The Guardian

Pollution aside, the problem with expanding Heathrow lies in the disruption and delay inevitable in such a complex project

Get ready for another season of that interminable saga, Heathrow’s third runway. There was a lull during the Covid pandemic when the airport’s owners, despite winning permission from the supreme court in 2020 to submit a planning application, cooled their jets while they waited for passenger numbers to recover. Now the whole thing is back, courtesy of Rachel Reeves. The chancellor is reported to be preparing to use a speech next week to declare support for a third runway at Heathrow alongside wider airport expansion in the south-east.

The best form of airport expansion is none at all, environmentalists (some of them in the cabinet) will argue, but it looks as if Reeves has dismissed those objections in the name of economic growth. A £1.1bn investment in Stansted, to enable it to grow its annual capacity from 29 million passengers to 43 million, was welcomed by the government last year.

More than 40% of individual corals monitored around One Tree Island reef bleached by heat stress and damaged by flesh-eating disease

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More than 40% of individual corals monitored around a Great Barrier Reef island were killed last year in the most widespread coral bleaching outbreak to hit the reef system, a study has found.

Scientists tracked 462 colonies of corals at One Tree Island in the southern part of the Great Barrier Reef after heat stress began to turn the corals white in early 2024. Researchers said they encountered “catastrophic” scenes at the reef.

Critical CO2 stores held in permafrost are being released as the landscape changes with global heating, report shows

A third of the Arctic’s tundra, forests and wetlands have become a source of carbon emissions, a new study has found, as global heating ends thousands of years of carbon storage in parts of the frozen north.

For millennia, Arctic land ecosystems have acted as a deep-freeze for the planet’s carbon, holding vast amounts of potential emissions in the permafrost. But ecosystems in the region are increasingly becoming a contributor to global heating as they release more CO2 into the atmosphere with rising temperatures, a new study published in Nature Climate Change concluded.

Expert says the planet parade will be best viewed around 21 January and recommends downloading a sky map app to help see when the planets align

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Stargazers are being treated to a rare planetary alignment this month, also known as a “planet parade”, with most of the planets visible in the night sky at the same time.

Astrophysicist Dr Rebecca Allen, co-director of Swinburne University’s space technology and industry institute, said it would be a rare opportunity to see so many planets align, especially outer ones such as Neptune.

These ibises have a special skill called ‘remote touch’, which they use to find their worm, grub and snail prey through vibrations

Hadedas are iridescent grey-brown ibises – jack russell-sized birds with long, curved bills and very small heads – found throughout sub-Saharan Africa.

They have a special skill called “remote touch”, which they use to find their worm, grub and snail prey. At the tip of their bills is an organ that, when they stick it into the soil, can sense the vibrations of their food nearby.

Pod Point reports weak demand for new cars as government says no firms will pay fines over ZEV mandate

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A charging company has said proposed UK changes to electric car sales rules could increase uncertainty over demand, as it said that it had been caught out by lower numbers of purchases by British drivers.

Pod Point, which is majority-owned by EDF Energy, said weak demand for new cars meant it made revenues of £53m in 2024 from its sales of chargers and services, compared with a £60m target. The London-listed company’s share price slumped by more than a third on Monday morning.

Even average use of nitrogen fertilisers cut flower numbers fivefold and halved pollinating insects

Using high levels of common fertilisers on grassland halves pollinator numbers and drastically reduces the number of flowers, research from the world’s longest-running ecological experiment has found.

Increasing the amount of nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus doused on agricultural grassland reduced flower numbers fivefold and halved the number of pollinating insects, according to the paper by the University of Sussex and Rothamsted Research.

Exclusive: Restoration fund in England could be ‘siphoned off’ to be used for general government spending, not repairing rivers

Rachel Reeves’s Treasury is looking to keep millions of pounds levied on polluting water companies in fines that were meant to be earmarked for sewage cleanup, the Guardian has learned.

The £11m water restoration fund was announced before the election last year, with projects bidding for the cash to improve waterways and repair damage done by sewage pollution in areas where fines have been imposed.

Shifting responsibility to consumers minimises the role of energy industry and policymakers, University of Sydney research suggests

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It’s not unusual to see individuals championed as heroes of climate action, with their efforts to install rooftop solar and buy electric cars promoted as pivotal in the fight to save the planet.

Hero figures can motivate others to follow suit, but a University of Sydney study suggests the way the energy sector shapes this narrative sets individuals up to fail.

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Sifting for bottles together never gets old – it’s the idea that something so fragile could have survived for so long in one piece and in one place

My family and I have a weird hobby. We like to dig for old bottles. It’s something we stumbled upon, quite literally, one soggy weekend.

On a visit to the family farm, we were exploring a shady gully below the house, where an occasional creek meandered down the hill. One of the kids tripped on a jutting ridge in the mud. Dug up and sluiced out, the object revealed itself to be a round, honey-hued medicine bottle.

United Utilities has dropped legal fight to block access to data on the discharge of treated sewage in Lake District

The water company United Utilities has conceded defeat in its legal battle to block public access to data on treated sewage it is discharging into Windermere in the Lake District.

Company officials initially claimed that data from phosphorus monitors at a main sewage treatment works at the lake was not environmental information. The company also wanted to block access to data from Cunsey Beck, a site of special scientific interest, which flows into Windermere.

More sightings may be a positive sign for growing population but also indicative of effect of climate change

The slap of an enormous tail upon grey waters as a humpback whale leaps from the sea is becoming an increasingly possible – although still rare – natural thrill around Britain.

The 30-tonne, 15 metre-long migratory giants are being spotted in growing numbers and locations this winter from Kent to the Isles of Scilly.

Some wildlife species have accumulated many times more than safe amount of PFAS in their tissue and organs

• Revealed: drinking water sources in England polluted with forever chemicals
• Revealed: scale of ‘forever chemical’ pollution across UK and Europe

Dolphins, otters, porpoises, fish and birds across the UK have been found to have toxic “forever chemicals” in their tissue and organs, analysis of official data has revealed.

Manmade chemicals called PFAS, known as forever chemicals because they do not degrade, are used in a wide range of consumer products and industrial processes and some have been linked to serious diseases in humans and animals, including cancers. PFAS have been found widely to pollute water and soils and are thought to be in the blood of every human on the planet.

Region hit by strong winds, flash flooding and giant hailstones, causing one death and widespread power cuts

Severe thunderstorms have been wreaking havoc across eastern Australia this week, unleashing heavy rain, strong winds, flash flooding and giant hailstones.

In some regions there were wind gusts of more than 100mph (160km/h) and strong winds caused operational disruptions at Sydney airport as well as extensive damage nearby, including roofs being torn off buildings. An 80-year-old man died after a tree fell on his car in New South Wales, and several other injuries have been recorded. The storms also triggered lightning strikes, leading to widespread power outages that affected more than 200,000 homes and suspending rail services.

The best of this week’s wildlife photographs from around the world

Experts criticise Defra’s decision not to use OECD definition of PFAS, with one asking if move is ‘politically based’

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Leading scientists have criticised the UK government for failing to take stronger action to tackle “forever chemical” pollution and refusing to match moves in the EU to ban non-essential uses of the substances.

Last year, 59 experts in per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) sent a letter to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) asking it to follow the science, which has established that PFAS do not biodegrade and that despite variations in toxicity, this persistence itself is sufficiently worrying that all PFAS should be regulated as one class.

Scientists say frog’s journey shows difficulty of spotting insects or fungi spread by global plant trade

A tiny tree frog hitchhiking in a bunch of roses to Sheffield from Colombia has inspired a study into invasive species reaching the UK’s shores.

Dr Silviu Petrovan, a researcher in the University of Cambridge’s zoology department and a senior author of a paper published today in the journal BioScience, had his interest piqued when he was asked to identify a live frog found in roses in a florist’s shop in Sheffield.

Report criticises ‘slow progress’ on industry regulation, amid record fish mortality and concerns over welfare and environmental pollution

The Scottish government has been criticised for its “slow progress” on regulating the salmon farming industry by a parliamentary inquiry that took evidence for five months before reaching its conclusion.

The report reveals that MSPs “seriously considered” calling for a moratorium on new farms and expansion of existing sites due to concerns over persistently high salmon mortality rates but did not do so due to uncertainties over the impact on jobs and communities.

Data for 2024 shows humanity is moving yet deeper into a dangerous world of supercharged extreme weather

Wildfires that blazed around the world in 2024 helped to drive a record annual leap in carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, surprising scientists. The data shows humanity is moving yet deeper into a dangerous world of supercharged extreme weather.

The CO2 level at the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii jumped by 3.6 parts per million (ppm) to 427ppm, far above the 280ppm level before the large-scale burning of fossil fuels sparked the climate crisis. The Mauna Loa observations, known as the Keeling curve, began in 1958 and are the longest running direct measurements of CO2.