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As the summit goes into its second week, complex issues with anxiety growing over conference outcomes
The first global register of how much carbon dioxide is being buried underground has been published – it was 45m tonnes in 2023. In one sense that’s not a large amount – it’s about 0.1% of global CO2 emissions that year. Furthermore, about 90% of it was pumped into oil fields to push out more oil, largely in the US and Brazil.
This seems to support criticisms of carbon capture and storage as a niche technology supported by fossil fuel companies aiming simply to continue to sell their products.
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As summer went on, the temperature climbed and climbed. Every day became harder. This is Neha’s story
Location Manesar, India
Disaster Indian heatwave, 2024
Neha is 25 years old and works for a large multinational company at a warehouse in Manesar, Haryana state,so she can send money back home to her family. In 2024, her working conditions worsened after a deadly heatwave spread acrossnorthern India. Climatebreakdown is increasing the frequency and intensity of heatwaves in India by warming the Atlantic and Indian Oceans.
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Analysis shows small hike in populations of insect-eating species after 2018 ruling, but full recovery may take decades
Insect-eating bird populations in France appear to be making a tentative recovery after a ban on bee-harming pesticides, according to the first study to examine how wildlife is returning in Europe.
Neonicotinoids are the world’s most common class of insecticides, widely used in agriculture and for flea control in pets. By 2022, four years after the European Union banned neonicotinoid use in fields, researchers observed that France’s population of insect-eating birds had increased by 2%-3%. These included blackbirds, blackcaps and chaffinches, which feed on insects as adults and as chicks.
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The search for a gingko-toothed beaked whale had taken five years, when a thieving albatross nearly ruined it all
It was an early morning in June 2024 and along the coast of Baja California in Mexico, scientists on the Pacific Storm research vessel were finishing their coffee and preparing for a long day searching for some of the most elusive creatures on the planet. Suddenly a call came from the bridge: “Whales! Starboard side!”
For the next few hours, what looked like a couple of juvenile beaked whales kept surfacing and disappearing until finally Robert Pitman, a now-retired researcher at Oregon State University, fired a small arrow from a modified crossbow at the back of one of them.
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Abernethy, Cairngorms: Even in this part-plantation where there is much uniformity, high winds ensure the woodland can never stay the same
After the summer’s cacophony of greens, the broadleafs among the Scots pines are turning – the larches to green-yellow and bronze, the birches to a warmer yellow, but turning to bronze and copper too. I’m walking along a path with a line of larchesand mostly pines behind. Storm Amy has made its presence felt, and a number of trees are windthrown.
Through new gaps I see a couple of gnarly “granny” pines I’d not noticed before, so I head in towards them, crackling over fallen twigs and branches festooned with lichens. This area is for the most part plantation, so the trees are quite uniform in age, spacing and girth, with some granny outliers that speak to an earlier time. I find a storm path of sorts, diagonal lines where trees have dominoed, or where one has partially fallen and is resting on another. Each points north-east to a fault.
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Commons committee report challenges ‘lazy narrative’ used by ministers that scapegoats wildlife and the environment
Nature is not a blocker to housing growth, an inquiry by MPs has found, in direct conflict with claims made by ministers.
Toby Perkins, the Labour chair of the environmental audit committee, said nature was being scapegoated, and that rather than being a block to growth, it was necessary for building resilient towns and neighbourhoods.
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City council and regional authority collaborate to guarantee renewable mobile energy for next summer’s festival season
Artists including Billie Eilish and Neil Young and festivals across the world have taken action to make their concerts more sustainable by harnessing green power.
The concept is being taken a step further in the south-west of England next summer when a “clean power hub” is set up in Bristol that festivals, large gigs and film crews will be able to tap into.
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Ending use of coal, oil and gas is essential in tackling climate crisis – but even talking about it is controversial
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Climate summit in Brazil needs to find way to stop global heating accelerating amid stark divisions
“It broke my heart.” Surangel Whipps, president of the tiny Pacific nation of Palau, was sitting in the front row of the UN’s general assembly in New York when Donald Trump made a long and rambling speech, his first to the UN since his re-election, on 23 September.
Whipps was prepared for fury and bombast from the US president, but what followed was shocking. Trump’s rant on the climate crisis – a “green scam”, “the greatest con job ever perpetrated”, “predictions made by stupid people” – was an unprecedented attack on science and global action from a major world leader.
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Brazil’s president welcomes world leaders while navigating divided government, promising action on deforestation and emissions
Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has welcomed world leaders to Belém for the first climate summit in the Amazon, where conservationists hope he can be a champion for the rainforest and its people.
But with a divided administration, a hostile Congress and 20th-century developmentalist instincts, this global figurehead of the centre left has a balancing act to perform in advocating protection of nature and a reduction of emissions.
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