adviser.
Prof Frank Kelly said that while electric vehicles emit no exhaust fumes, they still produce large amounts of tiny pollution particles from brake and tyre dust, for which the government already accepts there is no safe limit.
Continue reading...Climate change to blame for Australia's July heat
Winter hasn’t felt too wintry yet in much of Australia. Most of us have have had more sunshine, higher temperatures, and less rainfall than is normal for the time of year. In fact, Australia just had its warmest average daytime maximum temperatures for July since records began in 1910.
This July saw the warmest average maximum temperatures on record across Australia.
Bureau of Meteorology
The north and centre of the continent saw the biggest temperature anomalies as Western Australia, the Northern Territory and Queensland experienced record warm daytime July temperatures. Only the southwestern tip of Western Australia and western Tasmania had slightly below-average daytime temperatures.
Southern Australia was again very dry as the frontal systems that usually bring rain remained further south than usual.
Read more: Winter heatwaves are nice … as extreme weather events go.
For most of us, warm and dry winter conditions are quite pleasant. But with drought starting to rear its head and a severe bushfire season on the cards, some cooler wetter weather would be helpful to farmers and fire services across the country.
What caused the unusual warmth?Often when we have warmer winter weather in Australia it is linked to El Niño conditions in the Pacific or a positive Indian Ocean Dipole. Both of these Pacific and Indian Ocean patterns tend to shift atmospheric pressure patterns in a way that brings more stable conditions and warmer, drier weather to Australia.
This year, however, neither El Niño nor the Indian Ocean Dipole is playing a role in the warm weather. The sea surface temperature patterns in the Pacific and Indian Oceans are close to average, so neither of these factors is driving Australia’s record warmth.
A clear human fingerprint
Another factor that might have influenced the July heat is human-caused climate change.
To assess the role of climate change in this event, I used climate model simulations and a standard event-attribution method. I first evaluated the climate models to gauge how well they capture the observed temperatures over Australia during July. I then computed the likelihood of unusually warm July average maximum temperatures across Australia in two groups of climate model simulations: one representing the world of today, and another representing a world without human influences on the climate.
I found a very clear signal that human-induced climate change has increased the likelihood of warm July temperatures such as the ones we’ve just experienced. My results suggest that climate change increased the chances of this record July warmth by at least a factor of 12.
July heat is on the riseI also wanted to know if this kind of unusual July warmth over Australia will become more common in future.
I looked at climate model projections for the next century, and examined the chances of these warm conditions occurring in periods when global warming is at 1.5℃ and 2℃ above pre-industrial levels (we have had roughly 1℃ of global warming above these levels so far).
The 1.5℃ and 2℃ global warming targets were decided in the Paris Agreement, brokered in December 2015. Given that we are aiming to limit global warming to these levels it is vital that we have a good idea of the climate we’re likely to be living in at these levels of warming.
I found that even if we manage to limit global warming to 1.5℃ we can expect to experience such July heat (which is record-breaking by today’s standards) in about 28% of winters. At 2℃ of global warming, the chances of warm July temperatures like 2017 are 43% for any given year.
More Julys like this are on the way as the globe heats up.
Andrew King, Author provided
Given the benefits of fewer and less intense heat extremes over Australia at lower levels of global warming, there is a clear incentive to try and limit climate change as much as possible. If we can reduce our greenhouse gas emissions and hold global warming to the Paris target levels, we should be able to avoid the kind of unusual warmth we have seen this July becoming the new normal.
DisclosureAndrew King receives funding from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science.
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