The Guardian
Too many deer for too few people – a self-defeating study of the Highlands | George Monbiot
I've read too many daft reports in the course of this job, but I don't remember any as self-defeating as this. This morning the Scottish Gamekeepers' Association launches its study on the economic importance of red deer to Scotland's rural economy. It succeeds in demonstrating the opposite of what it sets out to prove.
The association represents people working for the big estates of Scotland, which are visited at certain months of the year by a small number of exceedingly rich people, who come to shoot stags or grouse.
Continue reading...Does building turbines use more energy than they produce?
Critics of wind energy often claim that the energy used to construct a wind turbine outweighs the energy produced during its lifetime in operation. This is not correct. An evidence review published in the journal Renewable Energy in 2010, which included data from 119 turbines across 50 sites going back 30 years, concluded that the average windfarm produces 20-25 times more energy during its operational life than was used to construct and install its turbines. It also found that the average "energy payback" of a turbine was 3-6 months.
A life-cycle analysis published in 2011 by Vestas, a Danish turbines manufacturer, of a 100MW onshore windfarm consisting of 33 3MW turbines concluded, unsurprisingly, that the siting of the turbines is crucial in maximising the energy return ratio. "Doubling the distance to the grid from 50 km to 100 km typically increases [negative]
Continue reading...Fishing skippers and factory fined nearly £1m for illegal catches
An inquiry into the UK's largest fishing scandal has uncovered "serious and organised" criminality by Scottish trawlermen and fish processors in an elaborate scam to illegally sell nearly £63m of undeclared fish.
Three large fish factories and 27 skippers have pleaded guilty to sophisticated and lucrative schemes to breach EU fishing quotas, in what one senior police officer described as "industrial level" deception.
Continue reading...Leak exposes how Heartland Institute works to undermine climate science
• Heartland claims fraud after leak of climate documents
The inner workings of a libertarian thinktank working to discredit the established science on climate change have been exposed by a leak of confidential documents detailing its strategy and fundraising networks.
DeSmogBlog, which broke the story, said it had received the confidential documents from an "insider" at the Heartland Institute, which is based in Chicago. The blog monitors industry efforts to discredit climate science.
Continue reading...The Himalayas and nearby peaks have lost no ice in past 10 years, study shows
• Live Q&A: What does the Himalaya glacier study mean for climate change?
• In pictures: the best images of the Earth from space
The world's greatest snow-capped peaks, which run in a chain from the Himalayas to Tian Shan on the border of China and Kyrgyzstan, have lost no ice over the last decade, new research shows.
The discovery has stunned scientists, who had believed that around 50bn tonnes of meltwater were being shed each year and not being replaced by new snowfall.
Continue reading...Penn State defies Facebook campaign calling for it to drop climate lecture | Leo Hickman
In an uncharacteristically angry post at the New York Times's Dot Earth blog, Andy Revkin has hit out at a "shameful attack on free speech". It relates to a Facebook campaign which is calling on Pennsylvania State University to "disinvite" Professor Michael E. Mann, the director of its Earth System Science Center, from giving a lecture next week entitled: "Confronting the Climate Change Challenge."
The Facebook campaign has been initiated by a seemingly conjoined group called the Common Sense Movement/Secure Energy for America Political Action Committee. Brad Johnson at ThinkProgress has investigated the people behind it and describes it as a "coal-industry astroturf group". Here's a video from the Common Sense Movement's "I Am Coal" campaign, which gives an insight into its worldview...
Continue reading...Glacier thief arrested in Chile
• In pictures: The world's melting glaciers
Climate change sceptics have acquired a new explanation for why glaciers are retreating: it's not global warming, it's theft.
Police in Chile have arrested a man on suspicion of stealing five tonnes of ice from the Jorge Montt glacier in the Patagonia region to sell as designer ice cubes in bars and restaurants.
Continue reading...China's largest freshwater lake dries up
For visitors expecting to see China's largest freshwater lake, Poyang is a desolate spectacle. Under normal circumstances it covers 3,500 sq km, but last month only 200 sq km were underwater. A dried-out plain stretches as far as the eye can see, leaving a pagoda perched on top of a hillock that is usually a little island. Wrapped in the mist characteristic of the lower reaches of the Yangtze river, the barges are moored close to the quayside beside a pitiful trickle of water. There is no work for the fisheries.
According to the state news agency Xinhua, the drought – the worst for 60 years – is due to the lack of rainfall in the area round Poyang and its tributaries. Poor weather conditions this year are partly responsible. But putting the blame on them overlooks the role played by the colossal Three Gorges reservoir, 500km upstream. The cause and effect is still not officially recognised, even if the government did admit last May that the planet's biggest dam had given rise to "problems that need to be solved very urgently".
Continue reading...World's giant trees are dying off rapidly, studies show
The biggest trees in the world, known as the true ecological kings of the jungle, are dying off rapidly as roads, farms and settlements fragment forests and they come under prolonged attack from severe droughts and new pests and diseases.
Long-term studies in Amazonia, Africa and central America show that while these botanical behemoths may have adapted successfully to centuries of storms, pests and short-term climatic extremes, they are counterintuitively more vulnerable than other trees to today's threats.
Continue reading...What is the best way to draught-proof stripped wooden floors? | Caramel Quin
You wouldn't leave a window wide open if the heating were on. But if you have stripped floorboards, the chances are that you're doing the equivalent. Cold air naturally circulates below ground floor floorboards, and the small gaps between boards in an average-sized room add up to the equivalent of a small window. No wonder your toes are feeling chilly. According to the Energy Saving Trust, just filling gaps between floor and skirting boards will save around £20 – and 100kg of CO2 – annually, paying for itself in less than a year.
Continue reading...Livia Firth: the woman who turned the red carpet green
She is seen as the world's most glamorous champion of "eco style" and has been dubbed "the queen of the green carpet". Now Livia Firth is moving into design: last week she revealed she is working on a line for the online retailer Yoox's eco brand Yooxygen, in partnership with Reclaim To Wear, which helps designers recycle textile surplus and waste.
Upcycling – or remaking cast-off items into something different and better – is something of a Firth speciality. She first drew attention to Reclaim to Wear when she wore one of its 1950s strapless cocktail dresses in silver satin to the Venice film festival. For the Paris premiere of The King's Speech, starring her husband Colin Firth, she famously wore an outfit made of one of his old suits.
Continue reading...Q&A: 'Climategate'
It is the controversy over a set of over 1,000 private emails and many other documents that were stolen or leaked from the University of East Anglia's (UEA) Climatic Research Unit (CRU) in November 2009. All the emails involved CRU staff, principally the CRU head Phil Jones, but in correspondence with many of the world's leading climate scientists, including the main researcher behind the "hockey stick" graph, Michael Mann. CRU's speciality was reconstructing records of the Earth's past temperatures from thermometer data and "proxy" such as tree-ring measurements.
Continue reading...Getting to cycle the New York marathon | Matt Seaton
I was supposed to be running in this year's New York Marathon, but injury brought my training to a shuddering halt. To say I was disappointed to have to pull out (even if the many people in my position do get to defer their entry to next year) is typically-English understatement, so when the opportunity arose to ride the 26.2-mile runner's course on my bike on race day, I jumped at it.
I still had a smidgeon of envy for the runners, as New York dawned in perfect conditions, chilly but brilliant, on Sunday morning. But I couldn't be churlish about it for long: after all, how many people get to parade on their bike for the whole closed-road course, complete with cheering crowds?
Continue reading...India plans 'safer' nuclear plant powered by thorium
India has announced plans for a prototype nuclear power plant that uses an innovative "safer" fuel.
Officials are currently selecting a site for the reactor, which would be the first of its kind, using thorium for the bulk of its fuel instead of uranium – the fuel for conventional reactors. They plan to have the plant up and running by the end of the decade.
Continue reading...The six natural resources most drained by our 7 billion people
With 7 billion people on the planet – theoretically from today – there will be an inevitable increase in the demand on the world's natural resources. Here are six already under severe pressure from current rates of consumption:
Continue reading...White roofs are not a silver bullet for cooling planet, study finds
Seemed like a cool idea: paint the world's roofs white to reflect more sunlight, and it could help cool down both cities and the planet. A new study, however, finds it's a lot more complicated – even as it dispels climate change deniers' claims that urban "heat islands" are a major cause of apparent temperature increases.
The land covered by urban areas more than doubled between 1992 and 2005, to about 0.128% of Earth's surface, Mark Z. Jacobson and John E. Ten Hoeve of Stanford University report in the Journal of Climate. Roofs and roads cover about half of that land, and help heat up urban areas by preventing evaporation of water and absorbing sunlight. Exactly how these urban heat islands affect global temperatures, however, has been unclear. But Jacobsen says some skeptics of climate science have argued that heat islands – and not the buildup of warming gases in the atmosphere – may be responsible for observed temperature increases, since some monitoring stations are near urban areas.
Continue reading...BBC Frozen Planet – in pictures
China angry over Burma's decision to suspend work on £2.3bn dam
Burma's decision to suspend the country's biggest hydroelectric project has shocked and enraged China, the government's most influential backer on the international stage.
Senior officials in Beijing have castigated their south-east Asian ally and threatened legal action. It emerged that they were not consulted before President Thein Sien of Burma announced last Friday a halt to building the $3.6bn (£2.3bn) hydropower dam on the Irawaddy – known as the Myitsone project – because it was "against the will of the people".
Continue reading...Scottish nuclear leak 'will never be completely cleaned up'
Radioactive contamination that leaked for more than two decades from the Dounreay nuclear plant on the north coast of Scotland will never be completely cleaned up, a Scottish government agency has admitted.
The Scottish Environment Protection Agency (Sepa) has decided to give up on its aim of returning the seabed near the plant to a "pristine condition". To do so, it said, could cause "more harm than good".
Continue reading...West Bank villagers' daily battle with Israel over water
The South Hebron Hills, sweltering in 34C heat and in its second consecutive year of drought, is a landscape of brutal contrasts. There is enough water here to support lush greenhouses, big cattle sheds, even ornamental plants. It arrives in large, high-pressure lines. And there appears to be no limit to the bounty it can bring.
Cheek by jowl with the water towers and red roofs of the Israeli settlers in this area of the West Bank is a landscape of stone boulders, tents and caves. The Palestinian village of al-Amniyr looks from afar like a rubbish tip until you realise that the rubbish is people's dwellings, which have been destroyed in attacks targeting their water cisterns.
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