The Guardian
Revealed: first mammal species wiped out by human-induced climate change
Exclusive: scientists find no trace of the Bramble Cay melomys, a small rodent that was the only mammal endemic to Great Barrier Reef
Human-caused climate change appears to have driven the Great Barrier Reef’s only endemic mammal species into the history books, with the Bramble Cay melomys, a small rodent that lives on a tiny island in the eastern Torres Strait, being completely wiped-out from its only known location.
It is also the first recorded extinction of a mammal anywhere in the world thought to be primarily due to human-caused climate change.
Continue reading...How swifts survive a wet British June
Long-distance flights enable aerial hunters to feed their young whatever the weather
For Britain’s breeding birds – especially those migrants that spend only a short time here before heading back to their winter home in Africa – June is a crucial month.
Plentiful sunshine – June is usually the sunniest month of the year in England and Wales, thanks to the long hours of daylight – provide the vast amounts of insects and invertebrates that these birds require to feed their young.
Continue reading...Carbon dioxide levels in atmosphere forecast to shatter milestone
Scientists warn that global warming target will be overshot within two decades, as annual concentrations of CO2 set to pass 400 parts per million in 2016
Atmospheric concentrations of CO2 will shatter the symbolic barrier of 400 parts per million (ppm) this year and will not fall below it our in our lifetimes, according to a new Met Office study.
Carbon dioxide measurements at the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii are forecast to soar by a record 3.1ppm this year – up from an annual average of 2.1ppm – due in large part to the cyclical El Niño weather event in the Pacific, the paper says.
Continue reading...Legal ivory sale drove dramatic increase in elephant poaching, study shows
Research shows the legal sale in 2008 catastrophically backfired – but two African nations want to repeat the stockpile sell-off
A huge legal sale of ivory intended to cut elephant poaching instead catastrophically backfired by dramatically increasing elephant deaths, according to new research.
The revelation comes just months before a decision on whether to permit another legal sale and against a backdrop of more African elephants being killed for ivory than are being born. In 2015 alone, 20,000 elephants were illegally killed.
Continue reading...Scrap destructive Gwent Levels motorway plan, charities say
In open letter charities say environmental evidence should lead Welsh government to stop plan that would cut through wetland
Ten leading environmental charities have claimed a proposed section of motorway that would cut through wildlife-rich wetland represents “ecological destruction on an unprecedented scale”.
The charities have written an open letter to the Welsh government calling for it to scrap £1bn plans to build a 14-mile stretch of motorway through the Gwent Levels near Newport in south Wales.
Continue reading...Biggest US coal company funded dozens of groups questioning climate change
Analysis of Peabody Energy court documents show company backed trade groups, lobbyists and thinktanks dubbed ‘heart and soul of climate denial’
Peabody Energy, America’s biggest coalmining company, has funded at least two dozen groups that cast doubt on manmade climate change and oppose environment regulations, analysis by the Guardian reveals.
The funding spanned trade associations, corporate lobby groups, and industry front groups as well as conservative thinktanks and was exposed in court filings last month.
Continue reading...The Grand Oil Party: House Republicans denounce a carbon tax | Dana Nuccitelli
Lobbying from the petroleum industry may have convinced Republicans to denounce a carbon tax
On Friday, the US House of Representatives voted on a Resolution condemning a carbon tax. As The Hill reported:
Lawmakers passed, by a 237-163 vote, a GOP-backed resolution listing pitfalls from a tax on carbon dioxide emissions and concluding that such a policy “would be detrimental to American families and businesses, and is not in the best interest of the United States.”
Six Democrats voted with the GOP for the resolution. No Republicans dissented.
Continue reading...Air pollution linked to increased mental illness in children
New research is first to establish the link and builds on other evidence that children are particularly vulnerable to even low levels of pollution
A major new study has linked air pollution to increased mental illness in children, even at low levels of pollution.
The new research found that relatively small increases in air pollution were associated with a significant increase in treated psychiatric problems. It is the first study to establish the link but is consistent with a growing body of evidence that air pollution can affect mental and cognitive health and that children are particularly vulnerable to poor air quality.
Continue reading...Where have all our curlew gone?
The Stiperstones, Shropshire We might have been walking towards a future devoid of the riveting, other-worldly call of the curlew
A few Sundays ago, Mary Colwell-Hector and I were walking with a bunch of ornithologists and conservationists along the Stiperstones ridge. The scent of gorse drifted on warm air. Sunlight moved over the heather and farmland finding sheep, meadows and cattle. But our talk was more of what wasn’t there. We should have been seeing curlew, returned from the coast to breed here in the Shropshire-Powys borderlands.
The British Trust for Ornithology estimates that 68,000 breeding pairs remain in the UK – about 46% of the 1994 figure. “But where are they? They’re not here, and they’re not in Wales or Ireland,” said Mary, the former producer of Shared Planet, who is walking 500 miles through Ireland and England to highlight fears about the decline of these distinctive waders.
Continue reading...Coalition will protect Great Barrier Reef with $1bn fund, says PM
Amid a series of reports detailing the poor state of the reef, Malcolm Turnbull is promising improved water quality and clean energy for the region
Malcolm Turnbull has promised that a re-elected Coalition government will protect the Great Barrier Reef by tackling its two biggest challenges – climate change and water quality.
The prime minister will pledge to set up a new $1bn reef fund with $1bn – taken from the Clean Energy Finance Corporation’s $10bn special account – to invest in projects that will improve water quality, reduce emissions and provide clean energy in the reef catchment region.
Continue reading...Sea of glass: the underwater world of Leopold Blaschka
In the 1860s, when the Bohemian glassblower Leopold Blaschka began sculpting models of underwater creatures, the Industrial Revolution, population growth and climate change had yet to take their toll on marine biodiversity. Over three decades, using techniques that still baffle experts, Leopold and his son, Rudolf, handmade about 10,000 marine sculptures, each one rendered in minute detail: impossibly delicate anemones, livid orange cuttlefish – creatures at once alien and unnervingly lifelike.
In a world before scuba diving, underwater photography or ocean life surveys, the Blaschkas’ models proved an invaluable educational resource, with universities worldwide purchasing collections of glass specimens. One of the largest, with 570 models, belongs to Cornell University in the US, where until recently it was all but forgotten, stowed in a warehouse in a state of disrepair. As a young professor in the 1990s, Dr Drew Harvell began cataloguing the collection, discovering a “time capsule” of 19th-century marine biology. “There’s value in the entire collection,” she says. “It’s what you could see 150 years ago, frozen in time.”
Continue reading...The eco guide to population growth
Every hour 10,000 people are born. Fortunately a new crop of eco innovations will help tackle the pressures on our planet
The regularity with which I’m contacted by population worriers – people who think it’s pointless discussing green energy, climate change and ethical pensions when the elephant in the room is actually the new human in the room – is impressive. They say that the planet needs fewer people. End of.
The numbers are indeed eye catching. Today there are 7 billion humans alive (twice the number who were alive in 1965) – and each hour we add 10,000 more. By 2050, UN demographers predict, there will be at least 9 billion of us putting a strain on life-sustaining resources.
Continue reading...The eco guide to cargo ships
The shipping industry burns fossil fuels on a grand scale, and scarcely even tries to reduce its emissions
A seafaring adage goes: “If the winds are shifting, adjust your sails.” But even with the disturbing winds of climate change, the shipping industry, with its combustion of fossil fuels (accounting for 2.4% of global emissions), remains outside binding emissions-reduction agreements.
There have been some eco efforts, but the Carbon War Room points out that ship owners feel little need to green their fleets, as those hiring the vessels pay the fuel costs. When the price of bunker fuel (the sludgiest oil left over from refining) drops, as it has, eco resolve disappears.
Continue reading...How the ‘animal internet’ sheds light on the secrets of migration
Aristotle thought the mysterious silver eel emerged from the earth fully formed. The young Sigmund Freud could not understand how it reproduced, and modern biologists puzzled for years over whether it ever returned to the Sargasso Sea, where it was known to breed.
Last year a team of Canadian scientists found conclusive proof of that extraordinary journey. They strapped tracking devices to 38 eels and followed as they migrated more than 900 miles at a depth of nearly a mile to the Sargasso, in the Atlantic near Bermuda. This year French researchers used geolocators to watch them descending European rivers and passing through the Strait of Gibraltar, heading for the same spot.
Continue reading...More than half of jobs in UK solar industry lost in wake of subsidy cuts
Change in government’s energy policy blamed for job losses just as solar power eclipses coal in electricity generation
The solar power industry says it has seen the loss of more than half its 35,000 jobs due to recent changes in government energy policy, just at a time when solar power has eclipsed coal as a major generator of Britain’s electricity.
Experts believe ministers had cut subsidies too far and too fast, praising the “seismic”, record-breaking growth of solar in recent years.
Continue reading...The last frontier: the climbers conquering Mount Everest without oxygen
Among elite mountain climbers, summiting Everest sans oxygen has become the latest challenge in an already grueling journey
Another climbing season has finished on Mount Everest, with the inevitable tales of tragedy and triumph.
Since 2000, an average of seven people a year have died on Everest. The past two years were especially grim: 19 people were killed by an earthquake-triggered avalanche in 2015, and 16 died in 2014.
Continue reading...British flower power: how home-grown blooms can compete with cheap imports
The UK spends more than £2bn on cut flowers per year, but around 90% are imported. Now a new breed of growers are determined to grab more of that market, by persuading the public that local and seasonal are the ways to go
Georgie Newbery sometimes has to dodge a hunting barn owl when she rises at 5am to harvest flowers on her seven-acre plot near Wincanton in Somerset. Picking sweet rocket, foxgloves and cornflowers as dawn light streaks over the fields may sound idyllic, but grabbing a cup of tea on a late-May afternoon after despatching her exclusively British-grown posies and bouquets, Newbery laughs at the thought. “If you imagine it’s all standing around in a flower garden with a Roberts radio and a robin singing, you couldn’t be more wrong,” she says, possibly a little tartly.
Related: Is crowdfunding the future of horticulture?
Continue reading...Tackling pollution: Beijing's electric bikes and buses - in pictures
Vehicles are the source of a third of the air pollution in the Chinese capital, which restricts their use during episodes of heavy smog. Electric cars, buses, scooters and bicycles offer an alternative, cleaner form of transport
The humble daisy brings a smile to my face
South Uist The plant’s uses are many, but the sight of a sunlit field full of daisies is perhaps what we should value most
Daisies are one of our best known and most widely distributed wildflowers, and maybe this is why we sometimes pass them by with barely a second glance. This morning, though, they have stopped me in my tracks and brought a smile to my face.
They line the edge of the path, spangle the open grassland, and have so thoroughly covered one fenced pasture that almost all signs of grass have vanished beneath a blanket of white. In the warm sunshine each and every one turns a bright and open face skywards, a response that gave them their name “day’s eye”.
Continue reading...Ellen DeGeneres bewildered at backlash to her Great Barrier Reef request
Comedian says she put out an announcement because of the need to protect oceans and the reef, and cannot understand what the fuss is all about
The US talkshow queen Ellen DeGeneres is bewildered her call to protect the Great Barrier Reef has sparked a backlash in Australia.
DeGeneres made headlines earlier in the week with the release of a video public service announcement as part of the Remember the Reef campaign.
Continue reading...