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Country diary: starlings dot the lighthouse roof like currants on a bun
St Mary’s Island, Northumberland Children with fluorescent nets peer into plastic buckets; their cries of excitement echoed by the piping of seabirds
Heading south on the coastal path, we leave Old Hartley village, drawn magnetically by St Mary’s Island with its tall white lighthouse. The sea is a muted grey, with two vast container ships at rest near its meeting with a paler sky.
The footpath skirts a tufty hillock where a kestrel hovers over rough grass, fenced off from the path by chestnut paling. I catch the medicinal scent of mugwort, its glaucous leaves curling and turning winter brown. The scrubby clifftops are a tangle of rose briars and brambles, safe thickets for stonechat and wren. Amongst the windblown tussocks are seedheads of wild carrot, yarrow and knapweed, with late flowers of red clover.
Continue reading...Know your NEM: Queensland poll – what are the odds?
Wind turbine collapse under investigation at Antarctic research centre
Sugar vs solar, round 2: 60MW Qld project stalls after opposition from cane farmers
Climate change spurs Medibank fossil fuel divestment
South Australia’s new power plant ready before summer
Wind farm researchers found to have no human ethics approval
Medibank drops fossil-fuel investments worth tens of millions of dollars
Australia’s largest private health insurer says it ‘acknowledges the science of climate change and the impacts on human health’
Australia’s largest private health insurer, Medibank, will shed tens of millions of dollars in fossil-fuel investments because of the effects of climate change on human health.
In a statement to the Australian Stock Exchange before its annual general meeting in Melbourne on Monday, its chair, Elizabeth Alexander, said the company would move to low-carbon investments “in line with our commitment to the health and wellbeing of our customers”.
Continue reading...Qld Labor ups ante on renewables – more ambition, new technology
CWP proposes 250MW solar thermal + storage near Townsville
100% global renewable electricity more cost-effective than current system
National Energy Guarantee’s bizarre approach to reliability
Impact Investment Group appoints new CEO: Daniel Madhavan
'Successful failures' – the problem with food banks
Rocket blasts off for ISS one day late
Queensland land clearing could become 'tsunami', say conservation groups
Notification of planned clearing is up 30% in the past year compared with the previous three-year average
A dramatic land-clearing surge in Queensland could turn into a “tsunami” in the coming year, say conservationists, the rate of notifications of planned clearing rising 30% in the past year compared with the previous three-year average.
Continue reading...Lincoln Gap wind farm near Port Augusta to add battery storage
Brexit: Environment watchdog planned says Gove
Congo basin’s peaty swamps are new front in climate change battle
Stumbling on submerged roots, attacked by bees and wading waist-deep through leech-infested water, the three researchers and their Pygmy guides progress at just 100 metres an hour through the largest and least-explored tropical bog in the world.
The group halt and unpack what looks like a spear, which is plunged over and over again into the waterlogged forest floor. Each time it brings up a metre-long core of rich, black peat made up of partly decomposed leaves and ancient plantlife. The deepest the steel blade reaches before meeting the underlying clay is 3.7 metres.
Continue reading...Loving Blue Planet? Go one better and take a real submarine trip to the deep
The unknowable expanse of the oceans has become a little more familiar after Blue Planet II. Now it is set to become more familiar still to tourists with enough cash to spare.
The BBC series is the most-watched show of 2017, with 14.1 million viewers tuning in for unseen wonders like cannibalistic Humboldt squid, methane belching from the ocean floor and an underwater lake of brine. Scenes like these are beyond the view of anyone except TV crews, scientists and explorers – but not for much longer. Submarine tourism is riding a wave of interest that is likely to swell as the series continues.
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