The Guardian

Fake news propagates through the conservative media to the halls of Congress where science is under attack

This weekend, conservative media outlets launched an attack on climate scientists with a manufactured scandal. The fake news originated from an accusation made by former NOAA scientist John Bates about a 2015 paper by some of his NOAA colleagues. The technical term to describe the accusation is ‘a giant nothingburger,’ as Bates clarified in an interview with E&E News:

The issue here is not an issue of tampering with data, but rather really of timing of a release of a paper that had not properly disclosed everything it was.

I grew up with a piano in my bedroom, but now the thought of ivory fills me with revulsion. The UK needs to impose a total ban on the trade of elephant tusks

Growing up in our two up, two down terraced house on the Southside of Edinburgh, I shared my bedroom with a cherished family heirloom – my granny’s mini-grand. This beautiful piano had been to the other side of the world and back. It ended up taking up half my room and a whole lot of my life. I taught myself to play on it, bashing out the sevenths while pretending to be (pre-Wings) McCartney. Now I think of that piano with total revulsion. I believe anyone in the possession of ivory should feel the same. It is over. It has to be.

Look at the knife handles or antique toothpick and then think of the dead mother with her face hacked off as her tuskless, helpless one-year-old tries to nudge her back to life. Google image search is always a useful resource. I feel no differently about the thought of a gorilla-hand ashtray (yes, they are a thing in parts of the Far East) or a nice cool glass of lion bone wine (ditto). One more time: ivory is so over.

Galilee Blockade, which opposes the $16bn Carmichael mine, urges followers to apply for jobs with the Indian company

A civil disobedience campaign targeting Adani’s controversial Queensland coal project has asked almost 12,000 supporters to sign up for a job with the miner.

The Galilee Blockade is working on infiltrating Adani and related companies to gain sources of information to help its plans for “direct action”.

Sandy, Bedfordshire: Peewit, teeack, chewit … whatever you call it, it sounds like the Clangers

Unearthly sounds have filled the fields lately, breaking frosty silences or cocking a whooping snook at louring skies. The lapwing’s voice is the joker in the pack, shooting up and down the scales like a novice twiddling the knobs on a synthesiser. It does not feel grounded in this landscape of puddles, mud slaked over boots, ragged grass margins, finches giving out throwaway chirrups, and the dull ribbed skeleton leftovers of last year’s flowers.

Our field-working forebears must have listened daily and tried to capture the distinctive peculiarity of these sounds in words. So much so that Vanellus vanellus may well have more regional names than any other bird. Lancashire’s chewit calls to Orkney’s teeack, Norfolk’s pie-wipe answers Lothian’s peasiewheep. I’m a child of the TV generation, and I always think when I hear the birds that the Clangers have landed.

Wind energy overtakes coal as the EU’s second largest form of power capacity but concerns remain over politicians’ enthusiasm for renewables

Renewable energy made up nearly nine-tenths of new power added to Europe’s electricity grids last year, in a sign of the continent’s rapid shift away from fossil fuels.

But industry leaders said they were worried about the lack of political support beyond 2020, when binding EU renewable energy targets end.

With the help of snake handlers and Trish Prendergast, a senior veterinary nurse at a clinic in Townsville, Queensland, the 1.5m-long carpet python manages to regurgitate an entire tennis ball after it was found swollen in a residential yard.

Tesco’s waste sugar goes to Cornish apiculture scheme as honey bees go short of nectar and rely on keepers’ winter syrup

Waste sugar routinely thrown away by supermarkets is being collected to help feed stricken bees in Britain struggling to get enough nectar to feed themselves.

Related: Pesticides stop bees buzzing and releasing pollen, says study

Energy retailer raised $100,000 from customers, which will be given out as grants to community-owned energy projects

Amid fresh attacks on renewable energy targets from the federal government and large energy retailer ERM Power, smaller electricity retailer Powershop has raised $100,000 from its customers to be given out as grants to 10 community-owned projects around the country.

Three months ago Powershop launched the Your Community Energy initiative, where they gave customers the opportunity to pay higher rates, which it said would then be distributed to renewable energy projects that were community-owned.

GOP elder statesmen urge Donald Trump’s administration to impose a ‘free market, limited government’ response to rising global temperatures

A group of senior Republicans will meet with White House officials on Wednesday to call for a new national carbon tax to replace federal regulations as a way to combat climate change.

The GOP elder statesmen – which include former secretaries of state James Baker and George Shultz, and ex-treasury secretary Hank Paulson – will urge Donald Trump’s administration to impose a “free market, limited government” response to rising global temperatures.

Scientists were amazed to find remains of 300,000-year-old sediment slip while conducting 3D mapping of deep sea floor

Evidence of a massive undersea landslide that took place more than 300,000 years ago has been discovered off the Great Barrier Reef.

Scientists discovered remains of the slip off Innisfail on Australia’s north Queensland coast.

‘This is the last chance saloon,’ say politicians and campaigners pushing for urgent action

The UK and EU, the world’s largest exporters of legal ivory, have been accused of not doing enough to save Africa’s fast disappearing elephant populations.

“This is the last chance saloon to save elephants,” said UK Labour MP Justin Madders at a meeting at Westminster Hall on Monday where more than 30 MPs on both sides of the chamber debated a public petition of 107,000 signatories calling for government to close its domestic ivory markets.

Environment minister Anil Madhav Dave overlooks Greenpeace research stating 1.2m Indians die each year from airborne pollutants

India’s environment minister has been accused of playing down the health risks of the country’s extremely polluted air by claiming, contrary to research, that there is no conclusive data available linking “death exclusively with air pollution”.

The environmental group Greenpeace released a report in January citing Global Burden of Disease (GBD) research that estimated nearly 1.2 million Indians die each year due to high concentrations of airborne pollutants such as dust, mould spores, arsenic, lead, nickel and the carcinogen chromium.

Fish is Norway’s most valuable export, more so than its vast oil fields. Two-thirds of UK cod comes from the Barents Sea. As the climate changes and the sea grows warmer the fish move north, and so, too, do the fishermen

A proposed government ban on the tiny plastic beads that pollute the ocean should be extended to include items such as make-up, sunscreen and cleaning products

Plans to ban tiny pieces of plastic that pollute the ocean should be extended to more products that people commonly wash down the drain, campaigners urged.

The government has proposed banning the sale and manufacture of products containing plastics known as microbeads that they classify as “rinse-off” items, such as shower gel, face scrubs and toothpaste.

Federal funding for Adani project amounts to $683,060 a job, compared with $3,219 a worker in Queensland’s clean energy sector, 350.org says

Clean energy projects in Queensland are already on track to create more employment than Australia’s largest proposed coalmine, which if funded federally would cost taxpayers 212 times more per job, according to new study.

Federal government agencies are investing $71.4m in seven solar farms and a wind farm in Queensland, which are set to deliver a total of 2,218 jobs, according to analysis by climate advocacy group 350.org.

Wenlock Edge With its riotous sex life and quick, edgy, movements, the hedge sparrow is like a little ticking bomb

Tseep! The hedge sparrow will not break loose from the gravity of the hedge. Hedge is home: a four-dimensional forest that travels through a landscape beset by dangerous space, and provides for a kind of dwelling that supports a very particular society. This tiny passerine is also called a dunnock – literally, little brown bird – an anonymous, blended-in, could-be-anything.

This one is prospecting for beetles, spiders and ants, as damp, mild, weather brings out early creatures. Its pencil-sharp beak shows that it is not adapted to seeds but it will take them when there’s nothing else. Drab and grey-headed is the usual description (as is mine), but there is a subtle vibrancy to its oak-polish brown flecked with darker encryptions, and its head, the colour of lichen on branches.

We were saddened, though not surprised, to hear that fewer gardeners are spotting hedgehogs (Report, 6 February). We have long known hedgehog numbers are in decline. Since the turn of the century numbers have dropped by about a third in urban areas and a half in rural ones. A major factor in their decline is loss and fragmentation of habitat. We have joined forces with People’s Trust for Endangered Species on a project called Hedgehog Street, designed to help tackle the habitat crisis. We ask people to create 13cm square gaps in the bottom of their boundary fences and walls to join up usable habitat, and to ask their neighbours, and their neighbours’ neighbours, to do the same, until the whole street is accessible to hedgehogs. To date we have had over 42,000 people sign up as “hedgehog champions”. There are lots of simple things we can all do to help hedgehogs that could make a big difference. To find out more (or to sign up as a champion) see hedgehogstreet.org
Fay Vass
Chief executive, British Hedgehog Preservation Society

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拥有超乎人类理解范围的敏锐感官、清晰的“自我”意识、严格的母系社会……大象的世界看起来比人类的精彩得多！《化身为兽》的作者写道。(翻译：金艳/chinadialogue)

如果你一觉醒来，发现自己变成了一头大象，那会是什么画风？

首先，你会发现自己的脸上多出了一只甩来甩去的，仅有两根指头的手。这条手像生殖器一样敏感，却能推倒一堵墙或捡起一颗樱桃。你会发现，好友们纷纷用它们的“手”在你的嘴里探来探去，只是为了增进友谊。你也可以用这只手“闻”到数英里外的水源和脚下的野花。这只手可以带给你五种讯息：一，迫在眉睫的危险；二，潜在的威胁；三，食物和水；四，短期及长期的天气预报；五，愉快。

With ambitious emissions-reduction targets, support from government and the car industry, electromobility is on the verge of major expansion in Europe, reports Yale Environment 360

Oslo, Norway’s capital, like most of the Scandinavian country’s cities and towns, boasts bus-lane access for electric vehicles (EVs), recharging stations aplenty, privileged parking, and toll-free travel for electric cars. The initiative began in the 1990s as an effort to cut pollution, congestion, and noise in urban centres; now its primary rationale is combating climate change. Today, Norway has the highest per capita number of all-electric [battery only] cars in the world: more than 100,000 in a country of 5.2 million people. Last year, EVs constituted nearly 40% of the nation’s newly registered passenger cars.

And the Norwegian experiment shows every sign of accelerating. Earlier this year, Norway opened the world’s largest fast-charging station, which can charge up to 28 vehicles in about half an hour. The country, joined by Europe’s No 2 in electromobility, the Netherlands, intends to phase out all fossil fuel-powered automobiles by 2025. Elon Musk, CEO of the US electric car company Tesla Motors, responded to Norway’s goal by tweeting: “What an amazingly awesome country. You guys rock!”

The dorado catfish travels 11,600km from the Andes to the mouth of the Amazon and back, but is threatened by dams and mining

A giant silvery-gold catfish undertakes the longest freshwater migration of any fish, according to new research, travelling 11,600km from the Andes to the mouth of the Amazon and back.

The dorado catfish, which can grow up to 2 metres long, is an important source of food for people along the world’s longest river. It was suspected of making a spectacular journey, but a careful new analysis of the distribution of larvae and juvenile and mature adults has confirmed the mammoth migration.