The Guardian

Any call to go directly from coal to nuclear is effectively a call to delay decarbonisation of our electricity system by 20 years

The battle lines have been drawn over Australia’s energy future.

With the nation signed up to net zero emissions by 2050, the Albanese Labor government is committed to renewables. The Coalition wants nuclear.

Welney landlord fears business may not survive impact of increasingly lengthy spells of flooding on customer numbers

Dennis Birch estimates his pub loses about £3,000 a week when the road into the village of Welney is closed because of flooding – and this winter, it was closed for a record-breaking 89 days.

Now labelled “the most flooded road in Britain”, Birch said he questions whether the 18th-century Lamb and Flag can survive the impact the flooding has on the number of customers coming through his door.

The mass deaths were puzzling scientists around the world – there were no signs of viruses or parasites. Then we looked closely at their skin

It was while we were sitting and talking in a hotel bar at the first global congress of herpetology that the world’s amphibian experts realised there was a problem: frogs, toads, salamanders and newts were disappearing in their thousands around the world and nobody understood why.

Not a single talk at the 1989 congress at the University of Kent had discussed the strange disappearance of the world’s amphibians. But scientist after scientist had the same story: from Central America to Australia, they were vanishing.

Stars of Avatar: The Way of Water photographed in baroque style by Christy Lee Rogers

Photographs of the actors Kate Winslet, Zoe Saldana and Sigourney Weaver seemingly floating underwater in elaborate blue dresses, with eyes shut and arms outstretched, are to be sold to raise money for ocean conservation.

The images are the work of one of the world’s most celebrated underwater photographers, Christy Lee Rogers, who teamed up with the stars of the 2022 film Avatar: The Way of Water and its director, James Cameron, a longtime proponent of ocean conservation, who commissioned the photoshoot.

High temperatures in February affected millions of people and put further pressure on chocolate prices

A searing heatwave that struck west Africa in February was made 4C hotter and 10 times more likely by human-caused global heating, a study has found.

The heat affected millions of people but the number of early deaths or cases of illness are unknown, due to a lack of reporting.

Established 24 years ago, the Carrifran Wildwood has been credited with inspiring the current surge of rewilding projects across the UK and beyond

About 6,000 years ago, most of southern Scotland was covered by broadleaf woodland, interspersed with patches of rich scrub, heath and bog. In stark contrast, the landscape today is dominated by close-cropped, severely nature-depleted hills, punctuated by sharp-edged blocks of non-native spruce plantation.

Now, thanks to the Carrifran Wildwood, one of the UK’s first community-led rewilding projects, patches of habitat resembling Scotland’s primeval forest are staging a comeback.

Fossil of giant river dolphin found in Peru, whose closest living relation is in South Asia, gives clues to future extinction threats

Scientists have discovered the fossilised skull of a giant river dolphin, from a species thought to have fled the ocean and sought refuge in Peru’s Amazonian rivers 16m years ago. The extinct species would have measured up to 3.5 metres long, making it the largest river dolphin ever found.

The discovery of this new species, Pebanista yacuruna, highlights the looming risks to the world’s remaining river dolphins, all of which face similar extinction threats in the next 20 to 40 years, according to the lead author of new research published in Science Advances today. Aldo Benites-Palomino said it belonged to the Platanistoidea family of dolphins commonly found in oceans between 24m and 16m years ago.

For the first time in 10 years, a baby pygmy hippo has been born at Attica Zoological Park. Zoo staff said they were thrilled to welcome the birth as a lack of male pygmy hippos in captivity made breeding efforts complicated. The rare male calf was born on 19 February and joins his parents, Lizzie and Jamal, as the only pygmy hippos at the zoo. Native to western Africa, pygmy hippos are listed as an endangered species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature

The state rescinded its decision over Carmichael mine fly-in, fly-out jobs but it’s unlikely to be the end of the dispute

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When Adani’s north Queensland coalmine obtained its final approvals in 2019, the residents of Clermont held an impromptu celebration at the Leo hotel.

“Our town needs it, everyone’s passionate about it, it will be great for the community. A welcome, welcome thing,” one local at the pub told the ABC.

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Executives at Texas summit claim clean-energy transition is failing and say world should ‘abandon the fantasy’ of fossil-fuel phaseout

The bosses of the world’s leading oil and gas companies have poured scorn on efforts to move away from fossil fuels, complaining that a “visibly failing” transition to clean energy was being pushed forward at an “unrealistic pace”.

The oil executives, gathered at the industry’s annual Cera Week conference in Houston, Texas, have taken turns this week to denounce calls for a rapid phase-out of fossil fuels, despite widespread acknowledgment within the industry, as well as scientists and governments, of the need to radically reduce planet-heating emissions to avoid the worst effects of the climate crisis.

City trees are an incredible green resource but are under serious assault. Banksy’s stark image shows the damage being done

Amid the excitement around Banksy’s latest art piece – a tree mural unveiled on a wall in Islington, north London – very little is being said about the tree at the centre of the story, a brutally pollarded 50-year-old cherry, and what it communicates about the way our urban trees are “managed”.

I visited it on Monday, just 10 minutes’ cycle from my house, and stood startled by the large, leafless tree, its bark darkened by pollution. It splays upwards like an agonised hand, with green paint – literal green wash – splashed up the wall behind it by a woman holding a pressure washer. But gradually I felt horrified, dismayed as the media filmed stories and crowds of people smiled, cooed and held their phones aloft for the latest Instagrammable image. People talked about whether the work could be “stolen” and the effect it would have on house prices and rents.

Gio Iozzi is a London-based writer and tree campaigner who set up Haringey Tree Protectors

Analysis shows alarming prevalence of harmful fishing methods thought to ‘destroy whole ecosystems’

Industrial vessels suspected of using a harmful fishing method known as bottom trawling spent more than 33,000 hours in British marine protected areas last year, a new analysis of satellite data shows.

Ten of these vessels, primarily from the EU, were responsible for a quarter of this activity in offshore protected areas, according to Oceana UK, a conservation group.

Greenhouse gases from sector could make up 44% of continent’s total output by 2030, says transport group

The failure to tackle Europe’s “runaway” transport emissions could lead to the sector pumping out nearly half of the continent’s planet-heating pollution by 2030, a report has found.

Driven by polluting cars and pushed higher by the growing thirst for flights, transport emissions in Europe have grown 26% since 1990 – even as efforts to clean up other areas of the economy have led to an overall emissions fall.

Ambulance officers treated the man, believed to have been bitten by an eastern brown snake, but he died later in Townsville hospital

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A man has died in hospital after being bitten multiple times by a snake in north Queensland.

Queensland ambulance service paramedics were called to a Deeragun property after 3pm on Tuesday. The man was in a critical condition and had sustained “multiple” snake bites at a separate address. He was taken to Townsville hospital but later died.

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WARNING: contains images some viewers may find distressing

Footage supplied to Guardian Australia shows koalas clinging to falling blue gums as logging occurs on Kangaroo Island in South Australia. The footage was taken across two days in November 2023 and January 2024. Logging has been stopped while an investigation takes place.

• Investigation into logging on Kangaroo Island under way after release of ‘horrific images’ of dead koalas

Climate Change Committee finds Scottish government has repeatedly failed to make cuts required by law

Scotland’s pledge to cut its climate emissions by 75% by 2030 is “no longer credible” and cannot be met, the UK’s climate watchdog has said.

In a damning report submitted to the Scottish parliament, the UK Climate Change Committee (CCC) accused the Scottish government of repeatedly failing to live up to its legally binding targets.

Shadow chancellor to use annual Mais lecture to set out plans to green the economy if party wins election

A Labour government will make fighting global heating a priority for the Bank of England as it seeks to put environmental sustainability at the heart of its plans to grow the economy, Rachel Reeves is to announce.

The shadow chancellor will say in a speech in London on Tuesday evening that if Labour wins the general election she will reverse Jeremy Hunt’s decision last year to downgrade the emphasis on the climate crisis in Threadneedle Street’s main objectives.

Records being broken for greenhouse gas pollution, surface temperatures and ocean heat

The world has never been closer to breaching the 1.5C (2.7F) global heating limit, even if only temporarily, the United Nations’ weather agency has warned.

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) confirmed on Tuesday that 2023 was the hottest year on record by a wide margin. In a report on the climate, it found that records were “once again broken, and in some cases smashed” for key indicators such as greenhouse gas pollution, surface temperatures, ocean heat and acidification, sea level rise, Antarctic sea ice cover and glacier retreat.

Neither the Tories nor Labour seem bothered by the climate mayhem that awaits us, but to save lives they must act

It’s the August bank holiday in 2050 and the UK is sweltering under the worst heatwave on record. Temperatures across much of England have topped 40C for eight days running: they peaked at 46C, and remain above 30C in cities and large towns at night. The country’s poorly insulated homes feel like furnaces, and thousands of people have resorted to camping out at night in the streets and local parks in a desperate attempt to find sleep. Hospital A&Es are overwhelmed and wards are flooded with patients, mostly old and vulnerable people who have succumbed to dehydration and heatstroke. Already, the death toll is estimated at more than 80,000.

No, this isn’t the beginning of a dystopian drama, but a snapshot of a mid-century heatwave unless we prepare for the increasingly extreme weather that will be driven by climate breakdown. To say that the government has no credible plan for this, as the UK Climate Change Committee did last week, is – if anything – an understatement. Britain is woefully underprepared for extreme weather, and in a number of key areas we are going backwards. About one in 15 of England’s most important flood defences were in a poor or very poor condition in 2022, up from roughly one in 25 just four years previously. The government’s Great British insulation scheme is operating at such a slow pace that it would take nearly 200 years to upgrade the country’s housing stock, while Labour has rowed back on its ambitious plans to insulate 19m homes within a decade.

Bill McGuire is professor emeritus of geophysical and climate hazards at UCL, and the author of Hothouse Earth: an Inhabitant’s Guide