The Guardian

It is very commendable that George Monbiot has converted to veganism (Opinion, 10 August), but perhaps he is deluding himself into thinking that this will alter our output of CO2 into the atmosphere. We can practise all the accepted methods of reducing carbon emissions, but nothing is more effective than choosing to have no more than two children. As we hurtle towards the point of no return with regards to global warming, choosing not to eat meat is quite low down the scale of things we need to do.

Which are: 1 Stabilise world population. 2 Eradicate poverty. 3 Stop using fossil fuels and change to renewables. 4 Use our land to produce crops more effectively. 5 Reduce excessive meat consumption.

Eamon Kelly, 52, from Didcot, disqualified for cheating in Tarbes Grand National race after sending decoy birds

A pigeon-racing champion has received a lifetime ban from the sport after allegations that he cheated to win one of the most prestigious competitions in the sport’s calendar.

Eamon Kelly, 52, from Didcot, was accused of cheating by registering 14 birds for the Tarbes Grand National race but keeping them at home and sending decoys instead.

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

Scientists say the Greenland shark has the longest lifespan of any vertebrate on the planet. Julius Nielsen, who has been studying the sharks, says record goes to a female thought to be between 272 and 512 years old and is five metres in length

• 400-year-old Greenland shark is oldest vertebrate animal
  

Elephant herds face an uncertain future – over the next year we’ll be taking a closer look at what can be done to help

Welcome to the elephant conservation hub. Over the next year, with the support of Vulcan, Guardian journalists will be taking a closer look at the situation of elephant herds around the world.

Elephant conservation has been a particular focus for Vulcan, a private company set up by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen to look for solutions to problems like endangered species, climate change and ocean health. The future of this particular species is precariously balanced. Although in some areas (a very few) elephant herds are expanding and thriving, the overall picture is one of decline, with falls of as much as 60% in elephant population in countries such as Tanzania.

A basking shark, panda cub and Finland’s bears and wolves are among this week’s pick of images from the natural world

Supporters are trying to improve sport’s reputation through a campaign group with no members that is funded anonymously

With the Glorious Twelfth, the 2016 grouse season is under way – and the first birds will be served up in many a country house on Friday night. But after raising a glass to the late Duke of Westminster, who owned a vast acreage of grouse moorland, the shooters may also toast a colourful and remarkably influential group of people trying to improve the tarnished reputation of their sport.

They include the retired cricketer Sir Ian Botham, a billionaire hedge fund owner who houses his chickens in a coop that supposedly cost £150,000, and a lobbyist who boasts of his role advising a Russian oligarch.

Club succeeds with an appeal to stop planning permission for the west London project that would power 600 homes

A proposed small hydropower project in west London has received a further setback, as court judges allowed an appeal by a club owned by Shell against the granting of planning permission to the site.

The project, at Teddington lock and weirs, would deliver enough electricity to power about 600 homes. It is proposed by a local cooperative group, run by volunteers, who have raised a potential £700,000 to build the plant, which the proponents say would not have any damaging effect on fish in the Thames or other local wildlife.

Wildlife presenter Chris Packham is called an extremist by former England cricketer Sir Ian Botham as they clash over a grouse-shooting ban on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. Botham accuses Packham of using his position at the BBC to promote his views

• Chris Packham using BBC role to push grouse-shooting ban, Ian Botham says

Wildlife presenter accused of extremism in clash with former England cricketer as grouse-shooting season begins

The former England cricketer Sir Ian Botham has accused wildlife presenter Chris Packham of being an extremist and using his position at the BBC to promote his views on restricting grouse shooting.

The pair clashed in a joint interview on Radio 4’s Today programme on the opening day of the grouse-shooting season, – or the “inglorious twelfth” as Packham called it.

About 600 Tasmanian devils untouched by facial tumour disease will stay in sanctuaries as insurance against animals in the wild becoming extinct

A controversial proposal to halve the insurance population of disease-free Tasmanian devils has been scrapped.

But the state government said it would continue to support the staged release of some of the animals as part of a vaccine-testing program.

The world’s population of elephants is nearing a critical point. Karl Mathiesen explains why there has never been a more dangerous time to be an elephant

The largest of all land beasts, elephants are thundering, trumpeting six-tonne monuments to the wonder of evolution. From the tip of that distinctive trunk with its 100,000 dextrous muscles; to their outsize ears that flap the heat away; to the complex matriarchal societies and the mourning of their dead; to the points of their ivory tusks, designed to defend, but ultimately the cause of their ruin.

Four-tuskers, hoe-tuskers, shovel-tuskers are all wiped out - now only a fragment of this keystone species remains

If, just 800 generations ago, we took a summer holiday to Crete, Cyprus or Malta, we would have found familiar-looking islands, filled with the flowers and birds we can enjoy today. But bursting through the scrub would’ve been one surprise: a pygmy elephant, one metre high, one of many different elephant species that once roamed every continent apart from Australia and Antarctica.

The 20,000-year-old pygmy elephants of the Mediterranean islands may appear as fantastical as the woolly mammoths which still ambled across one Alaskan island just 5,600 years ago. But these animals’ lives, and deaths, take on a new pertinence today. They lived a blink of an eye ago in evolutionary time and shared the planet with modern humans. And the fate of these lost elephants, warns Prof Adrian Lister, paleobiologist at the Natural History Museum, is analogous to the troubled future facing their close relatives, the African and Asian elephants threatened with obliteration today.

In the last three years, significant amounts of illegal ivory have been picked up in the Singapore – conservationists worry that new smuggling routes are opening up

Large-scale seizures of ivory in Singapore over the last three years make the south-east Asian city-state one of the world’s premier ivory smuggling hubs for organised crime, say conservation watchdogs.

Data from seizures, collected by the UN’s wildlife trade monitor Traffic and the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) and shared with the Guardian, reveals how the gangsters operate. Shipping containers carrying thousands of tusks are labelled as carrying anything from tea to waste paper or avocados. They leave Africa from a few ports well-known for high levels of corruption.

Knepp Castle Estate, West Sussex Emerging sallow scrub has provided these alluring butterflies with new territory, and the estate has become a breeding hotspot

Throngs of butterflies were on the wing. Small tortoiseshells basked on the sun-baked path, a red admiral was puddling in a muddy tyre track and peacocks were growing intoxicated on tree sap.

Meadow browns flitted low across the pasture, mingling with gatekeepers, ringlets and marbled whites among the thistles and knapweed. In the hedgerow a white admiral took nectar from the last of the bramble blossom, while a scalloped-winged comma fed on the first ripe blackberry.

Western Australian museum runs naming competition for new kind of sea-slug discovered by scientists in the Indian Ocean

The Western Australian museum is running a public competition to name a new species of “flamboyant sea-slug”, part of an order named nudibranch.

The blue and orange creature is up to 8cm long and looks like a cross between a slug and a Pokémon.

Queensland government study shows current funding is far less than what is needed to meet environmental targets and avoid reef being placed on Unesco watch list

Attempting to fix the water qualityfor the Great Barrier Reef will cost $8.2bn in the next decade but even then some of the targets will be impossible to meet, according to a landmark report commissioned by the Queensland government.

The targets are part of the federal government’s Reef 2050 Plan, the implementation of which is required by Unesco in order for the reef to avoid being included on the world heritage in danger list. Currently, state and federal governments are spending less than a tenth of what the report finds is required.

Shark, which would have reached sexual maturity at around 150 years, sets new record for longevity as biologists finally develop method to determine age

She was born during the reign of James I, was a youngster when René Descartes set out his rules of thought and the great fire of London raged, saw out her adolescent years as George II ascended the throne, reached adulthood around the time that the American revolution kicked off, and lived through two world wars. Living to an estimated age of nearly 400 years, a female Greenland shark has set a new record for longevity, scientists have revealed.

Related: Forget Nessie, now is the time to spot basking sharks in Scottish waters

Transocean Winner ran aground on Isle of Lewis, triggering environmental concerns

Tens of thousands of litres of diesel may have spilled into the ocean from an oil rig that ran aground on the Western Isles.

The Transocean Winner was carrying 280 tonnes of oil – more than 300,000 litres – when it was blown ashore in severe weather conditions on the western side of the Isle of Lewis early on Monday.

UK government’s own projections expect onshore wind power and large-scale solar to cost less per megawatt hour than new nuclear by 2025

The government expects solar and wind power to be cheaper than new nuclear power by the time Hinkley Point C is completed, its own projections show.

Theresa May’s government last month made a surprise decision to delay a deal on Hinkley, prompting a renewed look at what alternatives could power Britain if ministers this autumn fail to back new reactors in Somerset.