The Guardian
Italian Dolomites bank on 'bike only' days to boost cyclotourism
Ski resort of Alta Badia enters the craze for cycling sportives allowing amateurs to experience closed-roads settings
A ski resort in Italy is experimenting with closing sections of its mountain roads in an effort to become a mecca for road cyclists during the summer season.
Alta Badia in the Italian Dolomites has hosted three “bike only” days this summer to boost its cyclo-tourism credentials and capitalise on the trend for closed-roads sportives.
Continue reading...Dancing demoiselles rise from their watery world
Attingham, Shropshire Over centuries people have watched with wonder these almost unreal, too bright, too quick insects
The banded demoiselles are dancing like laser lights over the river Tern. There is something CGI about these creatures: too bright, too quick, too beautiful to be real.
The banded demoiselle is large for a damselfly, small for a dragonfly; a 40mm long emerald-cobalt pin with gauzy wings marked with the indigo fingerprints of when they were plucked from the water, or so it seems.
Continue reading...The wider effects of ending farm subsidies | Letters
Polly Toynbee (The Tories are split over farming. It’s hard not to gloat, 1 August) raises important issues. Subsidies were intended to lower food prices and increase discretionary income for manufactured products. The subsidy fills the gap between production costs and farm-gate prices, which were lowered by imports and by allowing food-chain “efficiencies” resulting in domination by the supermarkets. The inflexibility of EU-wide subsidies resulted a few years ago in tiny farm incomes, despite substantial investment in farms. This, combined with oppressive and chaotic management of subsidies by Defra, resulted in support for Brexit. Loss of subsidies will result in the closure of most affected farms that cannot subsidise themselves with non-farming income. Perhaps the price of rural holidays will have to increase.
You also report increased suicide rates amongst Indian farmers due to climate change (Farmers’ suicides linked to climate, 1 August), but suicides in response to agricultural depression are not uncommon in UK, either. Meanwhile, BNP Paribas is buying Strutt and Parker (Report, 1 August), famous for major land sales. French bankers clearly see a growing opportunity in selling distressed UK farms. Buyers will keep huge areas under common management, regardless of local land quality and ecosystems. Merged farms will need to use large suppliers, while smaller suppliers will go out of business. Small rural communities and dedicated local infrastructure will become unsustainable, reducing opportunities for tourism or even online businesses. Changes to subsidies will affect far more people than just farmers and will need to be considered very carefully.
Huw Jones
St Clears, Carmarthenshire
A brief history of bearded cricketers | Letters
It is disappointing to see such a large price rise from British Gas (Report, 1 August), but let’s not slam these suppliers for being greedy. They’re inefficient and outmoded – and it’s customers who pay the price. Energy doesn’t have to be this expensive, as proven by the dozens of newer suppliers with lower costs and better service. The only way to fix the broken energy market and the stranglehold of the big six is with the urgent introduction of an energy price cap which will benefit all families.
Greg Jackson
CEO, Octopus Energy
• While you note that England cricketer Moeen Ali’s hat-trick to win the Oval Test broke several records (Sport, 1 August), you fail to mention an important one. He became the first England cricketer with a beard ever to take a Test hat-trick. The best that had been previously managed was a moustache, and that was Billy Bates in 1883.
Keith Flett
London
Over 1,000 people killed in India as human and wildlife habitats collide
Elephant and tiger territories are shrinking as India’s growing population encroaches on wild spaces causing an increase in fatalities
A deadly conflict is under way between India’s growing population and its wildlife confined to ever-shrinking forests and grasslands. Data shows that about one person has been killed on average every day for the past three years by roaming tigers or rampaging elephants.
Statistics released this week by India’s environment ministry reveal that 1,144 people were killed between April 2014 and May 2017. That figure breaks down to 426 human deaths in 2014-15, and 446 the following year. The ministry released only a partial count for 2016-17, with 259 people killed by elephants up to February of this year, and 27 killed by tigers through May.
Continue reading...Utilities companies won't let you sell your own solar power. Why not?
The electric utility sector is broken – but the transformation we need will be virtually impossible so long as a handful of wealthy elites are calling the shots
A new report from the US-based Energy and Policy Institute last week found that investor-owned utilities have known about climate change for nearly 50 years – and done everything in their power to stop governments from doing anything about it.
From their commitment to toxic fuels to their corrosive influence on our democracy to their attempts to price-gouge ratepayers, it’s long past time to bring the reign of privately-owned electric utilities to an end.
Continue reading...Meat industry blamed for largest-ever 'dead zone' in Gulf of Mexico
A new report shows toxins from companies like Tyson Foods are pouring into waterways in the gulf and surrounds, causing marine life to leave or die
The global meat industry, already implicated in driving global warming and deforestation, has now been blamed for fueling what is expected to be the worst “dead zone” on record in the Gulf of Mexico.
Toxins from manure and fertiliser pouring into waterways are exacerbating huge, harmful algal blooms that create oxygen-deprived stretches of the gulf, the Great Lakes and Chesapeake Bay, according to a new report by Mighty, an environmental group chaired by former congressman Henry Waxman.
Continue reading...Wildlife on your doorstep: share your August photos
Whether basking in sunshine in the northern hemisphere or fighting cooler temperatures in the south, we’d like to see the wildlife you discover
Wherever you are in the world and however professional or amateur your photography set up, we would like to see your images of the wildlife living near you.
Related: Otters, geese and grebes: your photos as the Wetland Trust turns 70
Continue reading...Underground magma triggered Earth’s worst mass extinction with greenhouse gases | Howard Lee
There are parallels between today’s and past greenhouse gas-driven climate changes
Coincidence doesn’t prove causality, as they say, but when the same two things happen together over and over again through the vast span of geological time, there must be a causal link. Of some 18 major and minor mass extinctions since the dawn of complex life, most happened at the same time as a rare, epic volcanic phenomenon called a Large Igneous Province (LIP). Many of those extinctions were also accompanied by abrupt climate warming, expansion of ocean dead zones and acidification, like today.
Earth’s most severe mass extinction, the “Great Dying,” began 251.94 million years ago at the end of the Permian period, with the loss of more than 90% of marine species. Precise rock dates published in 2014 and 2015 proved that the extinction coincided with the Siberian Traps LIP, an epic outpouring of lava and intrusions of underground magma covering an area of northern Asia the size of Europe.
Continue reading...Man and dog pulled from car caught in Colorado floods – video
Emergency services rescue a man and his dog stuck in a car caught in flood waters in Colorado on Sunday. Rescuers use a crane to move the man and his pet to safety. The car was parked off a road in Fremont County when the water hit
Continue reading...Wild tigers of Bhutan – in pictures
Rare images of wild tigers in Bhutan captured by camera traps set up in a high altitude wildlife corridor verify that tigers and other animals are using stretches of land that connect protected areas. Photojournalist and filmmaker Emmanuel Rondeau undertook a three month expedition, supported by WWF and the Bhutanese government, to document tigers. His work reveals corridors are lifelines to otherwise isolated populations of tigers and other wildlife, and are critical to their genetic diversity, conservation and growth
Continue reading...Flowers work their healing magic on the old station platforms
Millers Dale, Derbyshire A galaxy of tiny purple globes sway where once the milk churns waited for the night train to London
The old railway station in this part of Derbyshire’s Wye valley presents an astonishing happenstance of mixed colour. There is the Van Gogh yellow of the ragwort and the dark mullein spikes. There are the blended lilacs of field scabious and the rose shades from wild marjoram and over most of the area towers a canopy of greater and black knapweed flowers creating a galaxy of tiny purple globes. In the wind, all these colours sway and mingle.
My favourite of all is in the blooms of the bloody cranesbill. It is intriguing that botanists used body parts to invoke its hue while the makers of matte lipstick call the same shade “pink peony”. Look closely at the petals and they comprise fields of exquisite magenta veined with red.
Continue reading...Post-Brexit Britain should phase out tariffs on food, says thinktank
Policy Exchange says EU agricultural policy should be replaced by system that makes imported meat cheaper for consumers
Britain should abandon tariffs on American and Argentinian meat products after Brexit to bring consumer food prices down, according to a leading rightwing thinktank.
Policy Exchange said the UK should phase out tariffs on agricultural products, saying they raise prices and complicate trade deals, although critics say that would pave the way for hormone-treated beef or chlorine-washed chickens, currently banned under EU law, to reach British supermarket shelves.
Continue reading...Suicides of nearly 60,000 Indian farmers linked to climate change, study claims
Rising temperatures and the resultant stress on India’s agricultural sector may have contributed to increase in suicides over the past 30 years, research shows
Climate change may have contributed to the suicides of nearly 60,000 Indian farmers and farm workers over the past three decades, according to new research that examines the toll rising temperatures are already taking on vulnerable societies.
Illustrating the extreme sensitivity of the Indian agricultural industry to spikes in temperature, the study from the University of California, Berkeley, found an increase of just 1C on an average day during the growing season was associated with 67 more suicides.
Continue reading...Engels’ view on the loss of public space | Letters
The contradictions of Friedrich Engels’ newly installed statue looking down on the private “public” space of Tony Wilson Place would not have escaped the young man living in 1840s Manchester. Privatisation of public land by stealth (The insidious creep of London’s pseudo-public land, 24 July) is subtly altering access to the city and its amenities. Ambiguous road markings and street signs confuse the public, maximising the landowners’ profits and discriminating against people with disabilities. Close to Engels’ statue a penalty notice was issued for using a blue badge on a street without road markings – notices on building hoardings apparently overruled the absence of yellow lines and the rights of the disabled. In Spinningfields £100 penalties are threatened for stopping cars anywhere, without defining what constitutes “stopping”. Local councils and elected mayors must move quickly to enforce the same regulations on private space as those in public space, make private landowners accountable, end discriminatory practices and be fully open about changing land ownership.
Bob Dinn
Manchester
• Join the debate – email guardian.letters@theguardian.com
Continue reading...How to avoid being bitten by a snake – and what to do if you are
Summer is the peak season for attacks by the UK’s only venomous snake, the common European adder. We asked a toxicology expert for the dos and don’ts
As any six-year-old will tell you, there is only one venomous snake native to Britain: Vipera berus, AKA the common European adder. Still, it can give you a nasty bite, and doctors have warned that bite victims are walking into a world of pain by not getting help soon enough.
“I’m astonished by the number of people who know they’ve been bitten but just go home,” says Michael Eddleston, a professor of clinical toxicology at the University of Edinburgh and a snake expert. “Then they wake up with massive swelling, when treatment is far less effective.”
Continue reading...Planet has just 5% chance of reaching Paris climate goal, study says
Researchers find that economic, emissions and population trends point to very small chance Earth will avoid warming more than 2C by century’s end
There is only a 5% chance that the Earth will avoid warming by at least 2C come the end of the century, according to new research that paints a sobering picture of the international effort to stem dangerous climate change.
Related: Bill Nye: 'You can shoot the messenger but climate is still changing'
Continue reading...2017 is so far the second-hottest year on record thanks to global warming | Dana Nuccitelli
2017 is behind only El Niño-amplified 2016.
With the first six months of 2017 in the books, average global surface temperatures so far this year are 0.94°C above the 1950–1980 average, according to NASA. That makes 2017 the second-hottest first six calendar months on record, behind only 2016.
That’s remarkable because 2017 hasn’t had the warming influence of an El Niño event. El Niños bring warm ocean water to the surface, temporarily causing average global surface temperatures to rise. 2016 – including the first six months of the year – was influenced by one of the strongest El Niño events on record.
Continue reading...Culling of Scotland's mountain hares should be banned, says charity
Death rates of hares native to Highlands are not monitored and animals are widely persecuted for sport, OneKind says
Unregulated culling of Scotland’s mountain hares should be banned and the species protected, according to a report that says shooting the animals for sport is inhumane and uncontrolled.
Landowners can shoot the hares without a licence from August to February and claim culls are necessary to protect game, especially red grouse, from disease.
Saving the world's wildlife is not just 'a white person thing'
The conservation sector is dominated by white faces, and for many people it looks a bit like colonialism. It’s time for new voices to take up the fight
In a few days it will be the 18th anniversary of the death of Michael Werikhe, the enigmatic African conservationist. You don’t hear or read much of him these days.
Nicknamed “the Rhino Man” because his work and campaigns focused on the critically endangered black rhino, Werikhe’s main campaign tactic of choice was walking to raise awareness. His first walk, starting on Christmas Day 1982, took him from Mombasa to the Kenyan capital Nairobi – a distance of 484 kilometres – and lasted for 27 days. He later walked in East Africa, Europe and North America to raise awareness and money, raising nearly $1m and covering nearly 5,000km.
Continue reading...