The Guardian
Major climate changes inevitable and irreversible – IPCC’s starkest warning yet
Report warns temperatures likely to rise by more than 1.5C bringing widespread extreme weather
- IPCC’s verdict on climate crimes of humanity: guilty as hell
- ‘Not too late’: Australian scientists call for urgent action to avoid worst of climate crisis
- Climate crisis ‘unequivocally’ caused by humans, says IPCC
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Human activity is changing the Earth’s climate in ways “unprecedented” in thousands or hundreds of thousands of years, with some of the changes now inevitable and “irreversible”, climate scientists have warned.
Within the next two decades, temperatures are likely to rise by more than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, breaching the ambition of the 2015 Paris climate agreement, and bringing widespread devastation and extreme weather.
Continue reading...What does the IPCC’s report mean for Australia, and what can we expect in the future?
As global temperatures rise, heatwaves, droughts, floods and other impacts will become more widespread, the sixth annual report says
- Major climate changes inevitable and irreversible - IPCC’s starkest warning yet
- IPCC’s verdict on climate crimes of humanity: guilty as hell
- Climate crisis ‘unequivocally’ caused by humans, says IPCC
- Download the free Guardian app; get our morning email briefing
The first major assessment of its kind in seven years from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has found the globe’s ocean, lands and air temperatures are rising, and the human influence is “unequivocal”.
But what does the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report say about changes in Australia, and what can we expect for the future?
Continue reading...Climate crisis ‘unequivocally’ caused by human activities, says IPCC report
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change states every corner of the planet is already being affected and it could get far worse
- IPCC report’s verdict on climate crimes of humanity: guilty as hell
- Humans have caused ‘unprecedented’ and ‘irreversible’ change to climate, scientists warn
“It is unequivocal.” Those stark three words are the first in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s new report. The climate crisis is unequivocally caused by human activities and is unequivocally affecting every corner of the planet’s land, air and sea already.
The report, produced by hundreds of the world’s top scientists and signed off by all the world’s governments, concludes that it could get far worse if the slim chance remaining to avert heating above 1.5C is not immediately grasped.
Continue reading...Australia ‘lagging at the back of the pack’ of OECD countries on climate action, analysis finds
Australia ranks 20th or worse in seven of eight categories despite Coalition claim it is leading the way in reducing emissions
Claims by the Morrison government that Australia has done more to cut greenhouse gas emissions than other countries have been challenged by an analysis that found it has gone backwards compared to similar countries over the past 15 years.
Energy analyst Dr Hugh Saddler ranked the performance of 23 OECD countries and Russia on eight climate measures, including share of electricity from non-fossil fuels, per capita emissions from transport and overall emissions intensity of each economy.
Continue reading...World’s climate scientists to issue stark warning over global heating threat
IPCC’s landmark report will be most comprehensive assessment yet as governments prepare for pivotal UN talks in November
The fires, floods and extreme weather seen around the world in recent months are just a foretaste of what can be expected if global heating takes hold, scientists say, as the world’s leading authority on climate change prepares to warn of an imminent and dire risk to the global climate system.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will on Monday publish a landmark report, the most comprehensive assessment yet, less than three months before vital UN talks that will determine the future course of life on Earth.
Continue reading...Dixie fire: cool weather slows raging California blaze as attention shifts to PG&E role
Wildfire’s cause is under investigation but utility company has admitted its equipment may have been linked to the devastation
As relatively cool temperatures and higher humidity slowed the Dixie fire raging across northern California on Saturday, attention shifted to the role an already disgraced utility company may have played in the gigantic blaze.
By Saturday evening, the Dixie fire covered 447,723 acres and had destroyed 370 structures, including residential, commercial and other buildings. The fire was only 21% contained, and the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection did not expect full containment until 20 August.
Continue reading...‘People can’t sleep’: Rhondda valley flood leaves climate fear in its wake
Many in south Wales are still suffering from havoc of last year – and say not enough is being done to prevent a repeat
In February last year, Storm Dennis wreaked havoc in the Rhondda valley, causing flooding in hundreds of homes and businesses, leaving landslips, ruined roads, smashed bridges and broken hearts in its wake.
Eighteen months on, many people in this close-knit corner of south Wales continue to suffer. “I still have nightmares about the river rising again,” said Katie Whelan, whose end-of-terrace house in the village of Ynyshir, near Pontypridd, was flooded.
Continue reading...The gift we should give to the living world? Time, and lots of it | George Monbiot
Planting 10 saplings does not replace a twisted old oak. ‘Slow ecology’ is the only way to preserve and restore ancient habitats
We have a slow food movement and a slow travel movement. But we’re missing something, and its absence contributes to our escalating crisis. We need a slow ecology movement, and we need it fast.
The majority of the world’s species cannot withstand any significant disruption of their habitat by humans. Healthy ecosystems depend to a great extent on old and gnarly places, that might take centuries to develop, and are rich in what ecologists call “spatial heterogeneity”: complex natural architecture. They need, for example, giant trees, whose knotty entrails are split and rotten; great reefs of coral or oysters or honeycomb worms; braiding, meandering rivers full of snags and beaver dams; undisturbed soils reamed by roots and holes. The loss of these ancient habitats is one of the factors driving the global shift from large, slow-growing creatures to the small, short-lived species able to survive our onslaughts. Slow ecology would protect and create our future ancient habitats.
Continue reading...UK farmers urged to set aside 1% of land for wildlife havens
Campaign seeks pledges for the rewilding of arable land as the Cop26 climate summit approaches
Farmers are being called upon to dedicate 1% of their land to nature and carbon sequestration in an unexpected way – by farming in straight lines.
The call to make a commitment to nature and the climate in the run-up to the crucial Cop26 UN climate summit in Glasgow comes from WildEast, the farmer-led rewilding movement that is encouraging landowners large and small to create wildlife-rich places across East Anglia.
Continue reading...Britain needs big ideas for big problems, but its leaders don’t appear to have any | Isabel Hardman
Boris Johnson and Sir Keir Starmer both pitched up in Scotland last week for two-day trips that were supposed to show that the two leaders have important things to say about the union and the big issues that face the UK. On the surface, Starmer had a more successful visit: unlike Johnson, he didn’t decide to launch his own Edinburgh fringe show complete with the sort of jokes that would empty even the smaller-capacity venues that this year’s Covid-secure event is running. The prime minister’s quip about Margaret Thatcher giving Britain an “early start” in decarbonisation by closing so many coal mines is the only thing anyone will remember of this foray north of the border. Then again, the only thing of note that Starmer managed to say was that he thought Labour should be proud of what Tony Blair, the only Labour politician to have won an election for the party since the 1970s, had achieved. It might challenge some in his movement, but it’s hardly radical stuff.
Both men have a clear grasp of the big issues facing the country. Neither seems able to say anything that remotely matches up to those challenges. Johnson’s climate spokeswoman, Allegra Stratton, has been doing the heavy lifting on the need for governments to be far more ambitious as the Cop26 summit in Glasgow approaches, but she also found herself being sucked into performing her own one-woman fringe show with a monologue on how it’s not that easy being green. While Stratton has been candid about the problems with the electric car charging network for a family such as hers, Johnson’s contribution to the debate has been to set everyone off on an angry row about the damage his own party did to mining communities in the 1980s.
Continue reading...When it comes to saving the planet, we need to play dirty
Dirt is good, environmentalists are telling us. Fine by me. Let’s start by not doing so much washing
Don’t rinse your plates before putting them in the dishwasher,” said Boris Johnson’s spokesperson, and then I sank to my knees. This wetness on my face, was it tears? I was shaking, and laughing, my hands reaching skywards in raw and screaming thanks, as I learned finally, how to save the world.
To my left, the city was flooding, cars wading through the dark water of drowned streets, and over there the path was littered with the corpses of bees, and in the distance fossil fuel companies were merrily going about their days responsible for over a third of all greenhouse gas emissions while billionaires popped to space for the afternoon. But here, on my kitchen floor, I was weeping with thanks. I can make a difference, I whispered, hoarse now, holding my ketchupped plate aloft. The future is mine!
Continue reading...Allegra Stratton leads by example in saving the world… she doesn’t fancy it just yet | Catherine Bennett
‘I don’t fancy it just yet,” said Allegra Stratton, the No 10 press secretary turned prime minister’s climate spokesperson, when she was asked about getting an electric car. She preferred her old diesel, thank you.
If this was merely the most memorable in a series of suboptimal comments from the person hired to communicate the urgency of Cop26, the climate summit, you couldn’t fault it as a summary of Boris Johnson’s position on decisive climate action. He doesn’t fancy it just yet.
Continue reading...In the darkness and dust: memorial recalls the hard history of British mining
The sculpture, to be unveiled next month, will celebrate the courageous contribution of pit workers to our industrial heritage
They toiled far underground in dark, cramped and dangerous conditions, emerging at the end of their shifts caked in coal dust and often gasping for air.
Towns grew up around the collieries; boys followed their fathers and grandfathers down the pit. In the 19th century, women and children were among the nation’s coal workers. But by the end of the 20th century, miners had mostly been consigned to the post-industrial scrap heap as pit after pit shut down.
Continue reading...Dixie fire: eight missing in largest single wildfire in California history
Judge demands information from PG&E utility as investigators seek cause of blaze spanning 698 sq miles
At least eight people were missing on Saturday as what has become the largest single wildfire in California’s recorded history continued to scorch through northern communities, forest and tinder-dry scrub in the Sierra Nevada mountains.
People in the scenic region were already facing a weekend of fear as the huge Dixie fire threatened to reduce thousands of homes to ashes.
Continue reading...Attorney general’s department advised Coalition Toondah Harbour development could breach wetlands convention
Josh Frydenberg’s office allowed proposed Queensland development to go to assessment despite legal advice it was ‘unacceptable’
The Coalition government decided a controversial apartment complex and marina proposed for Queensland’s Moreton Bay should proceed to the next stage of the assessment process, despite legal advice from the federal attorney general’s department warning it was unacceptable because of the risk it posed to internationally listed wetlands.
The government was advised that a development inside the Ramsar site could put Australia in breach of its international obligations before Josh Frydenberg, who was environment minister at the time, recommended his department proceed with an assessment of the Walker Corporation’s long-proposed Toondah Harbour.
Continue reading...‘We are going to lose these birds’: the quiet fight to save the golden-shouldered parrot
Nearly a century after the extinction of the paradise parrot, a tiny team is trying to protect its cousin – by using land clearing
In 1922, Cyril Jerrard captured the first and only photographs of the paradise parrot, the only Australian bird to be officially declared extinct since European colonisation. Jerrard was well aware he was looking at one of the last of its kind: “The one undisguisable fact [is] that the advent of the white man has spelled destruction to one of the loveliest of the native birds of this country,” he wrote in 1924.
The last accepted sighting of a paradise parrot – also by Jerrard – was in 1927, near Gayndah in the Burnett River district of southern Queensland.
Continue reading...Lockdown job losses are not as bad this year, but that’s cold comfort to Australians put to the test again | Greg Jericho
NSW is now the worst performing state for the first time in the pandemic, with nearly 210,000 jobs gone in just three weeks
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By all economic indicators the current lockdowns are nowhere near as damaging as those last year and yet that small comfort is small indeed, as this week millions of Australians are again put to the test.
Last week’s payroll job numbers showed a sharp drop in the first three weeks of July. Jobs fell 2.6% across the nation, with every state recording falls.
Continue reading...Get a grip: government censured for gaffe after gaffe in run-up to Cop26
Alok Sharma’s air miles made the headlines, but missteps by his colleagues may be more damaging to the crucial talks in Glasgow
Alok Sharma stepped off the plane from Brazil on Friday, the latest stop in a punishing travel schedule that has taken him to 30 countries in seven months, and into the eye of a media storm.
“The height of hypocrisy,” screamed the Daily Mail’s headline, slamming the UK president-designate of the Cop26 UN climate talks, to be hosted in Glasgow in October and November. Sharma’s crime? No quarantines, having taken advantage of the rare exemptions offered to ministers, and 200,000 air miles in the pursuit of climate diplomacy.
Continue reading...We’re on the brink of catastrophe, warns Tory climate chief
Cop26 meeting is last chance, says Alok Sharma as he backs UK’s plan for new oil and gas fields
The world will soon face “catastrophe” from climate breakdown if urgent action is not taken, the British president of vital UN climate talks has warned.
Alok Sharma, the UK minister in charge of the Cop26 talks to be held in Glasgow this November, told the Observer that the consequences of failure would be “catastrophic”: “I don’t think there’s any other word for it. You’re seeing on a daily basis what is happening across the world. Last year was the hottest on record, the last decade the hottest decade on record.”
Continue reading...‘Greece has burned’: thousands flee Athens suburb as wildfire spreads – video
Thousands of people were forced to flee Thrakomakedones, a suburb of the Greek capital, after strong winds spread wildfires that burned down homes.
More than 50 wildfires are burning across Greece as the worst heatwave in more than 30 years has hit the country.
Tens of thousands of acres of forestland, homes and buildings have been destroyed and the prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, has promised a radical shift in the country's approach to the climate emergency.
Continue reading...