The Guardian

Airedale, West Yorkshire By early September mating instincts will give way to a territorial urge and this stretch of river won’t be big enough for both birds

They’re still together, but it won’t last. The sycamore keys have started to twirl to earth and a parting of ways is on the cards. Kingfisher pairs seldom outlast the summer; by early September mating instincts will have given way to the territorial urge, and that’ll mean that this stretch of the river won’t be big enough for the both of them.

It’s warm, a bit muggy, and the air is thick with the musty stink of rosebay willowherb. Mallard drakes in their dowdy moult or “eclipse” plumage lounge in sulky gangs on the gravel spit, exiled dukes stripped of their finery.

Despite the government’s sudden conversion to gas as Australia’s panacea to climate change, the only real solution is 100% renewable energy

There has been a lot of hot air recently about the role of gas in Australia’s future energy generation. At last week’s COAG meeting, the overwhelming takeaway message from our newly minted energy and environment minister, Josh Frydenberg, was that gas was good, not to mention vital for our future energy solution.

For Frydenberg, gas is the key plank of Australia’s solution to climate change: the low-carbon panacea that will help us meet our obligations under the Paris agreement. Indeed, he has so much faith in gas that he is applying pressure on Victoria to overturn its current moratorium on onshore drilling and give the industry a foothold in the Australian state with the highest population growth rate.

Queensland woman says she had to fight the animal after finding it had her daughter pinned to the ground

A Queensland mother has wrestled and kicked a kangaroo to save her two-year-old daughter at their Hervey Bay home.

Argie Abejaron told the Fraser Coast Chronicle she had heard her six-year-old son scream on Tuesday and had run outside to see the kangaroo had pinned her little girl, Mileah, to the ground and was attacking her.

The small mammal – ‘one of the cutest animals in America’ – is struggling to survive as summers get hotter and drier

Populations of a rabbit-like animal known as the American pika are vanishing in many mountainous areas of the west as climate change alters its habitat, according to findings released by the US Geological Survey.

The range for the mountain-dwelling herbivore is shrinking in southern Utah, north-eastern California and in the Great Basin that covers most of Nevada and parts of Utah, Oregon, Idaho and California, the federal agency concluded after studying the mammal from 2012-2015.

The rules of acceptable behavior in the national parks have changed drastically over the past 100 years. It was once legal to drive through trees, ride waterfalls, and boil an egg in the Yellowstone hot springs – but now such actions are generally frowned upon

With respect to Professor MacDonald (Letters, 22 August), a recently published analysis of peer-reviewed literature between 2009 and 2015 demonstrates that 84% of the studies contain findings that indicate public health hazards, elevated risks or adverse health outcomes in fracking areas, all of which were confident no doubt that their regulations were world class. There are similar high levels of anxiety concerning water and air quality in fracking areas.

The professor does not share with us what it is, other than the industry’s assertion, that makes our UK system of regulation, not yet tested for shale, so watertight. Her last paragraph sits ill from an academic and hardly withstands the most cursory scrutiny: how can an untried system be world class – despite the “study after study undertaken in the UK by renowned universities”? How do we know? It is not enough that Public Health England “recognise that concentrations [of radon released by fracking to the environment] are not expected to result in significant additional radon exposure”. What kind of assurance is this?
David Cragg-James
York

The south-eastern edge of Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming takes a week of backpacking to hike in and out and is populated by wolves and grizzly bears

• 100 years of the National Park Service: readers’ photo and stories
• 10 of the least-visited US national parks

The most remote place in the contiguous 48 states, the farthest you can go to get away from it all – the only place you can be more than 20 miles from a road – is deep in the south-eastern corner of Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming.

Related: 'We need to preserve this beauty': your memories of US national parks

To celebrate 100 years of the National Park Service, we asked you to share what America’s natural wonders mean to you

The National Park Service turns 100 this week, and to celebrate its century of protecting American’s most treasured places, we asked you to share your memories and photos of the parks. Here’s a selection of your contributions. You can see all of them – and share your own – here.

Related: Celebrating 100 years of the National Park Service: readers' photo and stories

Majority of British public polled support protections at least as strong as current EU rules and many think farming subsidies should focus more on environmental protection

An overwhelming majority of the British public polled want new post-Brexit laws protecting wildlife and the countryside to be at least as strong as the EU rules currently in place, according to a opinion poll published on Thursday.

Many also want a new farming subsidy regime to emphasise environmental protection more than the EU’s existing Common Agricultural Policy and the vast majority want an EU ban on neonicotinoid pesticides, known to harm bees and other pollinators, to remain in place.

The Greenland Ice Sheet is losing 110,000 Olympic size swimming pools worth of water each year.

A new study measures the loss of ice from one of world’s largest ice sheets. They find an ice loss that has accelerated in the past few years, and their measurements confirm prior estimates.

As humans emit heat-trapping gases, we expect to see changes to the Earth. One obvious change to be on the lookout for is melting ice. This includes ice atop mountains, ice floating in cold ocean waters, and the ice within large ice sheets or glaciers. It is this last type of ice loss that most affects ocean levels because as the water runs into the oceans, it raises sea levels. This is in contrast to melting sea ice – since it is already floating in ocean waters, its potential to raise ocean levels is very small.

Old Warden, Bedfordshire In this parched landscape it was clear the hedgerow fruit had not ripened a moment too soon for the badgers

It took only a few dry weeks for the fields on the plateau above the village to forget that it had ever rained. The clay soil was beginning to crack, the footpath had turned to a sun-baked dirt track and there was no yield underfoot. Every bump and stone was hard and uncompromisingly contoured, jabbing at an instep, stubbing a toe.

The worms had become dustbowl refugees in this parched landscape, sinking deep underground. Far below my feet, they would be aestivating, bunched up in knots, coated in their own mucus in a hibernation-like suspension of active life, waiting for moisture to come again.

More than 150 leading climate scientists at universities and government agencies ask for cuts to coal exports, saying: ‘There is no Planet B’

I’m guessing that Malcolm Turnbull gets a fair few letters on any given day. You wonder how he has the time to read them all.

How do you prioritise the ones worth your attention, and the ones that you can toss in the round-shaped filing cabinet under your desk?

Many schemes may not go ahead if the Australian Renewable Energy Agency is defunded in the government’s omnibus bill, ACF warns

Thousands of jobs could be created in Queensland if 10 large-scale solar projects were to receive funding, according to analysis by the Australian Conservation Foundation.

The projects, earmarked for funding by the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (Arena), would create around 2,695 jobs according to the study.

Signs of warming appear as early as 1830 say researchers, whose analysis will help build accurate baseline of temperature before influence of human activity

Continents and oceans in the northern hemisphere began to warm with industrial-era fossil fuel emissions nearly 200 years ago, pushing back the origins of human-induced climate change to the mid-19th century.

The first signs of warming from the rise in greenhouse gases which came hand-in-hand with the Industrial Revolution appear as early as 1830 in the tropical oceans and the Arctic, meaning that climate change witnessed today began about 180 years ago.

There can be around 100,000 of them in the average face wash, but now MPs are calling for a ban and manufacturers are swapping plastics for ground-up peach-pits in products

The late Dr John Ugelstad was a hero of Norwegian science. “Why go to space when you can go to Trondheim,” Newsweek crowed on a visit to his labs in the 80s. It had come to photograph him in the company of a few of the millions of tiny particles – microbeads – he had invented. Prior to Ugelstad, it had been assumed that the only way to make tiny plastic polymers spherical was to do it in the weightlessness of space – the ones made on Earth had come out as useless droopy plastic soufflés. But Ugelstad had found a way, and the results were revolutionary.

In medicine, they allowed the separation of bodily substances to make testing much easier, especially for Aids. And in cancer, his “paramagnetic” (magnetic only in a magnetic field) microbeads allowed new treatments that would pile into bone cancer patients’ bones and “scrub out” the old cancerous cells.

Environmental groups warn president’s climate legacy could be at risk over research showing areas cleared for oil and gas extraction contain marine life

Environmental groups have turned on the Obama administration over offshore oil and gas extraction, warning it puts whales and dolphins in peril and risks undermining the president’s commitment to putting the brakes on climate change.

Barack Obama, who recently called global warming an “genuine existential threat”, has enjoyed largely solid support from green groups that have praised his leadership on the issue. But Obama’s environmentalist allies are increasingly frustrated over federally approved fossil fuel drilling, just as the US president attempts to put the finishing touches on his climate legacy.

With limited resources, Yellowstone national park is trying to manage crushing tourism that tangles roadways, spawns traffic accidents and provokes clashes between humans and the park’s natural world

• Increase in Yellowstone visitors raises park’s concerns over wildlife and safety
  

Humanity’s environmental footprint has increased, but at a much slower rate compared to population and economic growth because of more efficient use of natural resources, reports Mongabay

Human activities have taken a heavy toll on our environment. But there may be some hope, researchers say.

Although human pressures continue to expand across our planet, their overall rate of increase is slower than the rates of population and economic growth, a new study published in Nature Communications has found.

Park rangers reassess how to manage tourist violations, staff burnout and ‘animal jam’ as number of national park guests peaked to four million last year

Yellowstone national park is finding new ways to manage tourism after visits jumped by almost 600,000 between 2014 and 2015. After 15 years of steady growth, last year’s 4m visits was a tipping point, says park ranger Charissa Reid.

The park expects the number to rise in 2016. July is likely to be the first million-visit month in the park’s 144-year history.

Previous investigations fail to reveal impact of ‘world’s largest human health threat’ because they do not account for people’s movement, researchers say

The true impact of air pollution has been obscured by the failure to consider people’s exposure as they move around during the day, according to a new study that has mapped the hotspots of New York’s air pollution based on where people gather for work or recreation.

The research cites air pollution as “the world’s single largest environment and human health threat” but laments that the problem has not previously been “considered spatially and temporally”, with most studies basing a person’s pollution exposure on where they live.