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Green Energy Trading, Australia’s leading environmental certificate creator, is delighted to announce the appointment of current General Manager, Luke Konynenburg, as Chief Executive Officer.

A new trade analysis reveals the scale of Britain’s role in the international ivory trade

Britain was the world’s largest exporter of legal ivory between 2010 and 2015, a breakdown of records held by the Convention on international trade in endangered species (Cites) has revealed.

Not only did the UK export more ivory than anyone else to Hong Kong and China – which are considered smuggling hubs for “blood ivory” - it also sold on 370% more ivory than the next highest exporter, the USA.

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A controversial new fishing technique is being tested in the Netherlands using electric pulses.

Readers respond to George Monbiot’s recent article and news that the US Department of Agriculture is censoring use of term ‘climate change’

George Monbiot’s call to reconsider how we name things (Forget ‘the environment’. Fight for our living planet, 9 August) is a timely contribution to a confusing world. But one word that both he and the majority of online contributors have ignored is “prosperity”. That, after all, is why humans engage in economic activity: they believe it will make things better. There is, however, a fundamental problem with the way we have arranged our economic affairs. By treating the natural world as an infinite thing, “external” to the economy (except as a never-ending supply of resources) we have built a massive endeavour to take natural resources and make them into things that are then disposed of, generally after a fairly brief period of human enjoyment.

Everyone I speak to readily accepts that under this system the planet must eventually “run out”, but they cannot see an alternative to “prosperity”. The conversation we need to have is not how we name things but how we do things.

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One day, the immunotherapy could free patients from daily insulin injections.

The size of a tennis court, it will shield the vision of the biggest space telescope ever built.

A video tracks the behaviour of the protective atmospheric layer over Antarctica across all of 2016.

New images have been released of wildfires that continue to burn close to the Greenland ice sheet.

Company refutes legal analysis of documents suggesting it ignored risk to human health and environment long after pollutants’ lethal effects were known

Monsanto continued to produce and sell toxic industrial chemicals known as PCBs for eight years after learning that they posed hazards to public health and the environment, according to legal analysis of documents put online in a vast searchable archive.

More than 20,000 internal memos, minuted meetings, letters and other documents have been published in the new archive, many for the first time.

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Ramesh Thakur says that the boycott on the US ban the bomb conference was an open act of defiance and disrespect of a multilateral mandated disarmament process.

Interview with UN Special Rapporteur Victoria Tauli-Corpuz to mark the International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples

Today is the United Nations’ (UN) International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples, numbering an estimated 370 million in 90 countries and speaking roughly 7,000 languages. To mark it, the Guardian interviews Kankanaey Igorot woman Victoria Tauli-Corpuz about the UN’s Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which she calls “historic” and was adopted 10 years ago.

Tauli-Corpuz, from the Philippines, was Chair of the UN Permanent Forum of Indigenous Issues when the Declaration was adopted, and is currently the UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. In this interview, conducted via email, she explains why the Declaration is so important, argues that governments are failing to implement it, and claims that the struggle for indigenous rights “surpasses” other great social movements of the past:

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East Riding of Yorkshire and north-east Lincolnshire among areas hardest-hit with severe downpours expected to slowly move south

Heavy rain has brought flooding to a stretch of the east coast of England, and further severe downpours are expected.

Flash flooding hit towns and villages in the East Riding of Yorkshire and north-east Lincolnshire. There was 3ft (1 metre) of standing water in parts of Withernsea and further flooding in the Grimsby and Immingham areas.

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Searching for respite from the heat in one of Rome's fountains. Max Roxxi/Reuters

Parts of Europe are having a devastatingly hot summer. Already we’ve seen heat records topple in western Europe in June, and now a heatwave nicknamed “Lucifer” is bringing stifling conditions to areas of southern and eastern Europe.

Several countries are grappling with the effects of this extreme heat, which include wildfires and water restrictions.

Temperatures have soared past 40℃ in parts of Italy, Greece and the Balkans, with the extreme heat spreading north into the Czech Republic and southern Poland.

Some areas are having their hottest temperatures since 2007 when severe heat also brought dangerous conditions to the southeast of the continent.

The heat is associated with a high pressure system over southeast Europe, while the jet stream guides weather systems over Britain and northern Europe. In 2007 this type of split weather pattern across Europe persisted for weeks, bringing heavy rains and flooding to England with scorching temperatures for Greece and the Balkans.

Europe is a very well-studied region for heatwaves. There are two main reasons for this: first, it has abundant weather observations and this allows us to evaluate our climate models and quantify the effects of climate change with a high degree of confidence. Second, many leading climate science groups are located in Europe and are funded primarily to improve understanding of climate change influences over the region.

The first study to link a specific extreme weather event to climate change examined the record hot European summer of 2003. Since then, multiple studies have assessed the role of human influences in European extreme weather. Broadly speaking, we expect hotter summers and more frequent and intense heatwaves in this part of the world.

We also know that climate change increased deaths in the 2003 heatwaves and that climate change-related deaths are projected to rise in the future.

Climate change’s role in this heatwave

To understand the role of climate change in the latest European heatwave, I looked at changes in the hottest summer days over southeast Europe – a region that incorporates Italy, Greece and the Balkans.

I calculated the frequency of extremely hot summer days in a set of climate model simulations, under four different scenarios: a natural world without human influences, the world of today (with about 1℃ of global warming), a 1.5℃ global warming world, and a 2℃ warmer world. I chose the 1.5℃ and 2℃ benchmarks because they correspond to the targets described in the Paris Agreement.

As the heatwave is ongoing, we don’t yet know exactly how much hotter than average this event will turn out to be. To account for this uncertainty I used multiple thresholds based on historically very hot summer days. These thresholds correspond to an historical 1-in-10-year hottest day, a 1-in-20-year hottest day, and a new record for the region exceeding the observed 2007 value.

While we don’t know exactly where the 2017 event will end up, we do know that it will exceed the 1-in-10 year threshold and it may well breach the higher thresholds too.

A clear human fingerprint

Whatever threshold I used, I found that climate change has greatly increased the likelihood of extremely hot summer days. The chance of extreme hot summer days, like this event, has increased by at least fourfold because of human-caused climate change.

Climate change is increasing the frequency of hot summer days in southeast Europe. Likelihoods of the hottest summer days exceeding the historical 1-in-10 year threshold, one-in-20 year threshold and the current record are shown for four scenarios: a natural world, the current world, a 1.5℃ world, and a 2℃ world. Best estimate likelihoods are shown with 90% confidence intervals in parentheses. Author provided

My analysis shows that under natural conditions the kind of extreme heat we’re seeing over southeast Europe would be rare. In contrast, in the current world and possible future worlds at the Paris Agreement thresholds for global warming, heatwaves like this would not be particularly unusual at all.

There is also a benefit to limiting global warming to 1.5℃ rather than 2℃ as this reduces the relative frequency of these extreme heat events.

As this event comes to an end we know that Europe can expect more heatwaves like this one. We can, however, prevent such extreme heat from becoming the new normal by keeping global warming at or below the levels agreed upon in Paris.

You can find out more about the methods used here.

Disclosure

Andrew King receives funding from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science.

The nuclear "renaissance" in the US is now over, after another two reactors abandoned, leaving consumers holding the bill.

Big energy retailers didn’t so much blink, as wink in face of Turnbull’s “eyeballing” episode. Here’s why they will be high fiving each other in the Qantas lounge at Canberra airport.

The PM only had to push energy reforms slightly further to make a world of difference, and protect consumers from the "laziness tax" exploited by utilities.

Canadian start-up claims it can deliver lowest installed cost per kWh for bulk energy storage with compressed air technology.

ARENA-backed project to test whether excess solar and wind can be used to produce cheap hydrogen, and as a long-term energy storage option.

Wenlock Edge Rain hardens summer’s lushness and the vivid knapweed seems loaded with the uncanniness of the season

On the windmill meadow, above a green rind of grasses and below their fidgety seedheads in the rain is the dotty purpling of knapweed.

The jet stream divides August in Europe. As the south swelters in life-threatening temperatures, this side of the shower curtain is cool, wet and, after Lammas Day, thistly.

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Decision enrages environmental groups, with Lock the Gate calling it a ‘very dark day for farming’ in the state

Glencore’s multibillion-dollar Wandoan coalmine proposal has been granted mining leases years after it was shelved amid falling commodity prices and a ramped-up global response to climate change.

On Tuesday Queensland’s natural resources and mines minister, Dr Anthony Lynham, approved three 27-year leases covering 30,000 hectares for the first stage of its $7bn mine near Roma.

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