The Guardian

Open letter warns that ascribing aggression to rammings puts animals at risk of human violence

Orcas are not “attacking” boats, leading scientists have said, warning that the false narrative is putting the animals at risk of retribution from humans.

Iberian orcas started ramming vessels along the Spanish and Portuguese coast in July 2020, with at least 11 juveniles and four adult females believed to be involved. Some boats had toothmarks on them, while others appeared to have been rammed with the head or body multiple times, leading them to being towed into port. Since spring 2021, at least five boats have sunk as a result of damage.

Simone Weil’s life illustrates the capacity to give up the things we feel we’re owed – such as a carbon-intensive consumer-driven lifestyle

Nero fiddled while Rome burned. The saying takes on new meaning after the hottest July ever, devastating wildfires in Greece and Canada, and the declaration by the UN secretary general, António Guterres, that we’ve left behind “global warming” for “global boiling”.

But this time our Neros – AKA governments – aren’t the only ones shirking their responsibilities. What are the rest of us doing while the world burns?

Publisher Springer Nature says 2022 article ‘not supported by available evidence’ as editors launch investigation

One of the world’s biggest scientific publishers has retracted a journal article that claimed to have found no evidence of a climate crisis.

Springer Nature said it had retracted the article, by four Italian physicists, after an internal investigation found the conclusions were “not supported by available evidence or data provided by the authors”.

Latest blow to sustainable farming incentive for nature recovery prompts warnings of ‘tough autumn’

Farmers in England are being left without crucial nature recovery payments and unsure of what to plant after delays to a post-Brexit scheme.

The sustainable farming incentive (SFI) is part of a package of payments that is replacing the EU’s common agricultural policy, which paid land managers for the amount of land in their care. The aim of the SFI is to pay farmers to look after nature, soil and other public goods, rather than simply for farming and owning land.

UK has not reciprocated after EU banned import of pot plant soil, in which some species can travel undetected

Invasive species are increasingly likely to come to Britain because of lax post-Brexit trade rules, experts have warned.

The EU has banned the import of soil in pot plants from the UK since Brexit, partly because invasive species such as the Asian hornet can travel undetected in soil. The UK has not put reciprocal bans in place, however, meaning damaging species from the continent could be transported in soil.

In 2023, the effects of the climate crisis have come into sharp focus. Much of the northern hemisphere endured a blistering heatwave, while other countries were inundated with torrential rain and catastrophic flooding. A number of climate records – some unofficial – tumbled in recent weeks. The Guardian spoke to four people from Hawaii, India, China and the Middle East directly affected by extreme weather events

Researchers say their pyramid-shaped pear tree structures could help certain marine habitats recover

Reefs made from sunken trees can help restore biodiversity in degraded marine habitats, scientists have found.

It is estimated that coral reefs support about 25% of all marine life. They provide housing, food and areas to spawn for millions of marine species and are the backbone of maintaining the aquatic life cycle.

Plant in China releases water with higher amounts of tritium, scientist says, calling into question the reason for seafood ban imposed on Japan

As China bans all seafood from Japan after the discharge of 1m tonnes of radioactive water from the ruined Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant into the Pacific Ocean, Beijing has been accused of hypocrisy and of using the incident to whip up anti-Japanese sentiment.

Scientists have pointed out that China’s own nuclear power plants release wastewater with higher levels of tritium than that found in Fukushima’s discharge, and that the levels are all within the boundaries of levels not considered to be harmful to human health.

Former Treasury chief says every measure of Australia’s environment is ‘going in the wrong direction’

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Australia’s natural environment is in crisis and protecting it must become the top priority in government policy and legislation if it is to have a chance, a former Treasury chief says.

Dr Ken Henry, who led federal Treasury for a decade until 2011 and is now chair of the Australian Climate and Biodiversity Foundation, said governments continued to not give enough attention to the causes of environmental destruction and how policy and management could be changed to turn things around.

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A dolphin has also died at the Marineland theme park, which faces accusations of animal cruelty

Fourteen whales and a dolphin have died since 2019 at a popular Canadian aquarium and theme park, according to a new exposé by the Canadian Press.

Of the marine animals that have died, 13 were belugas and one was Kiska – the world’s loneliest orca, who died of a bacterial infection after four decades in captivity, the last 12 of which were in isolation.

Many credits in the voluntary market going unused, with study finding some offsetting could make global heating worse

Carbon credit speculators could lose billions as scientific evidence shows many offsets they have bought have no environmental worth and have become stranded assets.

Amid growing evidence that huge numbers of carbon credits do nothing to mitigate global heating and can sometimes be linked to alleged human rights concerns, there is a growing pile of carbon credits equivalent to the annual emissions of Japan, the world’s fifth largest polluter, that are unused in the unregulated voluntary market, according to market analysis.

The best of this week’s wildlife photographs, including turtle hatchlings, mating butterflies and trafficked toucan

In the 20th year of the South Australian Museum’s photographic competition, Samuel Markham’s image My Country Burns was the overall winner. The picture, taken while Markham was defending his home from a bushfire, was described by the judges as a ‘breathtaking, scary photograph … indicative of the world we now live in’

The release of water from the Japanese nuclear plant has already caused the price of produce from surrounding coastal areas to drop

Awa-jinja is a place of pilgrimage for the more superstitious fishers of Shinchi-machi, a coastal town in Fukushima, who come here to lower their heads and ask the Shinto gods to look kindly on them as they prepare to steer their boats into the vast Pacific Ocean.

Today, though, the “safe waves” implicit in the shrine’s name are of little concern to the men and women coming to the end of the working day at the town’s fishing port.

Oil, gas and coal benefited from $7tn in support in 2022 despite being primary cause of climate crisis

Fossil fuels benefited from record subsidies of $13m (£10.3m) a minute in 2022, according to the International Monetary Fund, despite being the primary cause of the climate crisis.

The IMF analysis found the total subsidies for oil, gas and coal in 2022 were $7tn (£5.5tn). That is equivalent to 7% of global GDP and almost double what the world spends on education. Countries have pledged to phase out subsidies for years to ensure the price of fossil fuels reflects their true environmental costs, but have achieved little to date.

For as long as our coast remains polluted and food is plentiful in urban areas, we will have these noisy neighbours

I used to hear sparrows, starlings, wood pigeons and robins. Now, summer’s small hours are dominated by a chorus fit for a seafarer: herring gulls mostly, narrating the day from their urban stoops. “Oh, how lovely!”, wistful colleagues say. “I feel like I’m at the seaside during a call with you.” And yet, I am not at the seaside. I am in Exeter city centre, 10 miles from the coast.

Our relationship with gulls is complicated. From Viking superstition to British Vogue’s latest cover, these seabirds have long been allied with truth, cunning, good fortune and endurance, while simultaneously being regarded as the ultimate urban antagonist.

Sophie Pavelle is a writer and science communicator

Median level of PFAS was 88% higher for Asian Americans than non-Hispanic whites, research using novel method shows

Asian Americans likely have much higher levels of “forever chemicals” in their blood than other US races and ethnicities, research using a novel method for measuring PFAS exposure finds.

The peer-reviewed study factored sociodemographic, dietary and behavioral characteristics into its algorithm, which makes it more sensitive to exposure differences among cultures than the standard methods used by the US government and most of the scientific community.

People were overwhelmingly in favour of stopping oil drilling in Yasuní national park. Can this success be replicated elsewhere in the world?

Joy and hope are all too rarely associated with the environmental movement, but both have been in abundant supply since Ecuador’s people voted on Sunday to keep the country’s oil in the subsoil of the Yasuní national park. The question now is whether this is a one-off triumph, or something that can be replicated in other countries.

The referendum result obliges the state oil company to dismantle operations – 12 drilling platforms and 225 wells that produce up to 57,000 barrels a day – in block 43 of the Ishpingo-Tambococha-Tiputini (ITT) project, an area of the Amazon rainforest famed for its ecological diversity, and which is home to two tribes that live in voluntary isolation. With more than 5.4 million votes in favour of halting production and 3.7 million against, this is the most decisive democratic victory against the fossil fuel industry in Latin America and, arguably, the world.

Jonathan Watts is the Guardian’s global environment editor

Greek firefighters have been struggling for five days to contain deadly wildfires throughout the country, several of them bordering an acrid, smoke-filled Athens

Work on Cockshut chalk stream will restore its natural flow, improving biodiversity and reducing flood risk

A chalk stream in Lewes, East Sussex, has been “rewiggled” to restore its natural flow and create a public wetland.