The Guardian
New species of grass snake discovered in England
Recognition of barred grass snake as distinct species different to common cousin increases native total to four
England is home to four kinds of wild snake, not three as was previously believed, according to scientists.
The barred grass snake, Natrix helvetica, is now recognised as a species in its own right distinct from the common or eastern grass snake (Natrix natrix).
Continue reading...Meat-loving creatures that attacked Australian teen's legs identified – video
The meat-loving marine creatures that feasted on the legs of a Melbourne teenager have been identified as sea fleas, lysianassid amphipods. Marine biologist Dr Genefor Walker-Smith says they are small, scavenging crustaceans that usually feeds on dead fish or sea birds.
Continue reading...Time to face up to the electric car revolution | Letters
Your editorial perpetuates a number of myths about electric vehicles (Car drivers are heading into a future far from their dreams, 7 August). You say “Tesla has just started selling its first electric car aimed squarely at the middle classes”, reinforcing the views recently posted online by fossil fuel lobby groups that EVs are only for the rich while being subsidised by the poorer. The Tesla 3 is directly cost competitive with similar cars with internal combustion engines and cheaper when including running costs, and there is now a growing second-hand market.
You say Tesla sales are “a remarkable figure for a machine with a fairly short range and a very limited number of specialised charging stations”. The Tesla 3 has an EPA rated range of 310 miles – this is not a “fairly short range”.
Continue reading...It’s not just the ‘sea lice’ – other flesh-eating sea creatures lurk in the deep
Carnivorous amphipods feasted on the legs of one unlucky Australian teenager, but they are not the only watery beasts with a taste for human flesh. Which ones should we really be afraid of?
Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water, some mystery lice chow down on a boy’s legs in Australia. Sam Kanizay had been paddling at a Melbourne beach. Half an hour later, the 16-year-old reeled when the sand he thought was covering his legs turned out to be eating his flesh, leading to unstoppable bleeding.
Related: Tiny 'meat-loving' marine creatures 'eat' teenager's legs at Melbourne beach
Continue reading...USDA has begun censoring use of the term 'climate change', emails reveal
Exclusive: series of emails show staff at Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service advised to reference ‘weather extremes’ instead
Staff at the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) have been told to avoid using the term climate change in their work, with the officials instructed to reference “weather extremes” instead.
A series of emails obtained by the Guardian between staff at the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), a USDA unit that oversees farmers’ land conservation, show that the incoming Trump administration has had a stark impact on the language used by some federal employees around climate change.
Continue reading...Tesco to end sales of 5p carrier bags
Supermarket to stop selling ‘single-use’ bags but will offer customers ‘bags for life’ costing 10p
The UK’s largest retailer is to stop selling “single use” 5p carrier bags in its UK stores from the end of the month, instead offering shoppers reusable “bags for life” costing 10p.
The move by Tesco follows a 10-week trial in Aberdeen, Dundee and Norwich, which led to a 25% cut in bag sales as shoppers either brought their own or switched to the bags for life.
Continue reading...Fossil fuel subsidies are a staggering $5 tn per year | John Abraham
A new study finds 6.5% of global GDP goes to subsidizing dirty fossil fuels
Fossil fuels have two major problems that paint a dim picture for their future energy dominance. These problems are inter-related but still should be discussed separately. First, they cause climate change. We know that, we’ve known it for decades, and we know that continued use of fossil fuels will cause enormous worldwide economic and social consequences.
Second, fossil fuels are expensive. Much of their costs are hidden, however, as subsidies. If people knew how large their subsidies were, there would be a backlash against them from so-called financial conservatives.
Continue reading...From Baidoa, Somalia: 'We have no hope'
The worst drought in 40 years has a cruel grip on Somalia. A struggling young government and militant violence have compounded to bring crisis to 6.7 million lives. The town of Baidoa is facing some of the harshest conditions. Surrounded by territory controlled by al-Shabaab militants and amid ongoing attacks, 160,000 people have had to leave their farms and are surviving in camps where hunger, thirst and cholera await them
All photographs by Peter Caton/Mercy Corps
Continue reading...Diesel has to die – there is no reverse gear on this
Daimler says diesel is worth fighting for but there is no comeback for the toxic technology and the fight must now be to save lives
When the story of Volkswagen’s cheating on diesel emissions tests broke nearly two years ago, a number of reporters asked me if this spelled the end for diesel cars. My response was a confident, dismissive “no”. While dieselgate would cast a long shadow, there was no reason to write off diesel cars, at least in the short term. After all, the technology does exist to make clean diesel cars. It’s just a question of improving the existing regulations and enforcing them better.
I was wrong.
For my eyes only – baring all on a Pennine ramble
Dark Peak, Derbyshire Even avowed outdoor evangelists should be allowed to keep one or two places to themselves
I am not going to tell you where I am writing about. It is one of those places of personal sanctity that has, miraculously, escaped the popular attention I am fully aware it deserves. Even avowed outdoor evangelists should be allowed to keep one or two of these places to ourselves.
I discovered it a few years ago, but had not gone back since. On a searing day this spring, after two excruciating hours inching through Manchester traffic, it flashed back into my head on my journey over the Pennines. Craving the mini-rebirth of a soak in wild water, I fled my car and marched up to it in my work clothes. There it shone, almost landscaped in its perfection, the porter-coloured beck tumbling down in bright cascades over exquisite water-smoothed shelves of rock. The cool pool at the bottom was treacle-dark and deep enough for submersion; water from heaven.
Continue reading...Drunk bees incapable of flying: Guardian country diary 100 years ago
Originally published in the Manchester Guardian on 7 August 1917
Almost every year I reply, early in August, to correspondents who, like the writer from Patterdale, have noticed dead and mutilated bees lying beneath the lime trees. Evelyn speaks of the lime, with “sweet blossoms, the delight of bees,” and in July and early August we have all noticed the happy hum of the bees as they boom round the limes, filling themselves with honey. But the bees, especially the drones of certain bumble-bees, are like many human drinkers; they do not know when to stop, and, soaking all day long, at last become so stupid that they cannot fly; they drop, intoxicated, to the ground beneath. Thus we find them, drunk and incapable, and often with ghastly wounds in their bodies, dead or only able feebly to move a limb.
Ten or a dozen years ago I spent some time watching the limes and examining the bodies of the slain. I failed to see tits actually kill the bees, but Mr Edward Saunders, to whom I submitted some of the bees, assured me that he had seen a bee drop and detected a great tit at work in the tree; the tits, he felt sure, emptied the bodies of the stupefied bees of their honied contents. This I do not doubt, but examination of the bodies and the ground beneath the trees caused me to think that possibly birds were not the only destroyers; the drunken bees were at the mercy of ants or carnivorous beetles, which the nature of the wounds of some of them suggested. The late Fred Enock, a wonderfully keen observer, found that an introduced lime was far more intoxicating than our native species – its honey was more heady, and consequently more bees which sipped its sweets fell victims than those which visited other plants. There is one other point from which we can draw a moral; it is at the present time, when bees are less busy on behalf of the full nests – when there are an abundance of workers to look after stocking the nests with food, – that the death-rate increases; the bees indulge to excess and pay the penalty.
Continue reading...The march of the exploding zombie caterpillar
Name: Zombie caterpillars.
Age: Not very old, and dead before their time, after a tragic life in which their bodies were taken over by a malign force.
Continue reading...The eco guide to microplastics
Seafood eaters consume up to 11,000 tiny pieces of plastic a year. Scary, isn’t it?
I’m officially declaring this the Summer of Plastic. With the rising tide of plastic waste – 38.5 million plastic bottles a day in the UK alone and production set to quadruple by 2050 – the plastic pollution crisis in our oceans has become the breakout issue.
Activists are stepping it up from quiet beach cleans to strident zero-tolerance campaigns. In terms of severity, Surfers Against Sewage (sas.org.uk) rates plastic pollution up there with climate change. Its campaign, Wasteland, urges us to boycott throwaway plastics now. Meanwhile, Greenpeace continues to hound soft-drinks brands, mapping their alarming use of plastic and abject failure to take responsibility.
Continue reading...Red Admiral spotting: desperately seeking a British butterfly revival
By any standards, it was a poor day to count butterflies. Denbies Hillside, on the south-facing flank of the North Downs – supposedly a summer haven for lepidopterists – was swept by wind and heavy showers. Butterflies, like humans, take a poor view of such conditions and had made themselves scarce.
Such are the discomforts of involvement in the Big Butterfly Count. The national survey has seen thousands of members of the British public counting butterfly species across the nation. It has been a damp and cold process on occasion.
Continue reading...Rock, water, sky and solitude in Snowdonia
Talsarnau, Gwynedd Not another person was visible in this elemental landscape. But there was activity on the waters of Llyn y Dywarchen
Beyond the water-lily lake of Llyn Tecwyn Isaf, in Snowdonia national park, the farm road zigzags steeply to Caerwych, from whence a splashy path slips round beneath Y Gyrn to climb into a region of marshy flats where bog asphodel and creeping spearwort flower. Recent waymarking lures you on through terrain problematical in mist to the bronze age trackway.
A short, gentle, ascent leads to Bryn Cader Faner’s corona of outward-pointing rocks atop a grassy bluff. It’s one of the most beautiful bronze age monuments in Britain.
Continue reading...Brexit could leave Britain with a bare larder, farmers warn
NFU says UK produces only 60% of its own food and must increase production to avoid food insecurity after leaving EU
Britain must increase home-grown food production and build stronger supply chains to face Brexit uncertainties, the National Farmers Union has said.
In an annual calculation to draw attention to the UK’s decline in food self-sufficiency, the NFU said the national larder would be bare this Sunday if Britain opted for a cliff-edge departure from Europe and imports became unavailable.
Continue reading...With political will, we could easily solve our transport problems | Letters
George Monbiot makes some useful points in his article bemoaning the influence of the lobbying power of the motor industry (We must break the car’s chokehold on Britain, 2 August). He proposes a modal transport shift to more coach travel and investment in nuclear power plants to power our electric cars. He ignores completely, as usual, the solar option with smaller electric cars and electric bikes and charged by photovoltaics on homes, at work and in public places. In 1993, I bought Hannibal, the 750kg fibreglass Kewet El Jet electric car that we used for a decade to take the children to school, go shopping and to train and bus stations. This first British solar car was largely powered by the 4kWp PV roof on my Oxford ecohouse. Monbiot also ignores the huge trend towards using electric bikes that can be easily solar charged at home or work. We love our cars and bikes, but the trick is to make them much smaller, lighter and solar powered, used locally and to connect with public transport systems for longer distances, so decrying any need for building inevitably toxic new nuclear power stations at all. Car size does matter now if we, as a society, are serious about surviving safely into the 22nd century, so let’s have less of Jeremy Clarkson on TV and more solar-powered Good Lives. It’s the mindset that has to change first, then the hardware.
Emeritus Professor Sue Roaf
Oxford
• George Monbiot and several of your readers (Letters, 28 July and 31 July) have drawn attention to the folly of the government’s 2040 initiative. It does not need 2020 hindsight to see that the demands on electricity generation will rocket in order to support a nation using only electric cars. Where will this electricity come from and at whose expense?
Continue reading...Industrial meat production is killing our seas. It's time to change our diets
America’s addiction to cheap meat, fed on corn and soy in vast indoor factories, comes at a high cost to our own health and that of the planet
- Callum Roberts is professor of marine conservation, at the University of York, UK
Every spring, as the snows thaw, water rushes down the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, spreading life, then death into the Gulf of Mexico. The floodwaters are laden with fertilisers washed from fields and factory farms. As spring turns to summer, excessive nutrients first drive a huge bloom of living plankton, then cause death on a gargantuan scale as a dead zone blossoms across the seabed. Most years it grows swiftly to over 5,000 square miles of seabed, killing everything that cannot outrun it.
Related: Why meat eaters should think much more about soil | John Sauven
Continue reading...Week in wildlife: amorous ladybirds and an adopted hawk - in pictures
An unlucky zebra and the UK’s first pair of breeding night herons are also among our pick of images from the natural world
Continue reading...London should lead in showing electric cars will not tackle air pollution
The government’s new strategy does not go far enough in recognising fewer vehicles, not just cleaner ones, are the answer
With more and more of the world’s population living in cities, we need to get urban transport right. That means making sure that people and goods can move around easily and cheaply. It also means ensuring that city transport systems don’t damage people’s health, as diesel and to a lesser extent petrol are currently doing in London and other UK cities.