The Guardian
Seven facts you need to know about the Arctic methane timebomb | Nafeez Ahmed
Debate over the plausibility of a catastrophic release of methane in coming decades due to thawing Arctic permafrost has escalated after a new Nature paper warned that exactly this scenario could trigger costs equivalent to the annual GDP of the global economy.
Scientists of different persuasions remain fundamentally divided over whether such a scenario is even plausible. Carolyn Rupple of the US Geological Survey (USGS) Gas Hydrates Project told NBC News the scenario is "nearly impossible." Ed Dlugokencky, a research scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) said there has been "no detectable change in Arctic methane emissions over the past two decades." NASA's Gavin Schmidt said that ice core records from previously warm Arctic periods show no indication of such a scenario having ever occurred. Methane hydrate expert Prof David Archer reiterated that "the mechanisms for release operate on time scales of centuries and longer." These arguments were finally distilled in a lengthy, seemingly compelling essay posted on Skeptical Science last Thursday, concluding with utter finality:
Continue reading...Revealed: how UK water companies are polluting Britain's rivers and beaches
The most persistent and frequent polluters of England's rivers and beaches are the nation's 10 biggest water companies, an Observer investigation has revealed.
The companies, which are responsible for treating waste water and delivering clean supplies, have been punished for more than 1,000 incidents in the past nine years, but fined a total of only £3.5m.
Continue reading...Climate study predicts a watery future for New York, Boston and Miami
More than 1,700 American cities and towns – including Boston, New York, and Miami – are at greater risk from rising sea levels than previously feared, a new study has found.
By 2100, the future of at least part of these 1,700 locations will be "locked in" by greenhouse gas emissions built up in the atmosphere, the analysis published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday found.
Continue reading...A guide to British ladybirds – in pictures
Andrew Neil - these are your climate errors on BBC Sunday Politics | Dana Nuccitelli
On last week's BBC show Sunday Politics, Andrew Neil hosted UK Energy and Climate Change Secretary Ed Davey for a discussion about climate science and policy. Neil subsequently requested that people provide him with examples of the factual errors in this interview. Given that he began the show with several errors about the paper I co-authored finding a 97 percent consensus in the peer-reviewed literature that humans are causing global warming (the inspiration for the name of our blog), I would be happy to oblige.
Claims #1–4
Continue reading...How well can you identify UK trees from their leaves – quiz
What tree is this?
Ash
Beech
Elder
What tree is this?
Ash
Sycamore
Maidenhair
What tree is this?
Oak
Elder
Beech
What tree is this?
Ash
Sycamore
Maidenhair
What tree is this?
Silver birch
Horse chestnut
Oak
What tree is this?
Elder
Ash
Maidenhair
What tree is this?
Silver birch
Beech
Oak
What tree is this?
Silver birch
Oak
Elder
2 and above.
Oh dear. Older people are more likely to have better knowledge of trees. 23% of those aged 55 and over can recognise an ash leaf, compared with 10% of 18-24s, and 68% of people older than 55 can recognise an oak leaf, compared with 39% of 18-24s, according to the Wildlife Trust
5 and above.
Not bad, but not great. Older people are more likely to have better knowledge of trees. 23% of those aged 55 and over can recognise an ash leaf, compared with 10% of 18-24s, and 68% of people older than 55 can recognise an oak leaf, compared with 39% of 18-24s, according to the Wildlife Trust
7 and above.
Well done. Older people are more likely to have better knowledge of trees. 23% of those aged 55 and over can recognise an ash leaf, compared with 10% of 18-24s, and 68% of people older than 55 can recognise an oak leaf, compared with 39% of 18-24s, according to the Wildlife Trust
Continue reading...Wake up to the danger of slug pesticides
Last month, it was revealed that levels of a toxic pesticide more than 100 times the EU limit were present in a source of English drinking water. The discovery of record levels of metaldehyde – a chemical used in slug pesticides – was reported by Natural England and the Environment Agency at the River Stour, which supplies water to homes in Essex and Suffolk. There's currently no treatment method available to extract this chemical from drinking water – once it's there, we're drinking it.
This isn't a sudden unexpected situation. The same problem occurred in many areas across Britain last autumn – when slug numbers exploded after the wet spring and summer, conditions that we're seeing emerge again. The problem was identified in autumn 2007, when new analytical techniques allowed testing for metaldehyde, and since then a voluntary stewardship programme with guidelines for the use of the chemical has been instituted. Yet this clearly isn't working.
Continue reading...Desert solar power partners Desertec Foundation and Dii split up
The two main advocates of a European renewable energy revolution driven by a vast grid of desert solar power have split, each accusing the other of poor communication.
Both the Desertec Foundation and the Desertec Industrial Initiative (Dii) say their plans to generate power from deserts across the world remains uncompromised despite the decision, which was made by the Foundation at an extraordinary board meeting last week.
Continue reading...Whales flee from military sonar leading to mass strandings, research shows
Whales flee from the loud military sonar used by navies to hunt submarines, new research has proven for the first time. The studies provide a missing link in the puzzle that has connected naval exercises around the world to unusual mass strandings of whales and dolphins.
Beaked whales, the most common casualty of the strandings, were shown to be highly sensitive to sonar. But the research also revealed unexpectedly that blue whales, the largest animals on Earth and whose population has plummeted by 95% in the last century, also abandoned feeding and swam rapidly away from sonar noise.
Continue reading...Humans – the real threat to life on Earth
Earth is home to millions of species. Just one dominates it. Us. Our cleverness, our inventiveness and our activities have modified almost every part of our planet. In fact, we are having a profound impact on it. Indeed, our cleverness, our inventiveness and our activities are now the drivers of every global problem we face. And every one of these problems is accelerating as we continue to grow towards a global population of 10 billion. In fact, I believe we can rightly call the situation we're in right now an emergency – an unprecedented planetary emergency.
We humans emerged as a species about 200,000 years ago. In geological time, that is really incredibly recent. Just 10,000 years ago, there were one million of us. By 1800, just over 200 years ago, there were 1 billion of us. By 1960, 50 years ago, there were 3 billion of us. There are now over 7 billion of us. By 2050, your children, or your children's children, will be living on a planet with at least 9 billion other people. Some time towards the end of this century, there will be at least 10 billion of us. Possibly more.
Continue reading...How a giant tree's death sparked the conservation movement 160 years ago | Leo Hickman
Today marks the 160th anniversary of a seminal, but largely forgotten moment in the history of the conservation movement.
On Monday, 27 June, 1853, a giant sequoia – one of the natural world's most awe-inspiring sights - was brought to the ground by a band of gold-rush speculators in Calaveras county, California. It had taken the men three weeks to cut through the base of the 300ft-tall, 1,244-year-old tree, but finally it fell to the forest floor.
Continue reading...Local, self-sufficient, optimistic: are Transition Towns the way forward?
Late last year, Rob Hopkins went to a conference. Most of the delegates were chief executive officers at local authorities, but it was not a public event. Speaking in confidence, three-quarters of these officials admitted that – despite what they say publicly – they could not foresee a return to growth in the near future.
"One said: 'If we ever get out of this recession, nothing will be as it was in the past,'" Hopkins recalls. "Another said: 'Every generation has had things better than its parents. Not any more.' But the one that stunned me said: 'No civilisation has lasted for ever. There is a very real chance of collapse.'"
Continue reading...Fishing ban proposed near Rockall after rare scientific finds
Fishing is expected to be banned near the Atlantic islet of Rockall after a rare methane gas vent in the seabed and two new shellfish species were discovered by British scientists.
The methane, which leaks through a so-called "cold seep" vent in the ocean floor, was found last year by scientists working with the government agency Marine Scotland. It is the first of its kind to be found near UK waters and only the third in the north-east Atlantic.
Continue reading...RSPB accused of hypocrisy for killing hundreds of birds on its reserves
The RSPB has admitted killing hundreds of birds on its reserves, prompting an accusation of "extraordinary hypocrisy" from the Countryside Alliance.
The RSPB recently criticised the licenced destruction of buzzard eggs and nests to protect a pheasant shoot and said a cull of lesser black-backed gulls should be halted. But on Thursday the charity revealed it too had destroyed lesser black backed gulls and other birds that were harming native species.
Continue reading...'Badger-friendly' milk to be sold in just three UK supermarkets
Only three UK supermarkets – Waitrose, Marks & Spencer and Asda – can guarantee they will sell milk that does not come from dairy farms inside zones where badger culls are due to take place, according to a survey by campaigners.
The survey also revealed that milk certified as organic will not be guaranteed as coming from farms outside the cull zones in Somerset and Gloucestershire.
Continue reading...Jellyfish surge in Mediterranean threatens environment – and tourists
Scientists across the Mediterranean say a surge in the number of jellyfish this year threatens not just the biodiversity of one of the world's most overfished seas but also the health of tens of thousands of summer tourists.
"I flew along a 300km stretch of coastline on 21 April and saw millions of jellyfish," said Professor Stefano Piraino of Salento University in southern Italy. Piraino is the head of a Mediterranean-wide project to track the rise in the number of jellyfish as global warming and overfishing clear the way for them to prosper.
Continue reading...'Canned hunting': the lions bred for slaughter
They are adorably cute, with grubby brown fur so soft it seems to slip through my fingers like flour. It is only when one of the nine-week-old cubs playfully grabs my arm with its teeth and squeezes with an agonising grip that I remember – this is a lion, a wild animal. These four cubs are not wild, however. They are kept in a small pen behind the Lion's Den, a pub on a ranch in desolate countryside 75 miles south of Johannesburg. Tourists stop to pet them but most visitors do not venture over the hill, where the ranch has pens holding nearly 50 juvenile and fully-grown lions, and two tigers.
Continue reading...Why Britain's barren uplands have farming subsidies to blame | George Monbiot
Even before you start reading the devastating State of Nature report, published today, you get an inkling of where the problem lies. It's illustrated in the opening pages with two dramatic photographs of upland Britain (p6). They are supposed to represent the natural glories we're losing. In neither of them (with the exception of some distant specks of scrub and leylandii in the second) is there a tree to be seen. The many square miles they cover contain nothing but grass and dead bracken. They could scarcely provide a better illustration of our uncanny ability to miss the big picture.
The majority of wildlife requires cover: places in which it can shelter from predators or ambush prey, places in which it can take refuge from extremes of heat and cold, or find the constant humidity that fragile roots and sensitive invertebrates require. Yet, in the very regions in which you might expect to find such cover (trees, scrub, other dense foliage) there is almost none. I'm talking about the infertile parts of Britain, in which farming is so unproductive that it survives only as a result of public money. Here, in the places commonly described as Britain's "wildernesses", almost nothing remains. And the "almost" has become radically smaller over the past 20 years.
Continue reading...Record Burmese python caught in Florida
Wildlife officials say a Burmese python nearly 19ft (5.8m) long has been captured in Florida.
Continue reading...DR Congo waits on funding for world's largest hydropower project
Complete set of Grand Inga dams on the Congo River would generate a massive 40,000MW of electricity
The dream of harnessing the mighty Congo with the world's largest set of dams has moved closer, with the World Bank and other financial institutions expected to offer finance and South Africa agreeing to buy half of the power generated.
In the past 60 years French, Belgian, Chinese, Brazilian and African engineers have all hoped to dam the river.
Continue reading...