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Labour politicians warn former PM had boosted Tory and Reform climate sceptics on the eve of local elections
Tony Blair has been forced by Downing Street to row back from his criticism of the government’s net zero strategy after furious Labour politicians warned he had given a boost to Tory and Reform sceptics on the eve of the local elections.
Climate experts also accused the former prime minister of granting political cover to fossil fuel interests and weakening momentum behind the UK’s legally binding target to reach net zero emissions by 2050.
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A restoration project at Sharpham near Totnes aims to tackle the loss of the natural world while helping people build mental resilience
Two landscapes separated by a wide sweep of river tell a story of change. On one side is traditional farmland, close-cropped grazing, uniform grasses, neatly tended hedges and a sparsity of trees, a farmscape ubiquitous across England. On the riverbank opposite, rougher, less uniform grasses grow unevenly between trees, thistle and brambles, in a chaos of natural disorder swaying in the breeze towards the reedbeds below.
The land on the Sharpham estate side of the River Dart used to be a mirror of the traditional farmscape on the opposite bank. It hosted a non-organic dairy farm and a vineyard, within a tightly controlled 18th-century heritage landscape of deforested parkland.
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The celebrated presenter warns of ‘modern day colonialism at sea’ as he highlights the destruction caused by overfishing and bottom trawling
When David Attenborough’s Blue Planet II documentary aired eight years ago, its impact was so strong it was credited with bringing about a revolution in the way people use plastics. Now film-makers are hoping he can do the same for other destructive environmental practices that the world’s best-known living naturalist describes as “draining the life from our oceans”.
The industrial fishing method of bottom trawling is the focus of a large part of Attenborough’s latest film, Ocean, which airs in cinemas from 8 May, the naturalist’s 99th birthday. In a remarkably no-holds-barred narrative, he says these vessels tear the seabed with such force “the trails of destruction can be seen from space”. He also condemns what he calls “modern day colonialism at sea”, where huge trawlers, operating off the coasts of countries reliant on fish for food and livelihoods, are blamed for dwindling local catches.
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A warming tundra has seen unexpected shifts, raising the alarm about fragile ecosystems and those who rely on them
Scientists studying Arctic plants say the ecosystems that host life in some of the most inhospitable reaches of the planet are changing in unexpected ways in an “early warning sign” for a region upended by climate change.
In four decades, 54 researchers tracked more than 2,000 plant communities across 45 sites from the Canadian high Arctic to Alaska and Scandinavia. They discovered dramatic shifts in temperatures and growing seasons produced no clear winners or losers. Some regions witnessed large increases in shrubs and grasses and declines in flowering plants – which struggle to grow under the shade created by taller plants.
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Aluminium emissions from satellites as they fall to Earth and burn up is becoming more significant as their numbers soar
Right now there are more than 9,000 satellites circumnavigating overhead, keeping track of weather, facilitating communications, aiding navigation and monitoring the Earth. By 2040, there could be more than 60,000. A new study shows that the emissions from expired satellites, as they fall to Earth and burn up, will be significant in future years, with implications for ozone hole recovery and climate.
Satellites need to be replaced after about five years. Most old satellites are disposed of by reducing their altitude and letting them burn up as they fall, releasing pollution into Earth’s atmosphere such as aerosolised aluminium. To understand the impact of these growing emissions from expired satellites, researchers simulated the effects associated with an annual release of 10,000 tonnes of aluminium oxide by 2040 (the amount estimated to be released from disposal of 3,000 satellites a year, assuming a fleet of 60,000 satellites).
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Horner, Somerset: The woodlands here are ideal for southern wood ants – and now the nests have come alive
You can hear when the wood ants wake up from hibernation. Heaps of soil, loose sticks and pine needles that lay inert all winter start seething with a continual, multidirectional flow of insects, whose footfalls make an incessant sizzling sound.
Exmoor’s woodlands are ideal for southern wood ants (Formica rufa), the largest of the four British wood ant species. The sandy, sunny path at Webber’s Post above Horner is lined with nests, the biggest of which is a sprawling dun mound a metre high and nearly six metres across, with a network of hidden underground tunnels and chambers beneath. It’s possible that the whole stretch is really one linked colony divided into various nodes, each occupied by hundreds of thousands of workers and several queens.
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The plastic particles are everywhere – here’s what to know about what to avoid, whether they ever leave the body and what to do about plastic pollution
Microplastics are tiny particles of plastic.
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Conservation groups count glow-in-the-dark caterpillars and chrysalises which are hard to spot in daylight
Nature lovers have been enjoying using UV torches to discover the vivid fluorescent colours of plants and animals at night for a few years now.
Now lepidopterists have realised that UV torches provide a highly effective new way to find and count rare and elusive butterflies.
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Joshua Bonnetta spent 8,760 hours recording a pine – then honed it down into a four-hour album full of creatures, cracking branches and quite possibly the sound of leaves growing
What does a landscape sound like when it’s not being listened to? This philosophical question was a catalyst for film-maker and artist Joshua Bonnetta, who has distilled a year of recordings from a single tree in upstate New York – that’s 8,760 hours – into a four-hour album, The Pines. As Robert Macfarlane writes in his accompanying essay, The Pines is a reminder of the natural world’s “sheer, miraculous busyness”, its “froth of signals and noise”. It is rich with poetic meaning, and resonant amid the climate emergency.
“It started as a personal thing,” Bonnetta explains from his studio in Munich, where he relocated from the US in 2022. For over 20 years he has made sonic records of places as private mementos, but recent experiments with long-form field recording led him to push himself “to document this place in the deepest way I could”. On a residency in the Outer Hebrides between 2017 and 2019, Bonnetta made the sound installation Brackish, a month-long continuous radio broadcast from a weather-resistant hydrophone – an underwater mic – by a loch. “I started to leave the recorder for a day or two, then it just got longer,” he says. “Amazing things happen when you’re not there to interfere … This allows you a different, very privileged window into the space.”
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Climate experts say warming atmosphere from climate change could fuel severe freezing rain and ice storms like the one that hit the upper midwest last month
Winter has been slow to release its icy grip from the upper midwest this year, and in northern Michigan, its effects will be keenly felt for months, perhaps years.
A devastating ice storm that hit late last month has left an estimated 3m acres of trees snapped in half or damaged from the weight of up to an inch-and-a-half of ice across the northern part of lower Michigan.
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