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Extinction Rebellion protesters want a carbon-free UK by 2025. But can the financial and political hurdles be overcome?
It is the near future. You wake in a house warmed by a heat pump that extracts energy from deep below the ground and delivers it to your home. (Your gas boiler was outlawed years ago.) You rise and make yourself a cup of tea – from water boiled on a hydrogen-burning kitchen stove. Then you head to work – in a robot-driven electric car directed by central control network to avoid traffic jams.
At midday, you pause for lunch: a sandwich made of meat grown in a laboratory. At the end of the day, you are taken home by a robot car – through countryside festooned with solar panels and turbines.
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The wardens of Britain’s small islands talk about daily life with little more than thousands of puffins for company. By Patrick Barkham. Photographs by Alex Ingram
After supper, while Eddie Stubbings was washing up, huge flocks of puffins would come whirling past his kitchen window. Later, when the sun had finally dipped into the ocean, the Skomer night filled with the bizarre caterwauling of 350,000 pairs of manx shearwaters, which fly under the cover of darkness to burrows dotted across the small island.
“Living on the island was absolutely amazing,” says Stubbings, 40. Alongside his partner, Bee Bueche, 41, he has completed six years working on Skomer, 720 acres of seabird-populated rocks off the Pembrokeshire coast.
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Group’s ongoing peaceful disruption in London is gaining it global attention and new members
On Monday morning a strange sight appeared, edging its way through the buses, taxis and shoppers on Oxford Street in London.
A bright pink boat, named Berta Cáceres after the murdered Honduran environmental activist, was being pulled carefully through the traffic, eventually coming to a halt in the middle of one of London’s busiest thoroughfares.
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An orchestra, a village, an entire country: the movement to rein in greenhouse gas emissions is growing
We are all doomed, it is said. Carbon dioxide is amassing in the atmosphere at levels not seen for millions of years when there were trees at the South Pole and Florida was under water. We have barely a decade to make amends. Protesters are on the streets.
But huge numbers of people have not given up. Not yet. Call them the carbon cutters. They are companies and cities, niche groups and nations. They are commuters and communes, off-gridders and off-setters, investors and institutions – and countless individuals, cutting their meat intake, installing solar panels, eschewing gas guzzlers and long-haul flights.
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Fears for wildlife after fierce predators apparently discovered in Yorkshire
Late on Monday night, a reporter at the Doncaster Free Press received an unusual phone call. A piranha, one of the world’s fiercest predators normally found stalking the waters of the Amazon basin, had apparently been discovered in a lake in Doncaster.
There were dramatic rumours of ducks being massacred and other wildlife being torn to shreds by the razor-toothed fish in the freezing waters of Martinwells Lake.
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Nation known for its natural beauty is under pressure with extinctions, polluted rivers and blighted lakes
A report on the state of New Zealand’s environment has painted a bleak picture of catastrophic biodiversity loss, polluted waterways and the destructive rise of the dairy industry and urban sprawl.
Environment Aotearoais the first major environmental report in four years, and was compiled using data from Statistics New Zealand and the environment ministry.
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Financial sector warned it risks losses from extreme weather and its stakes in polluting firms
The global financial system faces an existential threat from climate change and must take urgent steps to reform, the governors of the Bank of England and France’s central bank have warned, writing in the Guardian.
In an article published in the Guardian on Wednesday aimed at the international financial community, Mark Carney, the Bank’s governor, and François Villeroy de Galhau, the governor of the Banque de France, said financial regulators, banks and insurers around the world had to “raise the bar” to avoid catastrophe.
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Scientists, including a descendant of Charles Darwin, are researching the birds’ preference for Berlin
They were once among Britain’s most beloved singers, their “murmurs musical” giving melancholy poets solace in their darkest hours. But these days the world-famous warblers are more likely to be found jamming with jazz musicians in neglected Berlin parks than serenading Londoners in Berkeley Square. Some even claim that their latest outpourings feature elements of German techno.
Luscinia megarhynchos, the common nightingale, has been shunning the UK since the 1960s, during which time the population has slumped by 90%. The number of birds in Berlin, however, is on the rise. According to cautious estimates by the city senate, the German capital’s nightingale population grew by 6% every year from 2006 to 2016: “a very high rate”, said Johannes Schwarz, a species conservation officer, who puts the current number of nesting pairs at between 1,300 and 1,700.
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Scientists say a drastic cut in meat consumption is needed, but this requires political will
It has been known for a while that the amount of animal products being eaten is bad for both the welfare of animals and the environment. People cannot consume 12.9bn eggs in the UK each year without breaking a few.
But the extent of the damage, and the amount by which people need to cut back, is now becoming clearer. On Wednesday, the Lancet medical journal published a study that calls for dramatic changes to food production and the human diet, in order to avoid “catastrophic damage to the planet”.
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The continent’s largest land mammal plays crucial role in spiritual lives of the tribes
On 5,000 hectares of unploughed prairie in north-eastern Montana, hundreds of wild bison roam once again. But this herd is not in a national park or a protected sanctuary – they are on tribal lands. Belonging to the Assiniboine and Sioux tribes of Fort Peck Reservation, the 340 bison is the largest conservation herd in the ongoing bison restoration efforts by North America’s Indigenous people.
The bison – or as Native Americans call them, buffalo – are not just “sustenance,” according to Leroy Little Bear, a professor at the University of Lethbridge and a leader in the bison restoration efforts with the Blood Tribe. The continent’s largest land mammal plays a major role in the spiritual and cultural lives of numerous Native American tribes, an “integrated relationship,” he said.
Continue reading...Clinics are using "selective success rates" to target older women, the fertility watchdog warns.
Leia was born profoundly deaf but pioneering surgery and therapy has enabled her to hear sounds.
Around 5,000 heart attacks and strokes a year could be prevented by personalising heart health checks.
A little bone scientists thought was being lost to evolution seems to be making a comeback, say experts.
More than 2,200 people with learning disabilities are still being treated in hospitals, figures show.
Holly Eastall says she felt suicidal after being falsely accused of abuse following her baby's death.
All eight infants now have fully functioning immune systems after undergoing treatment, say experts.
The study could aid medical research and fuel debate about the difference between life and death.
A doctor in Pembrokeshire tweets a brutally honest job advert in a bid to relieve "tired" GPs.
A mental health crisis team is criticised after a patient killed his wife before taking his own life.
Our planet is now passing through ancient debris left by Comet Thatcher, which hasn't visited the inner solar system since 1861.
Geoparks use an area's geological heritage to draw attention to key environmental issues.
The private space race to send humans to the ISS and beyond is about to enter a new nail-biting phase for SpaceX.
The Indian Ocean is the world's biggest plastic dumping ground, but some of it is leaking elsewhere.
Everything you need to know about the full moons of 2019.
A 1,668-pound great white shark hanging around the Gulf of Mexico has a name and a Twitter account.
Star Count 2019 engages stargazers in England and draws attention to the growing threat of light pollution.
If fragments of this extrasolar object can be found, it could offer unprecedented hints about other star systems.
The endangered kakapo parrot smells funny, can't fly and takes courtship seriously.
Even remote places like the French Pyrenees can contain urban levels of microplastics.
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