The Guardian
The 20 photographs of the week
The Rio Olympics, wildfires in Europe, the continuing violence in Aleppo – the best photography in news, culture and sport from around the world this week
Continue reading...The secret life of a tiny pond
New Forest It’s a muddy hole that holds water all year round. We could so easily have walked by without seeing it
The walking group stop as they see me peering into a net. “Can we ask what you’re doing?” I explain that I’ve heard there were shells in this pond and have come to find out what they are. As we talk, a blue-bodied dragonfly circles over the water. I tell them what it is and say that it has chosen this mucky pool as its breeding patch, and is probably waiting for a mate to arrive. “Thanks for the nature lesson,” they say with a smile, and head on.
This pond isn’t easy to find. We have only a rough idea where to look. To get to it we cross heavily cropped grassland with tufts of heather and ground-hugging gorse in among which is petty whin. This is a member of the pea family whose yellow flowers are carried on stalks with vicious thorns. We see it because it’s still flowering, much later than the guides say to expect it.
Continue reading...Holmes truths for Theresa May | Brief letters
Phil Jones (Letters, 18 August) says that tidal energy cannot possibly provide baseload power, because it offers energy in “four three-hour blocks a day”. Make that 80 three-hour blocks a day: the tide is a wave that takes 20 hours to move around the British Isles. True, one tidal project can’t provide baseload on its own – but Jones asks you to believe that tidal power can’t do it, period. That’s inaccurate.
David Robjant
Bedford
• There is indeed a problem of obesity in this country, and many different suggestions for tackling it (Letters, 19 August). Isn’t it rather counterproductive that a large audience is eagerly anticipating The Great British Bake Off – a programme dedicated to making us eat cake?
Julia Reisz
Walberswick, Suffolk
Sea potatoes wash up en masse on Cornish beach
Marine experts say mysterious orbs found at Long Rock, near Penzance, are species of urchin stirred up from sandy burrows
With their biomechanical, other-worldly appearance, these orbs look like baseballs reprocessed through the imagination of HR Giger. So their appearance en masse on a beach near Penzance this week left locals uneasy.
“I took one home with me, then panicked and put it in the bin in case it attacked,” said one dog walker who found hundreds on the beach at Long Rock, between Penzance and Marazion. His spaniel refused to go near them, he said.
Continue reading...The week in wildlife - in pictures
Burrowing owls at the Olympics, a pygmy elephant with very special tusks, and a rare white mynah bird are among this week’s pick of images from the natural world
Continue reading...Study identifies key species which act as warning signs of ecosystem collapse
The success or failure of certain species can be used to predict the future health of an entire ecosystem, research says
The Earth’s biodiversity is under attack. We would need to travel back over 65 million years to find rates of species loss as high as we are witnessing today.
Conservation often focuses on the big, enigmatic animals - tigers, polar bears, whales. There are many reasons to want to save these species from extinction. But what about the vast majority of life that we barely notice? The bugs and grubs that can appear or vanish from ecosystems without any apparent impact?
Continue reading...Gas supplies to rise and secret contracts to be scrapped under Coag reform plan
States agree to develop coal seam gas and make deals more transparent in an effort to increase competition and reduce prices
Gas supplies in Australia will be expanded and suppliers forced to publish previously secret prices under reforms agreed to by state and federal ministers at the Coag energy council meeting in Canberra.
All states except Victoria, which has a blanket ban on coal seam gas, agreed to focus on expanding onshore gas activities. The state government in Melbourne agreed to consider its position.
Continue reading...Water voles to be reintroduced to England's highest lake
National Trust will release 100 of the endangered animals, not seen at Malham tarn in Yorkshire dales for 50 years
Britain’s endangered water voles will reach new heights when they are returned to Yorkshire’s Malham tarn for the first time in 50 years.
Around 100 water voles will be reintroduced on Friday to the National Trust estate in the Yorkshire dales, home to England’s highest freshwater lake, in what the trust says is the highest-altitude reintroduction of the species it has carried out in Britain.
Continue reading...High on Kinder Scout, land at the end of its tether
Kinder Scout, Derbyshire Far from being a dismal, greasy world of chocolate peat, the plateau appeared luxuriantly green
There is something littoral about the northern rim of Kinder Scout, the plateau that includes Derbyshire’s highest point. Its start in life was estuarine. Its famous gritstone cap, abrasive icing on a sedimentary layer cake, began as infill of a vast river delta, a Ganges in north Derbyshire. As I picked my way westwards along this narrow shoreline, between Kinder’s summit plateau and the sky, the setting sun emerged below the level of the cloud. The moors to my right – Howden, Alport and Bleaklow – were suddenly bathed in light.
Related: Country diary: Kinder Scout: A silent brooding crowd on the moor
Continue reading...Culling 5,000 brumbies: 41 scientists back controversial Kosciuszko proposal
Academics say plan to slash number of wild horses is needed to protect delicate Snowy Mountains environment
A plan to cull more than 5,000 brumbies in the Snowy Mountains has received the support of leading scientists from around Australia.
Forty-one scientists from 16 universities have written to the New South Wales premier, Mike Baird, to support the proposed cull of 90% of the brumby population in Kosciuszko national park.
Continue reading...Conjoined baby turtle saved by Italian marine biologists
Survivor from twin endangered loggerheads is separated by scientists and freed in Mediterranean Sea
Marine biologists in southern Italy have separated conjoined twin loggerhead turtles and released the surviving newborn into the Mediterranean Sea.
The release occurred this week along the beaches of Campania where the endangered loggerheads nest every year.
Continue reading...'Secret' gas contracts hurting competition, Josh Frydenberg says
Coag meeting will agree on a significant suite of reforms, federal energy and environment minister says
• If energy ministers bow to gas industry they’ll be deciding in the dark
A meeting of state and territory energy ministers will tackle secret long-term gas contracts in an effort to make the sector more competitive, the federal environment and energy minister has said.
Speaking to ABC’s AM on Friday, Josh Frydenberg took aim at the opaque contracts’ role in raising the price of domestic gas. Australia had a tight gas market because it was exporting liquid natural gas, he said, raising the domestic price to world levels.
Continue reading...If energy ministers bow to gas industry they'll be deciding in the dark
Coag meeting could spark a run on exploration and development – yet do nothing to increase competition
• Secret gas contracts hurting competition, Josh Frydenberg says
Friday’s meeting of every energy minister in Australia is looking to be at risk of bowing to gas industry demands and sparking a run on gas development around the country to head off a supposed shortage.
If they do that, it will be in the absence of any clear picture of actual gas supplies in Australia.
Continue reading...New online trawler tracking tool aims to help end overfishing
Developers hope the tool, that enables anyone with internet access to track fishing vessels worldwide, will create greater transparency in the oceans
Anyone with internet access and a passion for seafood will soon be able to track commercial fishing trawlers all over the world, with a new tool that its developers hope will help end the overfishing that has decimated the world’s fish stocks.
Millions of people depend on fish to survive, and fish will be vital to feeding the world’s growing population that is predicted to reach 9.7 billion people by 2050, the United Nations says.
Continue reading...Honeysuckle climbs for sunlight in the wood's deep shadow
Backstone Bank, Weardale Spring has given way to stillness – the gentle descent into autumn will soon begin
It had been more than four months since we last walked through this woodland. Gone were the songs of wood warblers and blackcaps. Gone too the carpet of spring flowers, of woodruff, sanicle, primroses, wood sorrel and bugle, now hidden under arching fern fronds below a closed canopy of leathery oak leaves.
Related: Icy gales shake the trees above spring’s first new growth
Continue reading...Donations to restore Great Barrier Reef could dry up if land clearing continues, says donor
Exclusive: Australia’s biggest environmental philanthropist says private investment to clean up reef ‘doesn’t make sense’ with current land clearing
Private investment in work to restore the Great Barrier Reef is likely dry up if the Queensland government fails to pass tighter land-clearing laws, warns Australia’s biggest environmental philanthropist.
David Thomas, who has donated $30m and bequeathed another $30m to environmental causes in Australia, told Guardian Australia that state and federal governments’ drive for private investment in Great Barrier Reef water quality projects would be unsuccessful if rampant land clearing continues.
Continue reading...The Guardian view on the heatwave: still hope on climate change | Editorial
The documentary broadcaster Ira Glass, the man behind the hit radio programme This American Life, is in Britain this week with his theatre show, Three Acts, Two Dancers, One Radio Host. The production, a collaboration with the experimental dancers of Monica Bill Barnes & Company, puts storytelling and dance together in an improbable but, the reviews say, endearing and entertaining combination. The dancers like to bring dance into places were no one expects it. Mr Glass does the same with documentary. The collaborators are united in wanting to tell serious stories in an engaging manner.
Not many subjects defeat Mr Glass’s creativity. But climate change, he admits, is beyond even his midas touch with a tale. “Any minute I’m not talking about climate change it’s like I’m turning my back on the most important thing that’s happening to us,” he said recently. The trouble with it is that it is “neither amusing nor surprising”. It is “resistant to journalism”.
Continue reading...Tidal energy support ebbs and flows | Letters
Steve Emsley is wrong when he compares tidal lagoons with Hinkley and asks why tidal energy is not even being discussed (Letters, 17 August). The latest estimated cost of the lagoon proposed for Swansea Bay is £1.3bn. Hinkley would produce 65 times as much electricity, all day, every day – true “baseload”. Tidal lagoons would produce variable amounts (four times as much on a spring tide as on a neap tide in Swansea and a bigger difference further up the Severn estuary) and the generation would be intermittent (four three-hour blocks a day) – that’s not “baseload”.
Lagoons could only produce 8% (about 25TWh a year) of the UK’s electricity requirements (a figure challenged by tidal energy experts), if five others followed Swansea, each many times larger and much more costly than Swansea (many times more than £5bn in total). But consent for the next two (huge lagoons further up the Severn estuary off Cardiff and Newport) is most unlikely because of various EU environmental designations (special area of conservation, special protection area etc). As to why no one is discussing them: in fact, Charles Hendry is conducting a review of tidal lagoons to assess, among other things, whether they could play a cost-effective role in the UK energy mix (see www.hendryreview.com). Some think the review was prompted by belated government realisation that the figures bandied around for lagoons just don’t add up.
Phil Jones
Ynystawe, Swansea
The coral die-off crisis is a climate crime and Exxon fired the gun | Bill McKibben
This week we’re staging protests on the ‘crime scene’ of the world’s affected reefs to send a signal that we’re not going to let fossil fuel firms get away with murder
Coral reefs are probably Earth’s most life-packed ecosystem; those who’ve had the privilege of diving in the tropics know the reef as an orderly riot of colour and flow, size and shape.
Which is why a white, dead reef is so shocking – as shocking in its way as a human corpse lying on the street, which still takes the form of the living breathing person it used to be, but now suddenly is stopped forever, the force that made it real suddenly and grotesquely absent.
Continue reading...Visitors rush to the Great Barrier Reef to catch it before it’s gone
Survey finds that 69% of visitors to the world’s largest coral reef system are motivated by the fear that it might disappear, reports Climate Home
In a reversal of the normal travel bucket list, tourists are rushing to see the Great Barrier Reef before it dies.
Half of the reef’s coral has disappeared in the past three decades due to a combination of warming ocean temperatures, coastal development, invasive starfish and agricultural runoff.
Continue reading...