The Guardian
‘Paralysis by analysis’: financial sector focused on climate data instead of action, report says
Analysis finds focus on stress tests and modelling impact of most extreme scenarios leaves sector blind to real risks
The financial world is making the same mistakes regarding climate change as it did with the housing market in the lead-up to the 2008 global financial crisis, a new report warns.
Degrees of Risk – co-authored by Ian Dunlop, a former head of the Australian Coal Association – found that while regulators and the financial sector had begun to grapple with the risks posed by the climate crisis, they were not moving fast enough.
Instead, they were relying on modelling scenarios of 3C and 4C of global heating without properly factoring in how catastrophic they would be.
Continue reading...Parts of the US are getting dangerously hot. Yet Americans are moving the wrong way | David Sirota and Julia Rock
As the climate changes, census data shows that Americans are shifting from safer areas of the US to the regions most at risk of heating and flooding
Science has provided America with a decent idea of which areas of our country will be most devastated by climate change, and which areas will be most insulated from the worst effects. Unfortunately, it seems that US population flows are going in the wrong direction – new census data shows a nation moving out of the safer areas and into some of the most dangerous places of all.
To quote Planes, Trains and Automobiles: we’re going the wrong way.
Continue reading...Southern Water sewage is destroying protected harbour, say activists
Campaigners say Chichester harbour at risk of environmental ruin from dumping of raw sewage
Discharges of raw sewage by Southern Water into a protected natural harbour risk causing an environmental catastrophe, say campaigners.
Chichester harbour in West Sussex is one of the most highly protected marine environments in the country. But the latest analysis from Natural England shows that 80% of the protected waters are in an unfavourable or declining condition.
Continue reading...UK net zero delay has left room for sceptics’ attacks, says government climate adviser
Lord Deben says he is ‘pressing very hard’ to get details of strategy published as Cop26 approaches
Boris Johnson’s delay in publishing the net zero emissions strategy has left a space for climate sceptics to “complain, attack and undermine” on cost grounds, and other countries could do with seeing more “proper leadership” from the UK before Cop26, the government’s independent climate adviser has said.
Lord Deben, the Conservative peer and chair of the climate change committee, said critics of the net zero policy had been vocal in the public debate because “it hasn’t been put into context by the government”.
Continue reading...Melbourne student and climate activist runs for board seat at energy giant AGL
Ashjayeen Sharif wants Australia’s biggest greenhouse gas emitter to be 100% renewable by 2030
An 18-year-old student and climate change campaigner is bidding for a seat on the board of energy company AGL, Australia’s biggest greenhouse gas emitter.
Ashjayeen Sharif, from Melbourne, wants the company to phase out its “dirty coal-burning power stations” by 2030 and replace them with 100% renewable energy.
Continue reading...Victoria consents to gas production from well near Twelve Apostles
Greens says government’s support for fossil fuel expansion is ‘bonkers’ and no one will visit the tourist site ‘if it’s surrounded by gas drilling rigs’
The Victorian government has given consent for a gas company to produce gas extracted from beneath a national park in the state’s south-west, near the celebrated tourist site the Twelve Apostles.
Documents tabled in Victorian parliament earlier this month show Lily D’Ambrosio, the state energy and climate change minister, gave consent for an existing exploration gas well underneath the Port Campbell national park to be developed into a production well.
Continue reading...The nature of a dragonfly: weigher of souls | Helen Sullivan
Upside down, they resemble a pair of scales
Dragonflies have a near-perfect hunting record, successfully grabbing their prey in mid-air 95% of the time: they do this while flying skywards, earthwards, side to side, backwards and upside down. In one experiment, a dragonfly with numbers drawn on its clear wings alights backwards from a reed, legs raised above its head like a person making an offering to God, and scoops up the bug flying behind it. The dragonfly appears to catch its prey both benevolently and malevolently: snatching it and saving it, like a ball or a falling baby.
Dragonflies transform from their larval stage with similarly precise acrobatics: the skin splits, the insect wriggles its head and chest out with the awkwardness of someone trying to get into a sleeping bag while standing up, and then it hangs upside down for a while, its tail still trapped in the skin. The almost-dragonfly regains its strength, then does an upside down sit-up at the same time it pulls and flicks its tail out: a perfectly controlled dismount, a precisely calibrated monkey acrobat toy.
Continue reading...The Guardian view on Boris Johnson’s oily politics: not-so-slick green policies | Editorial
How can Britain can persuade other countries to ditch fossil fuels when it won’t do so itself?
Boris Johnson’s apparent willingness to sign off a new oilfield, Cambo, in the North Sea makes a mockery of his claim to global climate leadership. The first phase of Cambo would produce up to 170m barrels of crude. That is the equivalent, say Friends of the Earth, of the annual emissions of 18 coal-fired power plants. This sends dark clouds scuttling over the UK’s presidency of Cop26, held in Glasgow in November this year. For the UN climate summit to be a success, Mr Johnson’s team, headed by Alok Sharma, must cajole recalcitrant countries into line. It is doubtful that Mr Sharma can persuade other nations of the merit of forsaking fossil fuels when Britain will not lead by example.
Last week, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change delivered its starkest warning yet about the planetary emergency. To have a 50% chance of keeping global heating below 1.5C requires the world to get net emissions of carbon dioxide down to zero before 2050. In a foreword to the IPCC report, António Guterres, the UN secretary general, wrote that countries should “end all new fossil fuel exploration and production”. The International Energy Agency, an intergovernmental group founded to protect access to hydrocarbons, has said much the same.
Continue reading...Germany ‘set for biggest rise in greenhouse gases for 30 years’
Increase means country will slip back from goal of cutting emissions by 40% from 1990 levels
Germany is forecast to record its biggest rise in greenhouse gas emissions since 1990 this year as the economy rebounds from the pandemic-related downturn, according to a report by an environmental thinktank.
Berlin-based Agora Energiewende said the country’s emissions would probably rise by the equivalent of 47m tons of carbon dioxide.
Continue reading...Green issues expose Tory division and loner Boris Johnson’s distance from his party | Isabel Hardman
Boris Johnson is a bit of a loner, socially and politically. He doesn’t have a clear group of friends. Neither does he hail from a particular political faction. The latter probably contributes in no small part to his electoral success: it’s hard to pigeonhole him, much to the frustration of his opponents. The former is useful, too, as he doesn’t end up just appointing his mates to jobs. He doesn’t really have mates, for one thing. He’s notoriously difficult to get truly close to.
But there are obvious disadvantages to not having your own tribe. One is that you don’t automatically have people who will come out to fight for you when you find yourself in the trenches. The other is that you find it hard to notice when there is a political problem brewing in your party because you haven’t really bonded with one part of it, let alone its noisy, often stubborn, entirety.
Continue reading...Documenting American wilderness – in pictures
Photographer Bob Wick is retiring from the Bureau of Land Management after 30 years documenting public lands across the western United States. This selection shows the diverse beauty of the landscapes, and the work of the BLM in protecting the wildlife and people that inhabit them
Continue reading...UK can’t fight climate crisis with austerity, warns expert
Author of government study says Treasury resistance to green spending programmes could halt progress to net zero
Imposing “premature austerity” again will undermine the fight against climate change and stop poorer households going green, one of the world’s leading climate economists has warned the government, amid claims that the Treasury is resisting policies to tackle the crisis.
Nicholas Stern, the author of the seminal 2006 government study into the costs of climate change, said comprehensive programmes were needed to help poorer households make the switch to electric cars and away from gas heating, if the government hoped to bring all greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050.
Continue reading...Micro marvels: Levon Biss captures seeds close up – in pictures
“As a boy, my main interest in nature was finding the tallest tree to climb,” says the British photographer Levon Biss. However, after travelling the world, his curiosity shifted to nature’s most minuscule structures.
For his photo series The Hidden Beauty of Seeds and Fruits, Biss immersed himself in the collections housed at Edinburgh’s Royal Botanic Garden , sifting through its 3,500 historical specimens. “I was stunned by the variety of designs that exist to disperse seeds. Some are truly ingenious,” he says, singling out the hairy-stemmed electric shock plant, “an innocent-looking seed pod until an animal (or human) decides to bite!”
- The Hidden Beauty of Seeds and Fruits: The Botanical Photography of Levon Biss is at the Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh, until 26 September.
Turkey floods: drone footage shows widespread devastation in Bozkurt – video
At least 44 people have died from the floods in the northern Black Sea region in Turkey, the second natural disaster to strike the country this month. Drone footage shows massive damage in the town of Bozkurt, where emergency workers were searching collapsed buildings. Torrents of water tossed dozens of cars and heaps of debris along streets, destroyed bridges, closed roads and cut off electricity to hundreds of villages
- Flooding death toll passes 44 in Turkey’s Black Sea region
- Turkey flood deaths rise as fresh fires erupt on Greek island of Evia
Guess who’s coming to dinner? Roadkill placed on ‘sky tables’ to lure rare birds of prey
Farmers are laying out carcasses to tempt vultures and eagles back to the UK countryside
When a griffon vulture last year graced the UK with its presence, awed birdwatchers from across the country gathered in the Derbyshire moors in the hope of catching a glance.
Now conservationists are hoping to make sightings of these magnificent birds more frequent by adding raw nature back into the countryside.
Continue reading...‘Is it too late?’: a retrospective on Australia’s climate crisis by Stephen Dupont – in pictures
As the northern hemisphere is inundated with natural disasters, photographer Stephen Dupont looks back on Australia’s own changing climate.
Stephen Dupont is currently premiering his new exhibition, Are We Dead Yet? at the aMBUSH Gallery, Kambri in Canberra until the 19th of September.
Continue reading...July was world’s hottest month ever recorded, US scientists confirm
Global land and ocean surface temperature last month was 0.9C hotter than 20th-century average, beating July 2016 record
July was the world’s hottest month ever recorded, US government scientists have confirmed, a further indication of the unfolding climate crisis that is now affecting almost every part of the planet.
Related: Greenhouse gas emissions must peak within 4 years, says leaked UN report
Continue reading...Are you in denial? Because it’s not just anti-vaxxers and climate sceptics | Jonathan Freedland
To accept the facts about climate science without changing the way we live is also to deny reality
It’s easy to laugh at the anti-vaccine movement, and this week they made it easier still. Hundreds of protesters tried to storm Television Centre in west London, apparently unaware that they were not at the headquarters of the BBC or its news operation – which they blame for brainwashing the British public – but at a building vacated by the corporation eight years ago and which now consists of luxury flats and daytime TV studios. If only they’d done their own research.
Anti-vax firebreather Piers Corbyn was there, of course, unabashed by the recent undercover sting that showed him happy to take £10,000 in cash from what he thought was an AstraZeneca shareholder, while agreeing that he would exempt their product from his rhetorical fire. (Corbyn has since said that the published video is misleading.) “We’ve got to take over these bastards,” he said during this week’s protest, while inside Loose Women were discussing the menopause.
Continue reading...The IPCC’s latest climate report is dire. But it also included some prospects for hope | Rebecca Solnit
The striking thing is not the bad news, which is not really news for those who have followed the science closely. It’s the report’s insights on possibilities for cautious optimism
The first response many of us have to a cancer diagnosis is terror, horror and the conviction that we’re doomed. For those who haven’t been paying serious ongoing attention to climate chaos, reminders that we are facing catastrophe can bring the same kind of response. But if you’ve been through cancer or been close to people who have, you know that the usual next phase is figuring out what the treatment options are and, in most cases, going all out for them. The good news is going to be that you got approved for a promising new treatment, are responding well, you are in remission, feel healthier, have a good prognosis. That there are things worth doing that make a difference.
Climate change is a nightmare, and this summer’s floods, fires and extreme heat, from China to Siberia to British Columbia, are reminders that the problem is rapidly growing worse. Yet the striking thing about the IPCC report released earlier this month is not the bad news, which is not really news at all for those who have followed the science closely. It’s the clarity about possibilities, which I found hopeful.
Continue reading...