The Guardian

The official start of winter was heralded by days of sharp sunshine. Country Life’s editor at large celebrates the season’s natural beauty

Windscreens frozen, ground like iron, a vichyssoise of fog in the valleys – we’ve had the first intimations of a proper winter, and my friend’s blood is coursing. “Isn’t it the most exciting time of year?” he mumbled, from the depths of many layers of warm clothing. “I love the sharpness of the air, the crunch of frost underfoot.”

I’m with him. A lucky chum who has a house in the Caribbean told me about the temperature variance on Nevis; it will be 30C at Christmas, just as it was 30C in July. A superficially seductive prospect, I admit, but who wouldn’t rather have the drama of the changing year? Icicles hanging from the eaves, mulled wine simmering on the stove. As the 18th-century nature poet James Thomson put it, “Welcome kindred glooms!”

A Republican-led panel promoted a misleading tabloid story alleging earth may not be warming, relying on data that leaves out important points of context

Climate scientists have denounced the House committee on science, space and technology after the Republican-held panel promoted a misleading story expressing skepticism that the earth is dangerously warming.

On Thursday afternoon, the committee tweeted a Breitbart article alleging: “Global Temperatures Plunge. Icy Silence from Climate Alarmists”. The story linked to a British tabloid, the Daily Mail, which claimed that global land temperatures were plummeting, and that humans were not responsible for years of steadily increasing heat.

Safety issues force many reactors offline prompting warnings of power cuts across France, higher energy prices and a rise in emissions

The company building the UK’s first new nuclear power station for decades is facing questions over the health of its fleet of French nuclear plants after an investigation which has left the country with the lowest level of nuclear power for 10 years and the prospect of power cuts during a cold snap.

Thirteen of Électricité de France’s (EDF) 58 atomic plants are offline, some due to planned maintenance, but most for safety checks ordered by the regulator over anomalies discovered in reactor parts.

As a relatively new owner of a Nissan Leaf, I support entirely the need for adequate provision of charge points (Letters, 29 November). The ecotricity charging points at motorway services are great, even if they are now not free. But you can now only pay using a mobile phone app – not much use for my wife whose phone is too old to run the app, and not much use for anyone if their phone is lost or broken. What is wrong with a swipe card, as offered by Charge your Car at other charging points? But the biggest absurdity, as employed by all charging points, is that you pay by charging session, not by the amount of electricity you use. In a petrol or diesel car in an area with few fuel stations, you will top up whenever you have the opportunity even if it means putting in only, say, a quarter of a tank. Electric car users may need to follow that routine, but will have to pay the same however much electricity they need.
Dr Robin Shipp
Bristol

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The week’s top environment news stories and green events. If you are not already receiving this roundup, sign up here to get the briefing delivered to your inbox

Foreign secretary, who backs ban on ivory trade, breaks off London speech to make plea for ‘magnificent’ vulnerable animal

Boris Johnson has interrupted a sweeping speech on the UK’s geopolitical future to make a passionate plea to save the African elephant, saying they are on the brink of extinction as they “get turned into umbrella stands and billiard balls”.

In the midst of a speech at Chatham House to ambassadors and foreign policy advisers, the UK foreign secretary said he was “obsessed with the tragic fate of the African elephant”.

A baby slow loris, a ‘walking shark’ and caribou in Alaska are among this week’s pick of images from the natural world

Paris, Madrid, Athens and Mexico City will ban the most polluting cars and vans by 2025 to tackle air pollution

Four of the world’s biggest cities are to ban diesel vehicles from their centres within the next decade, as a means of tackling air pollution, with campaigners urging other city leaders to follow suit.

The mayors of Paris, Madrid, Athens and Mexico City announced plans on Friday to take diesel cars and vans off their roads by 2025.

Climate change intensified the extreme weather in Tennessee, but its legislators deny the science

With my new hope that deniers of climate change will take ownership of the consequences, I am sad to report that this week, terrible wildfires have swept through Tennessee, a southeastern state in the USA. This state is beset by a tremendous drought, as seen by a recent US Drought Monitor map. There currently are severe, extreme, and exceptional drought conditions covering a wide swath of southern states. The causes of drought are combinations of lowered precipitation and higher temperatures.

Lawyer on president-elect’s transition team says leaving UNFCCC is ‘most practical way’ way to quit agreement, a process that normally takes four years

The US should completely quit the United Nations forum to tackle climate change in order to quickly exit the Paris climate agreement, according to a conservative lawyer who is part of Donald Trump’s transition team.

Abandoning the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) would allow the US to back out of the international climate effort within a year, far sooner than the four-year period that would be required to ditch the Paris accord, which came into force in November. Such a move would probably prove a severe blow to global efforts to avoid dangerous warming.

More than 50 spectacular specimens of monkeys, apes, lemurs, lorises and bushbabies will go on show at the National Museum of Scotland from 9 December. The taxidermy was specially commissioned for the exhibition and is the first to show primates behaving as if they were in the wild

It’s been a long time coming, but the world’s top powers are now betting billions on the Iter collaboration to deliver clean, safe, limitless energy for the modern world

“We are standing on the ground that could change the future of energy,” says engineer Laurent Pattison, deep in the reactor pit of the world’s biggest nuclear fusion project.

Around him is a vast construction site, all aimed at creating temperatures of 150mC on this spot and finally bringing the power of the sun down to Earth. The €18bn (£14.3bn) Iter project, now rising fast from the ground under the bright blue skies of Provence, France, is the first capable of achieving a critical breakthrough: getting more energy out of the intense fusion reactions than is put in.

Wenlock Edge, Shropshire Defying the season, the flowering hedge-bank plant has an irrepressible urge to burst forth

A hogweed blooms in the violet breath of shadows on the lane. Where garden roses are bred to keep flowering compulsively in a desperate denial of the season, the hogweed (Heracleum sphondylium) opens in defiance. In a frosty corner of the hedge bank cut down at the end of summer, one flower makes a reappearance.

Related: Late bloomers in the lee

Caribbean Princess discharged thousands of gallons of polluted bilge waste along British coast, while other ships used rigged sensors to hide contamination

Princess Cruise Lines will pay a US$40m penalty after pleading guilty to seven federal charges in an illegal ocean pollution case that involved one ship’s use of a so-called magic pipe to divert oily waste into the waters.

Miami US attorney Wifredo Ferrer told a news conference the penalty was the largest ever of its kind. A plea agreement filed in federal court also requires UK and US-listed Carnival Corp, parent company of the Princess line, to submit 78 cruise ships across its eight brands to a five-year environmental compliance programme overseen by a judge.

National Offshore Petroleum Safety and Environmental Management Authority censors documents sought by Greenpeace

Australia’s offshore oil regulator is censoring documents about BP’s plans to drill in the Great Australian Bight on the grounds that environmental campaigners could use the information to “oppose all drilling activities” there – and that the plans are too “technical” for the public to understand.

Nathaniel Pelle, a Greenpeace campaign who requested the documents under freedom of information laws, said the decision hindered democratic debate.

Doctors warn excessive intake can pose risks for some patients and say medical advice needs to be more specific

The common advice to drink plenty of water when ill is based on scant evidence and can actively harm chances of recovery, doctors have warned.

Medics at King’s College hospital NHS foundation trust, in London, raised the alarm after they treated a patient with hyponatremia – abnormally low sodium – from drinking too much water to help with a recurring urinary tract infection.

Overwhelming majority of people agree the government should legislate to stop chemicals polluting the Great Barrier Reef

More than two-thirds of Australians think the condition of the Great Barrier Reef should be declared a “national emergency” and support much stronger measures to protect it than are now being considered.

On Thursday the government released its report on the reef to Unesco, which was a condition of the reef being excluded from the UN body’s “world heritage in-danger” list. The government reported slow progress on the key issue of water quality and the failure of a major plank in the plan – slowing tree clearing in Queensland.

Tree campaign groups across Sheffield have been at pains to garner expert inputs to substantiate their very clear arguments against the Sheffield chainsaw massacre (Letters, 29 November). The Woodland Trust is a longstanding critic of the Sheffield “Streets Ahead” programme and its epic and disastrous plans for street tree “management”. Equally, the Sheffield Wildlife Trust has not been shy about its deep reservations. More recently, the Arboricultural Association has felt compelled to take a position. It is insulting to condemn them as “fanatics”.

Campaigners do not advocate saving every tree and have a clear position on the removal of the dead and the dangerous. Yet we live in a post-truth, post-factual world. Perhaps then we should be unsurprised when finding some rot and a little deadwood are being cast in the way of constructive dialogue.

From an Arctic expedition to working in a studio in the school of biology and environmental science at University College Dublin, artist Siobhan McDonald collaborates with researchers to broach subjects at the edges of current scientific knowledge

• Crystalline, curated by Helen Carey, will open at the Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris, on 26 January 2017
  

Energy and climate targets are ‘well within reach’ but the transport sector is lagging behind

EU countries are on track to meet their 2020 targets for renewable energy and emissions cuts but could fall short of ambitious longer-term goals, the European Environment Agency (EEA) said on Thursday.

“The EU’s 2020 targets on energy and climate are now well within reach,” EEA executive director Hans Bruyninckx said.