The Guardian

Wenlock Edge Daisy – daes eage, day’s-eye – a wonderfully simple poetry that has become a complicated symbolic chain-link of love, innocence and death

Hazel catkins are limp, in a still brightness they hang fire, waiting. After the thrashing they got from Storm Doris it’s a wonder they survived, let alone have any pollen left, but from woods and hedges, unimpeded by leaves, the magic dust cloud drifts for wider fertilisation. The pollen record found in peat bogs shows an expansion of hazel during the Mesolithic, 11,000 – 6,000 years ago and the speculation is that travelling people transported hazel nuts, so that now, catkins dangle from here to the Caucasus and Algeria.

Related: Country diary: Wenlock Edge: The lesser celandine, the voice of spring

Analysis shows steady warming in the Pacific Ocean and that Australia could be in for a warmer and drier year

Australia could be heading into another El Niño year according to new analysis by the Bureau of Meteorology, which found the chance Australia would be affected by the phenomenon in 2017 had increased to 50%.

Six of the eight models used by Australian climatologists to predict El Niño and La Niña events indicate the El Niño threshold could be reached by July, while seven indicate a steady warming in the Pacific Ocean over the next six months.

‘Citizen science’ project launched as FoE survey indicates population outside London overestimates air quality

People across the UK are underestimating the impact of the air pollution crisis in their local areas, according to a new survey.

Almost two thirds of respondents said they were concerned about the issue of air pollution, but only one in 10 said they thought the air they breathe is bad.

Plants from semi-tropical climes are overtaking native British species and choking habitat as they flourish in warmer conditions

A half-degree increase in the average temperature in September and October in East Anglia this century has made an already troublesome plant invader even more of a nuisance. While the change in climate has been hardly noticeable to humans, it has made an enormous difference to the floating pennywort, Hydrocotyle ranunculoide, which already threatens to choke slow-moving rivers and the Broads.

The extension of warmer weather into autumn has give this semi-tropical South American plant the opportunity to produce viable seeds for the first time enabling it to spread even faster.

Member states approve changes, including €12bn innovation fund, to emissions plan for cleaner technology and pollution cuts

An overhaul of the EU’s flagship trading scheme for cutting carbon emissions by European industries has been approved by the member states.

The agreement to reform the emissions trading system comes after almost two years’ of discussions but just two weeks after the European parliament voted in favour of a new directive.

Of course the unacceptable levels of air pollution in our cities is an issue that central and local government must urgently tackle (Report, 25 February). However, the elephant in the room is that millions of city dwellers routinely make unnecessary car journeys and they need to accept their responsibility and switch to alternative means of transport. Ironically, those children at London schools and nurseries you highlight are often being poisoned by their own parents’ vehicles and those of their classmates’ parents on the school run. I walk my children the mile to their school, while most of their friends are driven through the traffic-choked streets. It takes about the same time, but those families have contributed to the toxicity of the air and have done no exercise.
Adam Manolson
London

I am completely appalled to read that an organisation that is supposed to promote wildlife and nature in this country should be recruiting volunteers to kill the UK’s grey squirrels in the north (Thousands of volunteers wanted to save red squirrel, 24 February).

This diminishes the ethos of the Wildlife Trusts. I do not believe that the culling process can ever be made humane and the idea of bludgeoning squirrels to death is barbaric. In addition I fear that the cull will need to be extended to all of the UK’s regions to prevent replenishment of culled areas by southern squirrels. The enhanced transmissibility of the squirrel pox virus among red squirrels suggests the solution should be to work to increase their resistance to this disease, rather than trying to eliminate it in its entirety by culling grey squirrels in case they harbour it.

Exclusive: Plan also targets local air and noise pollution but critics say long-term solutions to environmental challenges are no closer to reality

The huge growth in flights from Heathrow’s planned new runway could be carbon neutral, according to an ambition revealed by the airport.

The 260,000 extra flights a year anticipated from the third runway would make the airport the UK’s largest source of carbon emissions. But Heathrow’s new sustainability plan suggests other ways to offset the leap in emissions, including by restoring British peat bogs.

Critics say public information film shows Shell ‘understood the threat was dire, potentially existential for civilisation, more than a quarter of a century ago’

• ‘Shell knew’: oil giant’s 1991 film warned of climate change danger

Climate change “at a rate faster than at any time since the end of the ice age – change too fast perhaps for life to adapt, without severe dislocation”. That was the startling warning issued by the oil giant Shell more than a quarter of a century ago.

The company’s farsighted 1991 film, titled Climate of Concern, set out with crystal clarity how the world was warming and that serious consequences could well result.

Public information film unseen for years shows Shell had clear grasp of global warming 26 years ago but has not acted accordingly since, say critics

• Film warned of climate change ‘at rate faster than at any time since end of the ice age’

The oil giant Shell issued a stark warning of the catastrophic risks of climate change more than a quarter of century ago in a prescient 1991 film that has been rediscovered.

However, since then the company has invested heavily in highly polluting oil reserves and helped lobby against climate action, leading to accusations that Shell knew the grave risks of global warming but did not act accordingly.

In 1991, Shell produced a public documentary on global warming called Climate of Concern. It warned that trends in global temperatures raised serious risks of famines, floods and climate refugees. But in the quarter century since, Shell has continued to invest heavily in fossil fuels
• Shell’s 1991 warning: climate changing ‘at faster rate than at any time since end of ice age’

Blanchland Moor, Northumberland Strutting and posturing, the grouse makes it clear that this is his territory

On shallow puddles, delicate fans of ice dissolve under the morning sun as we follow the sandy track over Blanchland Moor. These heather uplands, now every tone of brown from straw to sepia, fill the eye with purple every August.

Stopping on a south-facing bank, we share a flask of tea, a stand of thorn trees at our backs for shelter. Nearby is the outlying farmstead of Pennypie House. The name is said to derive from cattle drovers stopping at the farm to buy a pie for a penny, but it may also be a corruption of “penny pay”, a toll asked of travellers on the ancient track. Though it’s only about four miles across, different areas of the moor have colourful names denoting ownership: Burntshieldhaugh Fell, Cowbyers Fell, Bulbeck Common and Birkside Fell.

Rangers lost their lives in Kenya, Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and India

Eight wildlife rangers have lost their lives in four separate countries, in a week that highlighted the numerous hazards rangers face in protecting the world’s wild lands and species.

“It’s a tough week when we lose eight of our ranger family; some to poachers’ bullets and some to the other dangers that come with the territory,” said Sean Willmore, founder and director of the Thin Green Line Foundation, which supports widows and children of rangers killed in the line of duty.

How worrying are the nitrogen dioxide levels at your child’s school?

Tens of thousands of children at more than 800 schools, nurseries and colleges in London are being exposed to illegal levels of air pollution that risk causing lifelong health problems.

The Guardian revealed on Friday that there are 802 educational institutions in the capital where pupils as young as three are being exposed to levels of nitrogen dioxide that are within 150 metres of nitrogen dioxide pollution levels that exceed the EU legal limit of 40µg/m3 (40 micrograms per cubic metre of air).

As with all such lists, the 300 ‘scientists’ badly lack climate expertise

If you read my articles regularly, you may have noticed multiple times I have stated that the scientific argument is over; there are no longer any reputable scientists that deny the overwhelming human influence in our climate. An open letter published last week by the anti-environmentalists proves my point.

If you read the headlines, it might have seemed impressive: “300 Scientists Tell Trump to Leave UN Climate Agreement.” Wow, 300 scientists. That’s a lot right? Actually, it’s a pitiful list.

Council budgets for parks may have been cut, but you still love your local parks. We asked readers to share their pictures via Guardian Witness and here are some of our favourites.

Fiskavaig, Skye This huge island is a complication of landscapes, and on its west coast you walk the divide between them all

The lady had drawn a map to direct me to the beach: there it was, easy enough, but where a road continued off the edge she’d inscribed an arrow, and the words “end of the world”. Curious, I follow the road off her map, past ancient rusting crofts on to a ribbon of singletrack, to where it stops. A knoll stands beyond a sheep gate and I climb it.

What I see from its knotty top is a place of transition. Beneath the knoll the land stops, falling to a sort of lagoon of strange, rumpled headlands and islands like pieces flayed off the land to drift. It seems this coast doesn’t want to commit to the ocean: here the waters of Lochs Harport and Bracadale coalesce into a strange enclosure of the Minch. Beyond, only South Uist’s taper offers harbour from the Atlantic’s ferocious north water.

Originally published in the Guardian on 27 February 1967

THE CAIRNGORMS: It didn’t seem at all strange to discover a bedraggled reindeer sheltering from the storm just inside the entrance to the chair-lift the other day, for the wind was like a knife and the ski-runs like tilted ice-rinks. Of course, he might have merely come in for the company – you could see his fellows higher up the snowbound hillside – or he might have been hoping for a chance of something more succulent than the frozen heather roots these creatures seem to live on. But he wasn’t very friendly, responding to a cautious stroking by an angry swing of the head, so I left him standing disconsolate near the ticket office and looking as if he’d lost both Father Christmas and his sledge. I suppose they’re harmless enough although a notice farther down the mountain warns “Beware of Reindeer,” but doesn’t explain why. These were the only wild life we saw in the hills during a wild week, except for the ptarmigan in their white winter plumage hurrying through the snow, and once a handsome pheasant strutting across the track through the Rothiemurchus pines. Indeed, there were days, so fierce the winds, when these popular slopes were even deserted by the humans who normally at this time of year swarm like ants, and one day, especially, when I seemed quite alone in the mountains. Ski-ing that day was out of the question – you needed ice-axe and crampons just to get across the runs – and the wind so strong on the plateau it took you all your time to avoid being blown over the edge. But down by Loch Morlich in the late afternoon the wind suddenly dropped for half an hour, and there was the quiet splendour of purpling hills and a foreground of silvered loch with the birches and pines showing black against a golden sunset like a Chinese painting.

If the third warmest January on record occurred during a La Niña event, scientists are asking what El Niño has in store

Right now south-eastern Australia is having an unbearable summer. Temperatures in Sydney have regularly been in the upper 30s in recent weeks, while inland areas have had several days in the mid-40s.

January was the hottest month on record for Sydney since 1859, and the persistent warmth into February (with many places topping 35C day after day) may topple the New South Wales record of 50 hot days in a row.

More than 3.5m of the invasive rodents live in Britain, and their presence is harming the welfare of their native red cousins. Luckily, HRH has a cunning plan to reduce their numbers

Name: Grey squirrels.

Age: First introduced to the UK in the 1870s.