The Guardian

With thousands dying a year from poor air quality, is a mask as good a safety precaution as a helmet?

Many British urban bike commuters opt to wear a helmet. Some also go for a hi-vis jacket. But considerably fewer use an anti-pollution mask, despite evidence that smog might be the biggest single danger you face on two wheels.

According to a study carried out by Kings College London (KCL), around 9,500 people die in London alone every year due to long-term exposure to air pollution, with most deaths due to nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and fine particulates known as PM2.5s.

Show did not make clear climate sceptics are a minority voice, broadcaster admits, in ‘an unfortunate lapse’ of editorial policy, reports Climate Home

The BBC has apologised for airing a half-hour radio show earlier this year in which a series of high-profile climate sceptics lined up to disparage the science behind global warming.

What’s the point of the Met Office, aired in August, did not make clear sceptics are a “minority voice, out of step with scientific consensus,” the corporation said in an email to climate scientist Andy Smedley.

Off the coast of Tasmania, Australia, lies a small island on which 10,000 rare shy albatross live. Their declining population is a concern for conservationists including Dr Rachael Alderman, who has spent the past week on the island monitoring the birds. Photographer Matthew Newton has visted the island on three occasions over the past 12 months, recording the spectacular sight of the colony and the conservationists at work

High numbers of elk, deer, boar and wolves show long-term effect of world’s worst nuclear accident is less damaging than everyday human activity, say scientists

Wildlife is abundant around the site of the Chernobyl nuclear plant, despite the presence of radiation released by the world’s most catastrophic nuclear explosion nearly three decades ago, researchers have found.

The number of elk, deer and wild boar within the Belarusian half of the Chernobyl exclusion zone today are around the same as those in four nearby uncontaminated nature reserves.

Hundreds of new(ish) species have been discovered in the eastern Himalayas in recent years, including the ‘walking’ fish and a tissue-wielding, snub-nosed primate

Name: The sneezing monkey.

Age: Depends what you mean.

If a river was polluted by any other industry than farming, there’d be outrage. But we don’t want to know about the impact of our livestock

Eat less meat and fish, drink less milk. No request could be simpler, or more consequential. Nothing we do has greater potential for reducing our impacts on the living planet. Yet no request is more likely to elicit a baffled, hurt or furious response.

This point comes across with astonishing force in the film Cowspiracy. I would question some of the figures it uses, but its thesis – we just don’t want to talk about it – is undeniable. Leaders of the big US green groups either avoided the film makers like the plague or smiled and shook their heads when asked about livestock. State officials were struck dumb by the question.

As England introduces a 5p charge for plastic bags, campaigners say the exemption for small shops should be ended

A 5p tax on plastic bags must be extended to all shops to prevent further damage to the environment, campaigners have warned.

Without the participation of smaller shops, and not just those employing more than 250 staff, the impact of the tax will be limited, they said.

Only 1% of families recognise the UK’s most common trees, according to new research by Unilever. How many can you identify?

Can you identify the UK’s most common trees?

1Which tree is this?AshElmOak2Which tree is this?SycamoreYewBirch3Which tree is this?Giant redwoodOakElm4Which tree is this?HazelHawthornElder5Which tree is this?OakBeechSycamore6Which tree is this?OakYewSycamore7Which tree is this?HawthornElderBirch8Which tree is this?YewSycamoreHorse chestnut9Which tree is this?ElderBirchBeech10Which tree is this?SycamoreHorse chestnutYew

EU may ban ‘defeat devices’ after laboratory tests raise questions over whether some TVs could be set up to game efficiency tests

Independent lab tests have found that some Samsung TVs in Europe appear to use less energy during official testing conditions than they do during real-world use, raising questions about whether they are set up to game energy efficiency tests.

The European commission says it will investigate any allegations of cheating the tests and has pledged to tighten energy efficiency regulations to outlaw the use of so-called “defeat devices” in TVs or other consumer products, after several EU states raised similar concerns.

Rachel Notley supports a switch to clean energy to help Canada’s biggest oil-producing province move beyond fossil fuels within a century

The leader of Canada’s biggest oil-producing province has declared she sees no long-term future in fossil fuels, predicting Alberta would wean itself off dirty energy within a century.

In an early reveal of her forthcoming new energy policy, Alberta’s Rachel Notley said she would fight climate change by cleaning up the tar sands, shutting down coal-fired power plants, and converting to wind and solar power.

With a quarter of a million fatalities every year, health organisations are struggling to cope. Now antivenom supplies are also under threat

In the late 1970s, a 50-year-old farmer was working in his fields in the Hausa region of west Africa when was he was bitten on the ankle by a snake, probably a carpet viper. Within two hours his leg was badly swollen. The unnamed man, whose case is included in a report by a group of doctors led by Oxford University tropical medicine specialist David Warrell took herbal medicine but continued to sicken. Six days later he was taken to hospital, where doctors found that his urine was bloodstained and he had suffered intense internal haemorrhages. A day later, he died.

The farmer’s fate was grim, if not uncommon at the time, but now, decades later, deaths from snakebites are still on the rise. Recent evidence shows that hundreds of thousands of individuals are dying every year as a result of encounters with cobras, vipers or kraits.

In the school summer holiday of 1937, the conservationist Ted Smith, who has died aged 95, cycled 14 miles from his home in rural Lincolnshire to Gibraltar Point. The sixth-former took his cheap binoculars to look for terns on this lonely stretch of sand and salt marsh beyond Skegness and, surrounded by sky and sea, he fell in love with the place. He noted three “gaudy new houses” on a road cut into the sand dunes, typical of the unrestrained development then enveloping the British coastline.

A passion for wildlife and its habitats fired Smith for the rest of his life. This unassuming teacher battled against the tides of his time, industrial agriculture, toxic pesticides, the supplanting of ancient woods with conifers, the ploughing of heaths, and urban development, to cajole into existence a national network of 47 conservation charities now known as the Wildlife Trusts. Smith combined practical action – saving the last fragments of heath, meadow and coast (including Gibraltar Point) from destruction in Lincolnshire – with farsighted thinking, stressing the importance of landscape-scale conservation and the need to open the trusts’ 2,300 nature reserves to the public.

The people behind a manifesto for solving environmental problems through science and technology are intelligent but wrong on their assumptions about farming and urbanisation

Beware of simple solutions to complex problems. That is a crucial lesson from history; a lesson that intelligent people in every age keep failing to learn.

On Thursday, a group of people who call themselves Ecomodernists launch their manifesto in the UK. The media loves them, not least because some of what they say chimes with dominant political and economic narratives. So you will doubtless be hearing a lot about them.

In a bid to reduce CO2 emissions in the 90s, Europe backed a major switch from petrol to diesel cars but the result was a rise in deadly air pollution

Volkswagen’s rigging of emissions tests for diesel cars comes after nearly 20 years of the technology being incentivised in Europe in the knowledge that its adoption would reduce global warming emissions but lead to thousands of extra deaths from increased levels of toxic gases.

Diesel was a niche market in Europe until the mid-1990s, making up less than 10% of the car fleet. Diesels produce 15% less CO2 than petrol, but emit four times more nitrogen dioxide pollution (NO2) and 22 times more particulates - the tiny particles that penetrate the lungs, brain and heart.

A man seeking to be the world’s first climate change refugee has been booked on a flight home to Kiribati on Wednesday, despite his lawyer saying that is a breach of justice, reports Stuff.co.nz

Ioane Teitiota has been in custody in Mount Eden Prison, one of two private prisons in New Zealand, after his bid to claim climate change refugee status was dismissed last week.

He was arrested by police and immigration officials at his West Auckland home on Tuesday morning for overstaying his permit.

Overpriced, overcomplicated and overdue, the Hinkley project needs to be killed off and the money invested into other low-carbon technologies

• Read more: Nuclear supporting environmentalists in call to scrap Hinkley C plans

As committed environmentalists, our conversion to the cause of nuclear power was painful and disorienting. All of us carried a cost in changing our position, antagonising friends and alienating colleagues. But we believe that shutting down – or failing to replace – our primary source of low carbon energy during a climate emergency is a refined form of madness.

Because atomic energy provides a steady baseload of electricity, it has great potential to balance the output from renewables, aiding the total decarbonisation of the power supply. The dangers associated with nuclear power have been wildly exaggerated, all too often with the help of junk science. Climate breakdown presents a far greater hazard to human life. The same goes for the air pollution caused by burning coal.

Green campaigners say recent removal of 500-year-old virgin forest is an ecological disaster and dismiss officials’ ‘patronising’ offer to restore habitat

Campaigners in South Korea have accused organisers of the 2018 winter Olympics of destroying a “sacred” forest to make room for a ski slope, and dismissed official assurances that the site will be restored to its original state after the Games.

Environment groups say the recently-completed removal of tens of thousands of trees from the slopes of Mount Gariwang, including ancient and rare species, amounts to an ecological disaster.

Two kayakers outside the harbour of Moss Landing in California have a narrow escape on Monday after a large humpback whale launches out of the water and lands on them. Fortunately neither of the people on the kayak was hurt and the video from Sanctuary Cruses shows stills of the (fairly surprised) pair after the event

Scientists describe the highly camouflaged Kimberley death adder, native to Western Australia, as one of the world’s most venomous snakes

Related: Snakebite treatment 'will run out next year'

Ophidiophobics should fret not, but Australia has a new species of snake. Scientists have identified a new type of death adder in the Kimberley region of Western Australia.

A moneyless economy shows how our lives are intrinsically linked to the great web of life. In this deep ecology, our security comes from our relationships with people and nature

With little idea of what I was to expect, or how I was to go about it, seven years ago I began living without money. Originally intended as a one-year experiment in ecological living, I wanted to explore how it felt as a human being to live without the trappings and security that money had long-since afforded me. While terrifying and tough to begin with, by the end of the first year I somehow found myself more content, healthier and at peace than I had ever been. And although three years later I made a difficult decision to re-enter the monetary world – to establish projects that would enable others to loosen the grip that money has on their lives – I took from it many lessons that have changed my life forever.

For the first time I experienced how connected and interdependent I was on the people and natural world around me, something I had previously only intellectualised. It is not until you become physically aware of how your own health is entirely reliant on the health of the great web of life, that ideas such as deep ecology absorb themselves into your arteries, sinews and bones.