The Guardian

In the second of our series highlighting innovative renewable energy projects across Australia we show how many older residents of a Melbourne suburb have embraced solar energy, backed by a council scheme where they can pay for panels in instalments. One of the early adopters was a 102-year-old man. ‘He understood that the benefits lasted way beyond his lifespan,’ reports Kate Nicolazzo of Positive Charge. The residents say they are making big savings on their energy bills and doing their bit for the environment too

Green groups’ report says move to cleaner energy in China and India is discouraging the building of coal-fired units

The amount of new coal power being built around the world fell by nearly two-thirds last year, prompting campaigners to claim the polluting fossil fuel is in freefall.

The dramatic decline in new coal-fired units was overwhelmingly due to China and India because of policy shifts and declining investment prospects, found a report by Greenpeace, the US-based Sierra Club and research network CoalSwarm.

Rangers trap and kill four-metre crocodile near where Warren Hughes disappeared on Saturday

Rangers have killed a four-metre crocodile blamed for a fatal attack on a spearfisherman in Queensland’s far north.

The crocodile was trapped and killed about 10pm on Tuesday, at the mouth of the Russell river close to where Warren Hughes, 35, disappeared on Saturday.

Anent the admirable Stephen Moss’s remark (Birdwatch, 20 March) that his snow bunting on the Somerset coast was “probably the furthest south they ever get”, I have been spotting snow buntings all across the Alps for more than 40 years. In winter they are common, often seen in flocks around picnic spots, in all the high ski resorts.

My last sighting was in January. While photographing Alpine choughs on the summit of the Marmolada, the Queen of the Dolomites at just under 11,000ft, joining the choughs was a pair of snow buntings. Back at our hotel, a small flock of fieldfares, also breeders in Arctic latitudes, were feeding on berries. I suspect that both species were drifting northwards from even further south.
Jim Freeman
Croftamie, Loch Lomondside

The Stop Adani Alliance says north Queensland coalmine would ‘fuel catastrophic climate change’

The former Greens leader Bob Brown will launch a new alliance of 13 environmental groups opposed to Adani’s Carmichael coalmine on Wednesday in Canberra.

The Stop Adani Alliance will lobby against the coalmine in northern Queensland, citing new polling that shows three-quarters of Australians oppose subsidies for the mine when told the government plans to loan its owners $1bn.

Vibrant vegetation in a Venezuelan lake, Saharan dust in snowy Sierra Nevada, cloud vortices in South Korea, a vast solar farm in China, and a lone ship in the Atlantic are among our satellite images this month

Every so often, a vibrant green colour infuses the waters of Lake Maracaibo. Floating vegetation – likely duckweed – was swirling in the Venezuelan lake when Nasa’s Aqua satellite flew over in February 2017. Most of the time, Maracaibo’s waters are stratified into layers, with nutrient-rich, cooler, saltier water at the bottom, and a warmer, fresher layer near the surface. But after heavy rains, the layers can mix and make the lake an ideal habitat for plant growth. A narrow strait roughly 6km (4 miles) wide and 40 km (25 miles) long connects the lake to the Gulf of Venezuela and the Caribbean Sea. The influx of saltwater through the strait makes Maracaibo an estuarine lake. This mixing causes the water currents responsible for the concentric swirl pattern, according to Lawrence Kiage, a professor of geoscience at Georgia State University.

From a red bridge emerging from mist in rural Japan to a tiered stream stepping down a hillside, Toshio Shibata’s photographs – gathered for a new exhibition in New York – take a positive view of our impact on the landscape

Claxton, Norfolk Lapwing song was the omnipresent soundtrack of all my childhood springs. Now it has gone from behind our family home

Part of the charm of lapwings is that they look silly, a friend says, and I can surmise what she means. It’s the ridiculous crest, the unnecessary breadth of wing, which gives them so much more aerial lift and loop than they require, and then there’s the zaniness of their spring display. Nor should we leave out the high-pitched notes that pass for song and which remind me of a dog’s squeaky play bone wheezing in and out of tune as the animal chews.

Yet lapwings are too ingrained in a lifetime of memory for me to think them only silly. They are the first sounds I awakened to as a naturalist in Derbyshire, whose nests we came upon in the grass like a revelation, and whose blotched-brown Easter eggs seemed a kind of miracle.

Earth is a planet in upheaval, say scientists, as the World Meteorological Organisation publishes analysis of recent heat highs and ice lows

The record-breaking heat that made 2016 the hottest year ever recorded has continued into 2017, pushing the world into “truly uncharted territory”, according to the World Meteorological Organisation.

The WMO’s assessment of the climate in 2016, published on Tuesday, reports unprecedented heat across the globe, exceptionally low ice at both poles and surging sea-level rise.

SSE trials ‘demand-side response’ where vehicles start charging a few hours after being plugged in, when demand is lower

Electric cars are putting increasing pressure on the UK’s power grids, making it vital they are recharged at the right time of day, a minister has said.

John Hayes, transport minister, said it was important that such battery-powered cars were topped up in smart ways to avoid unduly stressing the energy system.

MPs say unprecedented investigation will study harm caused by toxic air and scrutinise government efforts to tackle it

MPs from four influential committees are coming together to launch a joint inquiry into the scale and impact of the UK’s air pollution crisis.

In an unusual development, the environmental audit committee, environment, food and rural affairs committee, health committee and transport committee will hold four sessions to consider mounting scientific evidence on the health and environmental effects of toxic air.

With the Republican Climate Resolution, Climate Solutions Caucus, and Climate Leadership Council, Republicans are trying to end their party’s climate denial

While the Trump administration is veering sharply toward climate science denial, 19 House Republicans have taken steps to pull the party in the direction of reality, and the need to combat the threats posed by human-caused climate change.

Fifty years ago, the supertanker Torrey Canyon ran aground between Land’s End and the Isles of Scilly, spilling more than 100,000 tonnes of crude oil into the Channel. The Observer photographer Jane Bown was sent to cover the cleanup operation across Cornwall’s beaches. These images are a small selection of the 270 photographs she took there, now housed in the GNM Archive.

• Torrey Canyon disaster – the UK’s worst-ever oil spill 50 years on

Stephen Hawking says he fears he may not be welcome in the United States since the election of Donald Trump as president. Speaking on ITV’s Good Morning Britain on Monday, the eminent physicist says a hard Brexit would leave the UK isolated and inward–looking

• Stephen Hawking: I fear I may not be welcome in Donald Trump’s US
  

Party to draft laws allowing a controlled cull of protected reptiles, including Indigenous-run safari hunts, after two suspected attacks in state’s far north

Two suspected crocodile attacks in the same north Queensland area within a day have prompted a bid by Katter’s Australian party to legalise hunting of the protected predators.

Wildlife officers and police believe Warren Hughes, 35, may have been killed by a 4m-plus crocodile that later “charged” a police boat searching for the Cairns man’s body on Sunday night.

Sea levels are rising. For many cities on the the eastern shores of the United States, the problem is existential. We take a look at how Miami and Atlantic City are tackling climate change, and the challenges they face under a skeptical Trump administration that plans to cut funding for environmental programs

New scheme aims to tackle one the UK’s trickiest disposal issues by turning thousands of tonnes of hygiene products into burnable bales

One of the UK’s trickiest waste problems is being tackled by turning the undesirable into the combustible – tampons and incontinence pads are being converted into dry, burnable bales. The new initiative, from a major waste company, compresses the waste into fuel for power stations.

Huge volumes of what are known in the trade as “absorbent hygiene products” are produced in the UK. But it is difficult to deal with as its dampness makes incineration expensive. Dumping the waste in landfill is the other current option, but the material takes decades to degrade and heavy and rising landfill taxes are aiming to end the practice.

Hope Cove, Devon I need to go into the attic to check the timbers – an awkward job, but a chance to get out of the wind

An experienced thatcher told me early on in my apprenticeship: “You’ll learn to hate the wind more than anything.” And after five years of working on Devon roofs I’m inclined to agree with him: rain is our more obvious enemy, but rain doesn’t blow the wheat out of your hand or bowl you sideways off your ladder.

On really windy days like this one, you can’t go on the roof. In spite of the warm spring sunshine, a howling south-westerly is whipping up white horses on the Atlantic and training the coastal trees into even more diagonal contortions.

Pumped hydro, big battery, solar thermal and solar PV and storage projects are already planned for South Australia’s power network

When it comes to South Australia’s radical plans for energy storage to support its power network, all roads lead to Port Augusta – or all transmission lines, that is.

Proponents of projects that include energy storage have converged on this small outback city perched on the top of the Spencer Gulf – but why here and why now?

Originally published in the Manchester Guardian on 24 March 1917

SURREY
Sheep, some fifty of them, big black-faced ewes, with about the same number of late lambs just dropped, came this morning out of a great pen at the end of the rickyard which had been put up behind the shelter of two still standing stacks of corn. As they filed through the hurdle gap each began bleating, and all were soon in the wide ditch opposite, nosing about in warm corners for any sweet young shoots of early spring. The lambs of a few days old, each “wickering” (as the shepherd said) after its mother, tumbled about grotesquely; it was their first hour on the open land. Some of the older ones began to frisk; the sedate sheep dog watched them narrowly as if with a mute warning against pranks; then, the barred gate of a near meadow swung, and all were among the turnips littered here and there. But not for long. Clouds swept up with a north-east wind: the lambs shivered and cried plaintively; they had to be housed again behind the piled trusses of wheat straw. We are never out of the wood on the farm.