The Guardian

Europe poised to take baton from US as leader in global efforts to fight climate change, with America’s commitment to Paris accords at risk

The European Union has led criticism of Donald Trump’s effort to unravel Barack Obama’s measures to combat climate change, suggesting that Europe will now take the lead in global efforts.

The US president signed an executive order on Tuesday aimed at eliminating the clean power plan, Obama’s landmark policy to set limits on the amount of greenhouse gases that power plants emit. America’s commitment to the Paris accord of nearly 200 countries now hangs in the balance.

Donald Trump signed an executive order on Tuesday to undo a slew of Obama-era climate change regulations that his administration says is hobbling oil drillers and coalminers, a move environmental groups have vowed to take to court. The decree’s main target is Barack Obama’s clean power plan that required states to slash carbon emissions from power plants – a critical element in helping the United States meet its commitments to a global climate change accord reached by nearly 200 countries in Paris in 2015

• Trump moves to dismantle Obama’s climate legacy with executive order

After a startling encounter with a cuttlefish, Australian philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith set out to explore the mysterious lives of cephalopods. He was left asking: why do such smart, optimistic creatures live such a short time?

Inches above the seafloor of Sydney’s Cabbage Tree Bay, with the proximity made possible by several millimetres of neoprene and an oxygen tank, I’m just about eyeball to eyeball with this creature: an Australian giant cuttlefish.

Even allowing for the magnifying effects of the mask snug across my nose, it must be about two feet long, and the peculiarities that abound in the cephalopod family, that includes octopuses and squid, are the more striking writ so large.

Trump’s anti-science budget, anti-climate executive orders, and general disdain for scientific expertise come at a bad time

Today, Trump signed executive orders taking aim at America’s climate policies. On the heels of a report finding that the world needs to halve its carbon pollution every decade to avoid dangerous climate change, Trump’s order would instead increase America’s carbon pollution, to the exclusive benefit of the fossil fuel industry.

Amount of electricity demanded by homes and businesses one afternoon was lower than it was during night for first time ever

Last weekend’s sunny weather was not only good for beers, barbecues and bees, but also drove solar power to break a new UK record.

For the first time ever, the amount of electricity demanded by homes and businesses in the afternoon on Saturday was lower than it was in the night, because solar panels on rooftops and in fields cut demand so much.

Takahama reactors, which Greenpeace says have serious unresolved safety issues, will restart within a month

Japan’s struggling nuclear power industry has won a victory against a landmark legal injunction that halted the running of two reactors.

Six years on from the triple-meltdown at Fukushima, the industry faces concerted opposition from residents and some officials due to lingering concerns about safety.

Trump’s climate blitzkrieg is unlikely to herald the end of civilization, but it risks US geopolitical dominance and could help ‘make China great again’

Is Donald Trump’s determination to send US climate change policy back into the dark ages an “existential threat to the entire planet”, as the architect of many of Barack Obama’s green measures warns? Or is global momentum towards a cleaner, safer future “unstoppable”, as the UN’s climate chief said recently?

Related: Trump begins tearing up Obama's years of progress on tackling climate change

UK ranks fifth in table assessing EU actions to cut carbon emissions by 40%, with most countries gaining wiggle room via loopholes

Sweden, Germany and France are the only European countries pursuing environmental policies in line with promises made at the Paris climate conference, according to a new ranking study.

The UK is in fifth position in the table which assesses policy actions taken by EU states to meet Europe’s pledge of a 40% cut in carbon emissions by 2030.

The B6305 Allendale road, Northumberland Colours and sights shift across the seasons, all seen from this one road

It’s late morning and I’m driving from Allendale to Hexham along the straight road known as the Paise dyke. Cars bowl along here at speed, but to do that is to miss the far views and the birds. There’s always something to catch the eye. Ahead, on this warm March morning, starlings swarm like bees across the fields, a rushing wind as I drive under them, about 3,000 birds. The flock is so regularly spaced that I feel a vast net has been cast over me before they settle on a field pocked by mole hills and rich in worms.

There’s a farm and a wood called the Paise but the road’s name is not on the Ordnance Survey map. In his book published in 1970, Goodwife Hot and Others: Northumberland’s Past as Shown in Its Place Names, the historian and farmer Geoffrey Watson thought the name referred to land where peas were grown. Though these are upland fields, he believed they would have been adequate for growing this staple diet. The dyke might refer to a stone wall or a causeway over the boggy moorland.

‘Environmental vandalism’ proposal would put vulnerable species, including Leadbeater’s possum and Sooty owl, at risk of extinction

A proposal to release areas of protected Victorian old-growth forest for logging is “environmental vandalism crossed with bad economics” that would put a number of vulnerable species at risk of extinction, a leading Leadbeater’s possum expert has said.

Professor David Lindenmayer, from the Australian National University, is recognised as the world expert in the critically endangered Leadbeater’s possum.

Eyewitness accounts of large, dog-like animals in state’s far north spur scientific hunt for thylacines, thought to have died out in 1936

“Plausible” possible sightings of a Tasmanian tiger in north Queensland have prompted scientists to undertake a search for the species thought to have died out more than 80 years ago.

The last thylacine is thought to have died in Hobart zoo in 1936, and it is widely believed to have become extinct on mainland Australia at least 2,000 years ago.

The Victorian plant will close down this week after half a century of electricity generation. The brown coal-powered station supplies more than 5% of Australia’s total energy demand – but is the country’s dirtiest and least efficient power plant, producing 3% of Australia’s total greenhouse gas emissions. It will shut down entirely on 31 March after its owner, the power company Engie, decided it was uneconomical and unsafe to continue running the plant without major upgrades

• Gay Alcorn: Gloom in the valley as Hazelwood fades to black
  

The death of activist Sikhosiphi Rhadebe in the Eastern Cape has not stopped local communities opposing plans for a titanium mine that threatens important lands and a way of life, reports Yale Environment 360

Environmentalists at risk: read parts one and two in this series

They called him “Bazooka” after his favourite soccer star. But Sikhosiphi Rhadebe’s real love was the magnificent coastal lands of South Africa’s Eastern Cape, where he chaired a community organisation campaigning to prevent an Australian mining company from strip-mining their sand dunes for titanium, one of the world’s most commercially valuable metals.

One evening last March, a Volkswagen Polo pulled up at his home and two men posing as police dragged Bazooka outside. When he resisted, they shot him eight times in front of his 17-year-old son, then sped away. “Bazooka” was dead. Nearly a year later, there have been no arrests, and no apparent progress in the investigation into his murder. I had come to find out why.

Despite its Sunshine State moniker, Florida is barely harnessing its bountiful rays for energy, with the number of households getting solar panels not projected to squeak past 100 a year until 2021. Meanwhile, there’s a solar boom occurring in north-east states such as New York and out west in California

• Sunshine state shuns solar as overcast New York basks in clean energy boom

Global warming makes temperature patterns that cause heatwaves, droughts and floods across Europe, north America and Asia more likely, scientists find

The fingerprint of human-caused climate change has been found on heatwaves, droughts and floods across the world, according to scientists.

The discovery indicates that the impacts of global warming are already being felt by society and adds further urgency to the need to cut carbon emissions. A key factor is the fast-melting Arctic, which is now strongly linked to extreme weather across Europe, Asia and north America.

During a record-breaking hot presidential election year, American news networks failed to report on climate change

Media Matters for America has published its annual review of American evening newscast climate coverage for 2016, and the results are stunning:

In 2016, evening newscasts and Sunday shows on ABC, CBS, and NBC, as well as Fox Broadcast Co.’s Fox News Sunday, collectively decreased their total coverage of climate change by 66 percent compared to 2015

The founder and chief executive of Murray Energy supports Donald Trump’s move to roll back Obama’s clean power plan but cautions the president to pump the brakes on talk of bringing back mining jobs

America’s biggest coal boss is hopeful that his industry will soon be freed of “fraudulent” green legislation that has hampered his industry, but warned Donald Trump to “temper” expectations about a boom in mining jobs.

Robert Murray, founder and chief executive of Murray Energy, the largest privately held coal miner in the US, is confident Trump will follow through with campaign plans to reinvigorate the coal industry and will start by scrapping Barack Obama’s clean power plan (CPP), Obama’s signature climate change plan.

In her series This Is Not Real Life, photographer Dominika Gesicka celebrates the stark beauty of the Svalbard archipelago

As geoengineer advocates enter Trump administration, plans advance to spray sun-reflecting chemicals into atmosphere

Harvard engineers who launched the world’s biggest solar geoengineering research program may get a dangerous boost from Donald Trump, environmental organizations are warning.

Under the Trump administration, enthusiasm appears to be growing for the controversial technology of solar geo-engineering, which aims to spray sulphate particles into the atmosphere to reflect the sun’s radiation back to space and decrease the temperature of Earth.

Marshwood Vale, Dorset It’s gentle at first, a fine drizzle of notes, and then the volume swells and they warble full-throatedly

Mid-afternoon on a still, overcast day that feels as if the air will thicken into rain. Clusters of slim, pale, wild daffodils light the under-storey of the roadside hedge, still bare and broken from its winter flailing. In the Victorian language of flowers, they represented hope, folly and unrequited love. Lower down, the bank is patched with early dog violets, their tiny, scentless blooms scrunched into frowns of concentration. Both sides of the lane are splashed yellow with primroses and shiny celandines.