The Guardian
Long-lost Congo notebooks may shed light on how trees react to climate change
Decaying notebooks discovered in an abandoned research station contain a treasure trove of tree growth data dating from 1930s
A cache of decaying notebooks found in a crumbling Congo research station has provided unexpected evidence with which to help solve a crucial puzzle – predicting how vegetation will respond to climate change.
Continue reading...The week in wildlife – in pictures
A rare rhinoceros under constant protection, an albino orangutan, and protected pandas are among this week’s pick of images from the natural world
Continue reading...Carcass of 12-metre whale to be dug up from beach after outcry
Authorities in Australian coastal town will exhume the body of the 20-tonne humpback over fears it is attracting sharks
Authorities in the Australian coastal town of Port Macquarie will dig up the carcass of a 12-metre, 20-tonne humpback whale from a local beach and dump it in landfill because of fears the animal is attracting sharks.
On Friday, officials at the Port Macquarie Hastings Council announced that the body of the whale, which was buried as an “option of last resort” after it washed up on Nobbys Beach in the beach town in New South Wales on Sunday, would be removed following an outcry from local residents.
Continue reading...Climate deniers want to protect the status quo that made them rich
Sceptics prefer to reject regulations to combat global warming and remain indifferent to the havoc it will wreak on future generations
From my vantage point outside the glass doors, the sea of grey hair and balding pates had the appearance of a golf society event or an active retirement group. Instead, it was the inaugural meeting of Ireland’s first climate denial group, the self-styled Irish Climate Science Forum (ICSF) in Dublin in May. All media were barred from attending.
Its guest speaker was the retired physicist and noted US climate contrarian, Richard Lindzen. His jeremiad against the “narrative of hysteria” on climate change was lapped up by an audience largely composed of male engineers and meteorologists – mostly retired. This demographic profile of attendees at climate denier meetings has been replicated in London, Washington and elsewhere.
Continue reading...What happens if you turn off the traffic lights?
When Amsterdam removed signals from a busy junction, it made journeys faster and interactions more pleasant. Now the approach is being copied across the city
On a foggy Monday morning in May 2016, 14 Amsterdam officials, engineers and civil servants gathered nervously at Alexanderplein – a busy intersection near the city centre with three tramlines – where many people were walking, driving, and, as in any Dutch city, riding bicycles. With a flip of a switch, the traffic controls were shut off for all transport modes, in all directions.
This live pilot project came about as a result of the rapid growth in cycling in some Amsterdam neighbourhoods. Nearly 70% of all city centre trips are by bicycle, and more space is needed on the bike networks. Traffic designers are deviating from standard design manuals to accommodate this need. Among the tactics being used are the removal of protective barriers, altering light phases, reducing vehicular speed limits and designating entire corridors as “bicycle streets”. Designers have created their own toolbox of solutions for other Dutch cities to use.
Country diary: ancient survivors and wild dune edges
Magilligan Point, County Derry The botany of the spit was once so rich that it was known as the ‘medicine garden of Europe’
The view from the top of the basalt outcrop of Windy Hill is sublime. Below, the flat expanse of Magilligan Point, County Derry, narrows into the distance as it almost reaches across the mouth of Lough Foyle to the heather-topped green hills and little white cottages of Donegal, six miles away.
Most of the sandy spit has been converted into grazed farmland, the field boundaries following the lines of ancient sand ridges deposited as the point has grown since the last ice age. A half-mile wide strip along the western edge, facing the Atlantic, is still wild sand dunes, tall and rough. A stiff breeze blows up and over the rocky ridge and to the east dark grey storm clouds roll.
Continue reading...Burn horns, save rhinos
Paula Kahumbu: Enlightened conservation efforts are needed to save the world’s rhinos, combined with a total ban on trade in rhino horn
Today, September 22, is World Rhino Day. Rhinos were once widespread across Asia and Africa and even in Europe, where they are depicted on cave paintings. Today their situation is precarious.
The world population of the northern white rhino now consists of 5 individuals. Sudan, the last surviving male, is now beyond breeding age. He and two female companions are living out their lonely final years under the care of Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya.
Continue reading...Crocodile over five metres long found shot dead in Queensland
The 5.2m male reptile, one of the biggest ever seen in the state, was found with a bullet in its head in the Fitzroy river in Rockhampton
A massive saltwater crocodile – said to be one of the biggest ever seen in Queensland – has been shot dead in Rockhampton.
Police and state environmental officers were investigating after the 5.2m male reptile was found with a bullet in its head in the Fitzroy river on Thursday.
Continue reading...Assumed safety of widespread pesticide use is false, says top government scientist
Damning assessment by one of the UK’s chief scientific advisers says global regulations have ignored the impacts of ‘dosing whole landscapes’ and must change
The assumption by regulators around the world that it is safe to use pesticides at industrial scales across landscapes is false, according to a chief scientific adviser to the UK government.
The lack of any limit on the total amount of pesticides used and the virtual absence of monitoring of their effects in the environment means it can take years for the impacts to become apparent, say Prof Ian Boyd and his colleague Alice Milner in a new article.
Continue reading...A new cycling law won't make roads safer and could postpone laws that could | Peter Walker
Of the about 400 pedestrians killed a year in the UK an average of just two are hit by a bike. Enforcing speeding limits on the other hand could help prevent 250 deaths
So there is to be an “urgent” review into whether the law should be changed to target dangerous cycling. This follows a campaign by Matt Briggs, whose wife, Kim, was killed when she was struck by a bike ridden by the now-jailed Charlie Alliston.
The first thing to stress is that I understand completely why Matt Briggs feels the way he does. I’ve talked to him, and appreciate why charging Alliston under an 1861 law was unwieldy and caused long delays. Briggs is a thoughtful, intelligent man and I wish him well.
Continue reading...When media sceptics misrepresent our climate research we must speak out
Our climate paper underlined that strong action towards the 1.5C Paris goal is perhaps more valid than ever, but reading some of the media coverage you might think the opposite was true
On Monday, we published a paper in the scientific journal Nature Geoscience that re-evaluated how much carbon dioxide we can still afford, collectively, to emit into the atmosphere and still retain some hope of achieving the ambitious goals of the Paris climate agreement to “pursue efforts” to keep global temperatures to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels. The carbon budget we found, to yield a two-in-three chance of meeting this goal, was equivalent to starting CO2 emission reductions immediately and continuing in a straight line to zero in less than 40 years: a formidable challenge.
Formidable, but not inconceivable. The distinction matters, because if it were already completely impossible to achieve the Paris ambition, many might argue there was no point in pursuing those efforts in the first place – or that the only option left is immediately starting to cool the planet with artificial volcanoes.
Continue reading...Land defenders call on UN to act against violence by state-funded and corporate groups
Fight to protect natural resources has become too dangerous in the face of violence from state forces, private security groups and state-sponsored vigilantes, say groups from 29 countries across Africa, Latin America and Asia
Land rights defenders from 29 countries have written to the UN asking it to act against violent corporate and state-sponsored groups which they say are threatening their lives and trashing the environment.
Thirty nine grassroots groups from Africa, Latin America and Asia, many of whose leaders have been killed or forced to flee for protesting the theft of land, big dams mines and forest destruction, say their fight to protect natural resources is becoming too dangerous.
Continue reading...Scientists discover unique Brazilian frogs that are deaf to their own mating calls
Pumpkin toadlet frogs are only known case of an animal that continues to make a communication signal even after the target audience has lost the ability to hear it
Humans trying to chat each other up in a noisy nightclub may find verbal communication futile. But it appears even more pointless for pumpkin toadlets after scientists discovered that females have lost the ability to hear the sound of male mating calls.
Country diary: Slowworm's escape from jaws of disaster
Blanchland, North Pennines Seemingly in a trance, the reptile lay outstretched on the road with predator bites near its head
When I was a child there was a sheet of rusting corrugated iron lying on the sunny bank of my grandmother’s allotment. If I lifted it quickly I could often find a slowworm resting underneath. It would lie there, startled by the sunlight for a moment, then glide away, like a flowing column of mercury, into the hedge.
I have been an inveterate lifter of rusty corrugated iron sheets ever since, but although they are well recognised hiding places for these elegant reptiles I’ve rarely been lucky.
Continue reading...Bureau of Meteorology attacks pushed by 'fever swamp' of climate denial | Graham Readfearn
Rob Vertessy, who retired as the BOM’s director in 2016, has hit back at ‘time wasters’ and ‘amateurs’ who are given a forum by the Australian
For Rob Vertessy, the attacks on his government agency became tedious and time-consuming and no less irritating because they were coming from a motivated group of “amateurs”.
Vertessy spent a decade at Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology. He retired in April 2016 after five years as the agency’s director.
Continue reading...Former weather bureau chief says agency debilitated by climate deniers' attacks
Rob Vertessy says attacks such as the claim the bureau was ‘fabricating temperature records’ are dangerous and wrong
Misleading attacks on Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology by climate deniers in the Australian are “debilitating” to the agency and limiting its ability to predict risks and protect the community, the former head of the bureau has told the Guardian.
Rob Vertessy, who retired as director of the BoM in April 2016, said climate deniers’ attempts to confuse the public about the science of climate change were dangerous, in an interview for the Guardian’s Planet Oz blog.
Continue reading...Nuclear is not the way to a clean energy future | Letters
In Agneta Rising’s defence of nuclear generation (Letters, 19 September), she claims that nuclear plants have to occasionally stop for repair and maintenance. But jellyfish also get into seawater inlets, as at Torness in 2011, causing week-long shutdowns. Seaweed can block inlets shutting reactors, and operator incompetence shuts reactors and compromises radioactive cores. Torness was even narrowly missed by a crashing RAF Tornado jet. Most worrying are not such transient manageable events but risks of systematic flooding of nuclear sites.
Nine UK plants are assessed by Defra as currently vulnerable to coastal flooding (Report, 7 March 2012), including all eight proposed new UK nuclear sites and numerous radioactive waste stores, operating reactors and defunct nuclear facilities. EDF claims on its website that “to protect the Hinkley Point C station from such events, the platform level of the site is set at 14 metres above sea level, behind a sea wall with a crest level of 13.5 metres”. Hurricane Katrina in 2005 produced a maximum storm surge of 8.5 metres. It is predicted that sea levels may rise by a metre by 2100. The UK government cannot actually have believed in climate change or surely they would not put future generations at such risk? I bet they believe in it now. The question is: do they care? Is it really too late to stop a retrograde, potentially catastrophic and already unaffordable UK nuclear future?
Emeritus Professor Sue Roaf
Oxford
Channel Islands' buried porpoise is not the first such mysterious find
A porpoise jawbone, discovered in the Hebrides by a 1950s schoolboy as part of an ancient treasure hoard, raises similar questions about the significance these animals held for earlier people
The strange discovery of a porpoise skeleton interred in a medieval religious grave in the Channel Islands is evocative of a deep cultural connection between humans and cetaceans which we are only just beginning to understand.
It speaks to a different, historical relationship to the natural world – one which now appears to be coming full circle.
Continue reading...Melting Arctic ice cap falls to well below average
• This summer’s minimum is the eighth lowest on record
- Shrinking ice cap increasingly linked to extreme weather events around the world, say scientists
The Arctic ice cap melted to hundreds of thousands of square miles below average this summer, according to data released late on Tuesday.
Climate change is pushing temperatures up most rapidly in the polar regions and left the extent of Arctic sea ice at 1.79m sq miles at the end of the summer melt season.
Continue reading...It takes just 4 years to detect human warming of the oceans | John Abraham
Our new paper illustrates the rapid, consistent warming of Earth’s oceans
We’ve known for decades that the Earth is warming, but a key question is, how fast? Another key question is whether the warming is primarily caused by human activities. If we can more precisely measure the rate of warming and the natural component, it would be useful for decision makers, legislators, and others to help us adapt and cope. Indeed, added ocean heat content underlies the potential for dangerous intense hurricanes.
An answer to the “how fast?” question was partly answered in an Opinion piece just published on Eos.org, the daily online Earth and space science news site, by scientists from China, Europe and the United States. I was fortunate enough to be part of the research team.
Continue reading...