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Scottish trawlerman has £1m seized for role in fisheries scandal
A Scottish trawler skipper has had £1m seized by the courts after pleading guilty to a major role in one of Europe's largest illegal fisheries scandals.
Ian Buchan, 55, from Peterhead, was given the £1m confiscation order after he admitted illegally landing and then selling nearly £4.5m worth of mackerel in a highly sophisticated "black landing" scam to evade European fishing quotas.
Continue reading...Household chemicals' 'cocktail effect' raises cancer concerns for watchdog
Common chemicals found in household products, cosmetics and medicines may be causing cancers, fertility problems and other illnesses including diabetes and obesity, according to a study.
Europe's environmental watchdog, the European Environment Agency, has warned that products containing endocrine disrupting chemicals should be treated with caution until their true effects are better known. However, it stopped short of recommending a ban of any specific products. A few such chemicals have already been banned, but many are still in widespread use.
Continue reading...Heartland Institute compares belief in global warming to mass murder | Leo Hickman
It really is hard to know where to begin with this one. But let's start with: "What on earth were they thinking?"
The Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based rightwing thinktank notorious for promoting climate scepticism, has launched quite possibly one of the most ill-judged poster campaigns in the history of ill-judged poster campaigns.
Continue reading...Nuclear power is only solution to climate change, says Jeffrey Sachs
Combating climate change will require an expansion of nuclear power, respected economist Jeffrey Sachs said on Thursday, in remarks that are likely to dismay some sections of the environmental movement.
Prof Sachs said atomic energy was needed because it provided a low-carbon source of power, while renewable energy was not making up enough of the world's energy mix and new technologies such as carbon capture and storage were not progressing fast enough.
Continue reading...The cargo bike – somewhere inbetween the courier and the truck | Peter Walker
It is a familiar, unpleasant but seemingly inescapable part of modern city life: streets full of diesel-belching vans or lorries on delivery runs, either stuck in jams or else creating them as the driver double-parks to dash into a building. The solution? Roll forward the humble bicycle, or at least its close cousin.
The idea of cycle freight replacing the ubiquitous truck might seem initially fanciful, but it is an increasingly serious idea, one being presented to transport ministers from several dozen countries at a major conference starting on Wednesday.
Continue reading...Living Buildings & Sustainability Assessment Training. SSEE Qld update.
Ten of Britain's rarest wild flowers – in pictures
Don't miss your 108-page guide to 50 of Britain's wild flowers, an exclusive excerpt from Sarah Raven's Wild Flowers (Bloomsbury), free this Sunday 29 April with the Observer Continue reading...
Sainsbury's slimline toilet roll to wipe 140 tonnes from carbon emissions
With each Briton getting through an average of 50 toilet rolls a year, the carbon footprint created by supplying it is huge.
Makers including Andrex have made rolls last longer by increasing sheet numbers. But Sainsbury's is set to try something new: shrinking the inner tube.
Continue reading...Damien Hirst's butterflies: distressing but weirdly uplifting
Butterflies made Damien Hirst's career and this is how he repays them: in a stark, white, windowless room in Tate Modern, hundreds of insects pull themselves from their pupae only to die there a few days later, surrounded by gawping tourists.
For some visitors to Hirst's blockbuster retrospective, it is not the rotting cow's head surrounded by flies, the sheep in formaldehyde or the giant ashtray filled with cigarette butts that makes them feel queasy. It is the installation in Room 5, where tropical butterflies futilely flit around the boxy space, eventually falling to die on the floor, where they are promptly scooped up by security staff.
Continue reading...F1 fuel-saving flywheel to be fitted to London's buses
A fuel-saving flywheel first developed for use in Formula One racing cars, but abandoned before it could be used due to a regulation change by the sport's administrators, will soon be retrofitted to a handful of London buses.
Six prototype buses owned by Go-Ahead, one of the UK's largest buses operators, are currently being fitted with the flywheels for a trial beginning later this year in and around Putney, south-west London.
Continue reading...How wildlife is thriving in the Korean peninsula's demilitarised zone
• In pictures: wildlife in the DMZ
• The world's most dangerous nature reserve
A thin green ribbon threads its way across the Korean Peninsula. Viewed from space, via composite satellite images, the winding swath clearly demarcates the political boundary between the Republic of Korea (ROK) and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK). Its visual impact is especially strong in the west, where it separates the gray, concrete sprawl of Seoul from the brown, deforested wastes south of Kaesong. In the east, it merges with the greener landscapes of the Taebaek Mountain Range and all but disappears.
From the ground, the narrow verdant band manifests as an impenetrable barrier of overgrown vegetation enclosed by layers of fences topped by menacing concertina wire and dotted with observation posts manned by heavily armed soldiers. That a place so steeped in violence still teems with life seems unimaginable. And yet, the Demilitarized Zone, or DMZ, is home to thousands of species that are extinct or endangered elsewhere on the peninsula. It is the last haven for many of these plants and animals and the centre of attention for those intent on preserving Korea's rich ecological heritage.
Continue reading...Iceland's volcanoes may power UK
The volcanoes of Iceland could soon be pumping low-carbon electricity into the UK under government-backed plans for thousands of miles of high-voltage cables across the ocean floor.
The energy minister, Charles Hendry, is to visit Iceland in May to discuss connecting the UK to its abundant geothermal energy. "We are in active discussions with the Icelandic government and they are very keen," Hendry told the Guardian. To reach Iceland, which sits over a mid-ocean split in the earth's crust, the cable would have to be 1,000 to 1,500km long and by far the longest in the world.
Continue reading...Is the EU taking its over-fishing habits to west African waters?
Mauritania's waters are crowded. Twenty-five miles out to sea and in great danger from turbulent seas are small, open pirogues crewed by handfuls of local fishermen, taking pitifully few fish. Also here within 50 miles of us are at least 20 of the biggest EU fishing vessels, along with Chinese, Russian and Icelandic trawlers and unidentifiable pirate ships.
Continue reading...SSEE April technical session Toxins in the Environment
World water day – in pictures
Appetite for shark fin soup 'causing decline of blue sharks in UK waters'
The demand for shark fin soup in Asia is probably the major cause of the alarming decline of blue sharks off the British coast and much of the Atlantic, the authors of a new study claim this week.
Scientists from the UK and Portugal have tracked the ocean predators to busy fishing grounds, where they believe they are being deliberately targeted by fishermen with "walls of death" from long-line fishing that can stretch as long as 100km.
Continue reading...How do we know how warm or cold it was in the past?
• See all questions and answers
• Read about the project
Scientists today measure the Earth's surface temperature using thermometers at weather stations and on ships and buoys all over the world. Such thermometer records cover a large fraction of the globe going back to the mid-19th century, allowing scientists to determine a global average temperature trend for the last 160 years.
Before that time not many thermometer records are available, so scientists use indirect temperature measurements, supported by anecdotal evidence recorded by diarists, and the few thermometer records that do exist. Scientists must rely solely on indirect methods to look back further than recorded human history.
Continue reading...Too many deer for too few people – a self-defeating study of the Highlands | George Monbiot
I've read too many daft reports in the course of this job, but I don't remember any as self-defeating as this. This morning the Scottish Gamekeepers' Association launches its study on the economic importance of red deer to Scotland's rural economy. It succeeds in demonstrating the opposite of what it sets out to prove.
The association represents people working for the big estates of Scotland, which are visited at certain months of the year by a small number of exceedingly rich people, who come to shoot stags or grouse.
Continue reading...SSEE - Technical Session Peak Resources
Does building turbines use more energy than they produce?
Critics of wind energy often claim that the energy used to construct a wind turbine outweighs the energy produced during its lifetime in operation. This is not correct. An evidence review published in the journal Renewable Energy in 2010, which included data from 119 turbines across 50 sites going back 30 years, concluded that the average windfarm produces 20-25 times more energy during its operational life than was used to construct and install its turbines. It also found that the average "energy payback" of a turbine was 3-6 months.
A life-cycle analysis published in 2011 by Vestas, a Danish turbines manufacturer, of a 100MW onshore windfarm consisting of 33 3MW turbines concluded, unsurprisingly, that the siting of the turbines is crucial in maximising the energy return ratio. "Doubling the distance to the grid from 50 km to 100 km typically increases [negative]
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