The Guardian

Wild Justice says government initiative to relocate broods away from grouse moors ‘rewards past crimes’ of illegal killing

A £900,000 government scheme to “meddle” with nests of hen harriers is a waste of money and rewards those who kill them, a wildlife campaign group has said.

The claims are contained in a report produced by Wild Justice and released to coincide with the Glorious Twelfth, the official start of the grouse shooting season, on Saturday.

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva promises to repair damage done by Bolsonaro and reach zero deforestation by 2030

The Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has vowed to haul the Amazon out of centuries of violence, economic “plundering” and environmental devastation and into “a new Amazon dream”, at the start of a major regional summit on the world’s largest rainforest.

Addressing South American leaders gathered in the Brazilian city of Belém, Lula offered a bold blueprint for the future of the Amazon, a 6.7m sq km region that is home to nearly 50 million people spread across eight countries and one territory.

The US national weather service detected at least one tornado as severe storms struck southern Indiana. Video footage taken by Salem's fire department shows gusts of wind and lightning hitting the city, with wind speeds reaching 90mph. Storms across eastern US have caused damage to homes and triggered power cuts. More widespread rain and thunderstorms are expected

• Storms in US north-east leave two dead and lead to thousands of flight cancellations

Experts say larger-than-normal hole could cause further warming of Southern Ocean and heighten damaging effects of 2022 Tonga volcano eruption

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The hole in the ozone layer has begun to form early this year, prompting warnings that a larger-than-average hole may further warm the Southern Ocean while the level of Antarctic sea ice is at a record low.

Satellite data from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts suggests the hole has already begun to form over Antarctica.

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Reef experts say an El Niño climate pattern could take hold this summer, raising the risk of another mass bleaching event further

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A recovery in the number of corals growing on the Great Barrier Reef over recent years has paused, with government scientists blaming bleaching, disease and attacks by starfish.

Results from the latest annual surveys of more than 100 individual reefs show a small drop in coral cover over the northern and central parts of the reef over the past year.

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Victim, 50, in critical condition as eight shark attacks have been recorded off the waters of New York in the past year

A 50-year-old woman was bit by a shark on Monday evening off New York’s Rockaway beach and is in critical condition after only the latest in a series of attacks.

The attack – or “encounter”, as authorities prefer to call it – was reported at about 5.49pm, according to the New York police department.

The Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni Grand Canyon monument – home to several Native tribes – will be protected from uranium mining

Joe Biden will designate a “nearly 1m acres” expanse around the Grand Canyon as a new national monument, protecting the region from future uranium mining.

The designation, which Biden is expected to announce on Tuesday comes after years-long lobbying by tribal leaders and local environmentalists to block mining projects that they say would damage the Colorado River watershed and important cultural sites.

There’s filth in the water, and inhumanity in the air. Greed and nationalism have destroyed a great British pleasure

This ought to be a new golden age for the British seaside, since we have somehow managed to recreate the conditions of its last golden age, the late 1940s, and nobody can afford to go abroad. Take a plane almost anywhere, and you’re flying closer to a climate crisis and will find it hard not to ruminate on your own contribution to it. Take a boat and you’ll spend most of your holiday in Dover. These are the ideal circumstances in which to rediscover the beauty of, say, Weymouth or Scarborough.

But you have to wonder how charming it would be to go to a Dorset beach when the area is mainly in the news because of the Bibby Stockholm, the giant refugee barge that has just taken delivery of its first residents. Even if you couldn’t see it from your beach hut – it is modestly moored in a non-beauty spot – you couldn’t help but wonder what life is like on this cramped seaborne accommodation, where the walls are bare, the hours untenanted and the TVs have no plugs. Is it at all like a cruise? Or is it more like a prison hulk? Sure, we all live in the shadow of inhumanity, but it’s difficult to imagine a mini-break there.

Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist

Infrared videos show gas leaking or being vented from more than 100 places across 35 fossil fuel sites in Queensland and New South Wales, according to an investigation by environmental organisations. The Australian Conservation Foundation commissioned the US-based Clean Air Task Force, a global nonprofit, to use new technology to monitor if methane was leaking from coalmines and gas facilities owned by energy giants Santos and Origin and pipeline company Jemena. The organisations said the videos were recorded over a four-week period in which they visited 80 sites to take a snapshot of Australia’s fossil fuel infrastructure. Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas with more than 80 times the global heating impact of CO2 over a 20 year period when released into the atmosphere

• Climate-heating gas released from dozens of Australian fossil fuel sites, environmental group claims

He should stand firm against the headbangers in his party, eject them if necessary, but he won’t. They speak, he listens

The imagery is unfortunate. Our prime minister, Rishi Sunak, was apparently spotted in a gym at 7am in Santa Monica, California – where his family owns a £5.5m penthouse in a building with its own pet spa – pedalling away at an indoor SoulCycle session to Taylor Swift music. Pedalling like fury and going nowhere.

Back in Blighty, staycationers may or may not brave the sea where, to Britain’s international shame, 57 world triathlon athletes in Sunderland have just fallen sick after competing in swimming events in our filthy, sewage-tainted waters. On holiday in East Sussex, I watched the Conservatives lose power last week to Liberal Democrats in a county council byelection that tipped this deep blue county’s council into a position of no overall control. They lost the Eastbourne ward of Meads, where the politics professor Tim Bale lives. “Wide implications here,” he says. “Tory since time began, it’s Eastbourne’s richest suburb, average age 60.” Rishi Sunak’s anti-green gesturing cut no ice here.

Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist

The results of the Nature inFocus photography awards were announced at the Nature inFocus festival held at Jayamahal Palace in Bengaluru, India, on Monday 31 July. The awards honour photographers documenting unique natural history moments and critical conservation issues, and generate an impressive catalogue of imaginative and artistic images every year

Soil estimated to be home to 90% of world’s fungi, 85% of plants and more than 50% of bacteria, making it the world’s most species-rich habitat

More than half of all species live in the soil, according to a study that has found it is the single most species-rich habitat on Earth.

Soil was known to hold a wealth of life, but this new figure doubles what scientists estimated in 2006, when they suggested 25% of life was soil-based.

World’s tiniest marine mammal – found only in the Gulf of California in Mexico – has only 10 individuals left, study finds

The International Whaling Commission has issued the first “extinction alert” in its 70-year history, to warn of the danger facing the vaquita, the world’s tiniest and most critically endangered marine mammal.

A recent study shows that the small porpoise, found only in the Gulf of California in Mexico, has only 10 individuals left. It has been driven to the edge of extinction due to entanglement in fishing nets known as “gillnets”, which are now illegal in the area.

Tyre Extinguishers claim responsibility for attack to highlight ‘presence of grossly inappropriate private vehicles’ on roads

Anti-SUV activists used a power drill to sabotage the tyres of more than 60 4x4 vehicles at a car dealership, in an attack they described as a reprisal for the deaths of two girls in a crash at a primary school last month.

In the early hours of Monday morning, activists crept on to the forecourt of the Vertu Jaguar showroom in Exeter. They told the Guardian they went from vehicle to vehicle drilling holes in the sidewalls of all four tyres on each, so they must be replaced.

Soggy July has affected wheat, barley and hay crops as waterlogged soil makes some harder to harvest

The unseasonably wet weather is causing problems for this year’s harvest, experts have said, with wheat, barley and hay crops affected.

Many farmers have been signed up to a nature-friendly scheme called Mid Tier, which does not allow hay to be cut until July to help wildlife.

Oarfish swim vertically, moving up and down and side to side like a cursor. It would be easier to believe that they do not exist

A giant oarfish, also known as the “king of herrings”, is an eight-metre long ribbon of silver, tapered at its tail and on its head wearing a permanently stunned face – as though moments ago it was a normal herring and then the world’s largest chef slapped it down on a bench top and rolled over it with a rolling pin.

“These are unpredictable fish,” research biologist Milton Love told the New York Times 10 years ago. But in Japan, oarfish are considered highly predictable: they predict the future. See an oarfish, the story goes, and an earthquake will follow. In the months before Japan’s 2011 earthquake, one of the most powerful ever recorded, 20 oarfish were found on beaches. They’re known as “messengers from the sea god’s palace”, or jinja hime, “shrine princesses”.

The sea god’s palace, Ryūgū-jō, has four sides, each of which faces one of the four seasons. The expression on the oarfish’s face, with one wide eye on each side, makes sense viewed like this, too – one side is seeing the past, and the other the future. Things don’t look good: looking east it sees plum and cherry blossoms, looking west it sees a maple tree making “fire in the branches”.

The British summer is still based on pre-industrial events. It’s time a government had the guts to shake up the holiday year

If you had booked an August holiday in Britain 10 days ago, then heard the weather forecast, you probably would have taken the first train to Gatwick. The forecast for the following week was awful – for storms, clouds, rain and “unseasonably cold” weather. In other words, another typical August.

In the event the forecast was wildly inaccurate. Where I was on the Welsh coast, just one day passed without sun for all or part of the day. It did rain heavily for part of one day and there was the odd shower. It certainly was not hot. But a week on the beach was feasible, the sea blue and the sunsets glorious. That we saw relatively few visitors was entirely the result of the forecast, according to local businesses. One publican told me he can predict his takings each day not by the weather but by the 8am forecast. Yet it is so often wrong. The weather forecast is England’s economic sanction against Wales.

Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist

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Reduction in primary forest loss in Indonesia and Malaysia, as well as Brazil and Colombia, offers hope for tropical forests across the world

Falling deforestation rates in countries including Indonesia, Malaysia, Colombia and Brazil could provide a boost to climate and biodiversity efforts, experts say, in the run-up to a key summit on the future of the Amazon rainforest.

In the coming days, the Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, will host a pan-Amazonian summit on the future of the world’s largest rainforest, with leaders from Venezuela to Peru hoping to present a plan at Cop28 to halt their destruction. Experts have said if rich countries provide backing to tropical forested countries it could help governments deliver on Cop26 promises to halt and reverse deforestation by 2030.

On urgent issues from strikes to the climate, voters are increasingly progressive. If only our so-called leaders would catch up

An expiring Tory party lashing about for electoral resuscitation by doubling down on a small number of pugnacious policies. A Labour opposition that has straitjacketed its pledges and ambitions with its fears of blowing its strongest chance in years to gain power. That is the slim space that now defines Westminster, making the preoccupations and tones of our politicians seem more remote than ever.

The result is a widening gulf between people’s reality and what they are relentlessly told they actually believe in and care about. Take immigration – a topic that has for the past three decades been at the top of the political agenda, and is now firmly established as something many should have “concerns” about. But attitudes among the public are flexible, dependent on the type of immigration and the general political mood.

Our inability to confidently predict sea level rise between an extremely challenging two metres and a civilisation-ending 10 metres is an exemplar of the problem facing researchers

These last few months have been a turbulent time to be an oceanographer, particularly one specialising in the vast Southern Ocean around Antarctica and its role in our climate. The media has been awash with stories of marine heatwaves across the northern hemisphere, the potential collapse of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation by mid-century and the record-breaking deficit in Antarctic sea ice emerging this southern winter. Alongside heatwaves and bushfires in North America and southern Europe, flooding in China and South American winter temperatures above 38C, the climate has moved from a “future problem” to a “now problem” in the minds of many.

The global climate is one hugely complex interconnected system. While the Antarctic and Southern Ocean are far removed from our daily lives, they play an oversized role in this system and the future climate that concerns humanity now. “Global warming” is really “ocean warming”. The atmospheric temperature change, the 1.5C Paris target we are now perilously near to exceeding, really is only a few percent of our total excess trapped heat. Almost all the rest is in the ocean and it is around Antarctica that it is predominantly taken up. How this uptake may change in the future as winds, temperatures and ice shift is a critical scientific, and human, question.