-
System operator Neso predicts lowest carbon intensity ever on Christmas Day after new wind and solar power come online
Britain’s energy system operator has predicted that this year’s Christmas Day could be the greenest yet.
If the weather remains mild and windy for the rest of December, the National Energy System Operator (Neso) has said it could record the lowest carbon intensity – the measure of how much carbon dioxide is released to produce electricity – recorded on the network for 25 December.
Continue reading...
-
Caistor St Edmund, Norfolk: Wildlife seems to like it as much as we do, and if you’re patient, you can make like a mistle thrush and spread it around
Stripped of their leaves, the trees are sculptural against the grey sky, revealing what is usually obscured. Trunks thick with ivy offer roosting sites for wrens and robins. Messy rook nests sway precariously in the breeze. And of course great balls of mistletoe, suspended among the bare branches as if put up for the festive season, although there all year round. Some trees have so many of the evergreen orbs in them that they appear to be in spring leaf.
For a parasite, mistletoe has a unique position in our hearts: from Greek mythologies, where it offered a gateway to the underworld, to the druids’ ceremonial links with fertility, which probably seeded our modern-day kisses under the mistletoe.
Continue reading...
-
Researchers noticed ‘dramatic’ changes in nutrients in crops, including drop in zinc and rise in lead
More carbon dioxide in the environment is making food more calorific but less nutritious – and also potentially more toxic, a study has found.
Sterre ter Haar, a lecturer at Leiden University in the Netherlands, and other researchers at the institution created a method to compare multiple studies on plants’ responses to increased CO2levels. The results, she said, were a shock: although crop yields increase, they become less nutrient-dense. While zinc levels in particular drop, lead levels increase.
Continue reading...
-
This week’s best wildlife photographs from around the world
Continue reading...
-
People of Silverdale report rattling and shaking as 2.5 magnitude earthquake strikes in probable aftershock
A village in Lancashire has been hit by a “radiator rattling” earthquake for the second time in little over two weeks.
Residents of Silverdale, a small coastal village located five miles south of the Cumbria border, reported the now strangely familiar feeling of rattling and shaking in their homes at 5.03am as a 2.5-magnitude earthquake hit the area with its epicentre 1.6 miles (2.6km) off the coast.
Continue reading...
-
Ryde, Isle of Wight: Lots of commotion here among the hovercraft and herring gulls, but it’s the wonderful, tubby geese that make my winter
There’s a hovercraft on the sand, skirts deflated, dumped like a beached whale. Behind it, the pier stretches into the Solent. The air has the dull taste of off-season resort, with background notes of seaweed and vinegar. Welcome to Ryde.
We eat fish and chips, fending off the attention of a hungry herring gull. The clicks and whistles of 20 starlings float towards our ears from over the road. A pied wagtail, manic wind-up toy, scurries beside us. Stop, start, whirr.
Continue reading...
-
In the Peloponnese mountains, the usually hardy trees are turning brown even where fires haven’t reached. Experts are raising the alarm on a complex crisis
In the southern Peloponnese, the Greek fir is a towering presence. The deep green, slow-growing conifers have long defined the region’s high-altitude forests, thriving in the mountains and rocky soils. For generations they have been one of the country’s hardier species, unusually capable of withstanding drought, insects and the wildfires that periodically sweep through Mediterranean ecosystems. These Greek forests have lived with fire for as long as anyone can remember.
So when Dimitrios Avtzis, a senior researcher at the Forest Research Institute (FRI) of Elgo-Dimitra, was dispatched to document the aftermath of a spring blaze in the region, nothing about the assignment seemed exceptional. He had walked into countless burnt landscapes, tracking the expected pockets of mortality, as well as the trees that survived their scorching.
Continue reading...
-
From retailers to banks, carmakers to councils, the bold pledges for carbon-neutral economies are being watered down or scrapped
Almost a year since Donald Trump returned to the White House with a rallying cry to the fossil fuel industry to “drill baby, drill”, a backlash against net zero appears to be gathering momentum.
More companies have retreated from, or watered down, their pledges to cut carbon emissions, instead prioritising shareholder returns over climate action.
Continue reading...
-
Exclusive: Ancient forests and turquoise rivers of the Cochamó Valley protected from logging, damming and development
A wild valley in Chilean Patagonia has been preserved for future generations and protected from logging, damming and unbridled development after a remarkable fundraising effort by local groups, the Guardian can reveal.
The 133,000 hectares (328,000 acres) of pristine wilderness in the Cochamó Valley was bought for $63m (£47m) after a grassroots campaign led by the NGO Puelo Patagonia, and the title to the wildlands was officially handed over to the Chilean nonprofit Fundación Conserva Puchegüín on 9 December.
Continue reading...
-
Were children’s bones found at the edge of European lake settlements an attempt to appease water gods?
Flood protection takes many forms, from the levees of Louisiana to the drains of East Anglia. Some villages in bronze age Europe may have had a more unusual barrier: a circle of skulls.
Researchers from Basel University have found children’s skulls at the edge of lake settlements vulnerable to flooding, dating to the ninth century BC. As flooding became worse, villages in the Circum-Alpine region in what is now Germany and Switzerland started building defences. These included log palisades, houses on stilts, and flood walls reinforced with stone and skulls.
Continue reading...
