The Guardian

Environment officials tell parliamentary inquiry there is no modelling on how current policies will affect emissions beyond 2020, or when emissions will peak

Government officials have acknowledged that Australia’s 2030 greenhouse gas emissions reductions pledged at Paris in 2015 were made without any modelling to show whether existing policies could achieve those targets.

They also admitted the government did not have any modelling revealing when Australia’s emissions would peak.

Steady winds produce a pattern on the sea’s surface like parallel furrows in a field

Researchers are still trying to unravel the complex interactions between wind, waves and currents. One of the most visible results of these interactions is Langmuir circulation, which produces a pattern on the water surface like parallel furrows in a field. These lines are known as wind streaks or windrows, and occur only in steady winds of more than 7mph.

Related: The oceans are heating up. That's a big problem on a blue planet | Bill McKibben

Gary Smith of the GMB says that Labour’s fracking ban is “an abdication of our environmental and moral responsibilities” (Report, 27 September). Clearly he hasn’t been reading the Guardian: otherwise he’d know that climate change is so serious that we need to leave most fossil fuel reserves in the ground. He also seems unaware of the Committee on Climate Change’s technical advice that fuels used by 2030 should produce an average of no more than 50g of CO2 per kilowatt hour. Natural gas generates nine times that and, with the risk of fugitive emissions, fracking is likely to produce more. If you want to deliver skilled jobs in an environmentally safe manner, look no further than investment in housing retrofit to deliver massive energy savings in our housing stock, the second leakiest in Europe. There’s also the option of reviving the growth of solar power, where 30,000 skilled jobs disappeared last year when the feed-in tariff was slashed.
John Rigby
Exeter

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Seven hours of legal argument on states’ right to allow carbon pollution may determine the fate of the centerpiece of US efforts to limit climate change

The future of the US’s centerpiece plan to tackle climate change hangs in the balance following nearly seven hours of legal argument over whether it tramples upon the right of states to allow carbon pollution.

Power utilities and business groups have joined 27 states in challenging the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, which would be the single largest tool in cutting greenhouse gas emissions to help avoid dangerous climate change.

New investment policy will end the endowment fund’s exposure to fossil fuels and channel 15% of its £175m into low-carbon alternatives

King’s College London has endorsed a plan that would sink millions of its £179m endowment into clean energy, and drop investments in the most polluting fossil fuels.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a King’s alumni, has previously intervened in the university’s refusal to divest from fossil fuels after a campaign by students.

World’s most illegally trafficked mammal wins total ban on international trade in all species under the strictest Cites protection possible

Pangolins, the world’s most illegally trafficked mammal, were thrown a lifeline at a global wildlife summit on Wednesday with a total trade ban in all species.

More than a million wild pangolins have been killed in the last decade, to feed the huge and rising appetite in China and Vietnam for its meat and its scales, a supposed medicine. The unique scaly anteaters are fast heading for extinction in Asia and poachers are now plundering Africa.

Ocean storms, California fires and an ice-free North-west Passage were among the images captured by European Space Agency and Nasa satellites last month

Composite image of an active Pacific and Atlantic storm season on 30 August 2016, with three hurricanes, two tropical depressions and a former typhoon visible from the ring of geostationary satellites in orbit high above above the Earth.

The report found that California, despite its green reputation, is refining the majority of crude oil – with one facility accounting for 24% of the US total

US imports of crude oil from the Amazon are driving the destruction of some of the rainforest ecosystem’s most pristine areas and releasing copious amounts of greenhouse gases, according to a new report.

The study, conducted by environmental group Amazon Watch, found that American refineries processed 230,293 barrels of Amazon crude oil a day last year.

In this Peruvian shanty town endangered wildlife is sold daily at market, live or freshly cooked in gory detail by traders flouting lax enforcement. Stopping this growing illegal trade will be key to discussions at Cites this week

Where a confluence of rivers meet the Peruvian city of Iquitos, the world’s largest city to be inaccessible by road, lies Belén, a partially floating shanty town and market where endangered monkeys change hands for a few dollars and wildlife traffickers take orders to stock informal zoos or private collections with the abundant fauna from the world’s largest rainforest.

Wildlife is part of the town’s daily trade. A ban on selling bushmeat is openly ignored in Belén’s market. Deep-auburn slabs of the smoked meat of the endangered South America tapir (Tapirus terrestris) are stacked high on trestle tables. The protruding hoof of a peccary or the paw of an agouti betray the fact that there is hunted game on sale.

In the US today, the most affordable and climate-friendly cars are electric

In a new study published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, with an accompanying app for the public, scientists at MIT compare the carbon pollution from today’s cars to the international 2°C climate target. In order to meet that target, overall emissions need to decline dramatically over the coming decades.

The MIT team compared emissions from 125 electric, hybrid, and gasoline cars to the levels we need to achieve from the transportation sector in 2030, 2040, and 2050 to stay below 2°C global warming. They also looked at the cost efficiency of each car, including vehicle, fuel, and maintenance costs. The bottom line:

We are now living in a 400ppm world with levels unlikely to drop below the symbolic milestone in our lifetimes, say scientists. Climate Central reports

In the centuries to come, history books will likely look back on September 2016 as a major milestone for the world’s climate. At a time when atmospheric carbon dioxide is usually at its minimum, the monthly value failed to drop below 400 parts per million (ppm).

That all but ensures that 2016 will be the year that carbon dioxide officially passed the symbolic 400 ppm mark, never to return below it in our lifetimes, according to scientists.

Helmeted hornbills’ solid red beak sells for several times the price of elephant ivory due to soaring demand on the Chinese black market

A virtually unknown ivory poaching crisis is rapidly driving one of the world’s most spectacular birds to extinction, a global wildlife summit has heard.

The helmeted hornbill, found mainly in Indonesia, Borneo and Thailand, has a solid red beak which sells as a “red ivory” on the black market, for several times the price of elephant ivory. The huge birds have been caught for centuries for their tail feathers, prized by local communities, but since 2011 poaching has soared to feed Chinese demand for carving ivory, even though the trade is illegal, sending the hornbill into a death spiral.

Suburban homeowners stocking their garden ponds with frogs, fish or spawn from other ponds or aquatic centres are helping the ranavirus move around

British suburban gardeners may be unknowingly driving the spread of a lethal frog disease by stocking their ponds with exotic or wild aquatic species, research shows.

Scientists from ZSL and Queen Mary University of London say their findings could explain the rapid spread of ranavirus across UK amphibian populations in recent decades.

Wenlock Edge, Shropshire The season might just have tipped over the balance of the autumn equinox but the woods were still green

When I heard the robin’s call, I stopped on the path and peered into the woods. The call had all the qualities of alarm that we recognise: an annoying insistence, a way of filling space with inescapable sound, an instinctive understanding that something was wrong. Like heart-monitoring machines in A&E, a reversing vehicle or a broken-into car, it was a warning but, unlike mechanised alarms, it was made from a narrative – a collection of rapid phrases, sharp as rattling a box of knives.

The season might have just tipped over the balance of the autumn equinox but the woods were still green. Infinite greens – leaves, stems, trunks, brambles, ferns, shadows – merged together to form a vanishing green in which everything disappeared. Something stirred in the crab apples and the alarm flashed red-for-danger as the robin turned to face me.

Queensland’s environment minister says Liberal National party’s refusal to pass laws puts reef in danger of being listed by Unesco as ‘in danger’

The failure of tree clearing reforms in Queensland is the only significant delay in Australia’s conservation plan for the Great Barrier Reef, says a progress report by the state and federal governments.

But the Queensland environment minister, Steven Miles, has declared the roadblock on a “huge” reform for the reef – coupled with a historic bleaching event that killed nearly a quarter of its coral – may lead Unesco to reconsider an “in danger” listing.

Josh Frydenberg says he puts ‘human safety first’ after teenage surfer mauled by a great white at Ballina

The federal government has signalled it would consider a shark cull on the New South Wales north coast after a teenage surfer was mauled by a great white.

It comes as the NSW government announces a new three-month trial of shark-spotting drones for the area, and additional drum lines off the coast.

Interview with Kichwa leader José Fachín on oil contamination, social struggle and the future of Peru’s biggest region

Indigenous peoples are part blockading one of the main tributaries of the River Amazon and demanding that Peru’s new president Pedro Pablo Kuczynski visit them - with no positive response to date. The protest is one of the latest instances of social unrest across Peru and in Loreto in particular, which, at 50% larger than the UK, is Peru’s biggest and most difficult-to-access region - as well as one of the poorest.

This poverty, together with poor infrastructure and a weak or non-existent state, is particularly outrageous given that some of Peru’s historically most productive oil fields are in Loreto. True, more than 40 years of operations, mostly by foreign companies, have transformed the region to the extent that the economy is now largely dependent on oil, generating wealth through tax revenues and casual employment for many people. But how have such revenues been spent? And what of the fact that the location of the oil fields has meant the systematic invasion and exploitation of huge swathes of indigenous peoples’ territories - allegedly contaminating rivers and local inhabitants, blocking efforts by communities to obtain land title, creating economic dependency, dominating local politics, buying off leaders, misleading community members, dumping trash, wasting staggering amounts of energy and resources, and, in general, leaving precious little behind in terms of infrastructure, basic services, education, beneficial projects and skilled, sustainable employment?

Protest follows report linking company’s suppliers in Indonesia to deforestation, forest fires and human rights abuses

Greenpeace activists have blockaded a palm oil refinery owned by IOI in the port of Rotterdam after a report linked the company’s third-party suppliers in Indonesia to deforestation, forest fires and human rights abuses, including child labour.

For seven hours on Tuesday, a felled tree barricaded the entrance to the Croklaan refinery, which processes palm oil mostly sourced from Indonesia and Malaysia.

After days expensively moored awaiting party in its honour, Ineos ship carrying shale gas from US fails to make entrance

There are some things even a billionaire petrochemicals baron can’t control.

Jim Ratcliffe, the founder-chairman of Anglo-Swiss firm Ineos, had carefully choreographed the arrival of the company’s first shipment of shale gas from the US. Its planned arrival in Scotland was the culmination of a $2bn (£1.5bn) investment designed to make its loss-making Grangemouth plant profitable again, not to mention a high-profile platform to lobby publicly for Britain to launch a fracking revolution.

Federal government figures show sulphur dioxide, hydrochloric acid, fine particle pollution and mercury output rose steeply in 2014-15

Toxic emissions from the power plant that made AGL Australia’s largest carbon polluter surged in the year the gas company acquired it, commonwealth figures reveal.

Bayswater power station in New South Wales recorded double-digit rises in sulphur dioxide, hydrochloric acid, fine particle pollution and mercury output in 2014-15, according to the National Pollutant Inventory.