-
Increasing frequency of heatwaves and flooding raises fears over health, infrastructure and how society functions
Record-breaking extreme weather is the new norm in the UK, scientists have said, showing that the country is firmly in the grip of the climate crisis.
The hottest days people endure have dramatically increased in frequency and severity, and periods of intense rain have also ramped up, data from hundreds of weather stations shows. Heatwaves and floods leading to deaths and costly damage are of “profound concern” for health, infrastructure and the functioning of society, the scientists said.
Continue reading...
-
Exclusive: Energy secretary’s ‘radical truth-telling’ comes as Reform plans net zero bonfire and Tories also ditch targets
Ed Miliband is to explicitly call out politicians who reject net zero policies for betraying future generations in an unprecedented update to parliament about the state of the climate crisis, which he is calling “an exercise in radical truth-telling”.
With Reform UK proposing to scrap all net zero measures and even questioning the science behind climate change, and the Conservatives ditching environmental targets, Miliband hopes to regain the initiative with a stark warning to MPs.
Continue reading...
-
Researchers in Europe found everyday plastics, especially farmers’ baler twine, being used by the birds as a building material and entangling their young. It is a problem that affects other species too, say experts in the US, UK and Argentina
On a late spring morning in the farmlands of southern Portugal, Dr Marta Acácio set her ladder against a tree and began to climb. Four metres up, she reached the giant white stork nest that was her goal. She knew from telescopic camera shots there was a healthy looking chick inside – and now she wanted to ring it.
But when Acácio, an ecologist from University of Montpellier in France, tried to scoop up the chick, it would not come away: it was tethered to the nest by a piece of plastic baler twine. She turned the chick over and recoiled: its belly was a mass of maggots.
Continue reading...
-
In the fourth part of a series, we look at how climate orthodoxy is coming under fire in Lincolnshire
In early summer the wide open fields of Lincolnshire seem to expand beneath even larger clear blue skies. Travel north through the breadbasket of Britain towards the North Sea, from Grantham to Grimsby, and farming gives way to factories, refineries and the Humber docks. Each sector tells a story of Britain’s industrial decline: the demise of heavy industry on the banks of the Humber, the closure of coal power plants, fishing fleets decimated by the cod wars of the 1970s and 80s.
Lincolnshire is at the heart of the government’s plan for the greatest economic step-change since the Industrial Revolution: a green re-industrialisation to help galvanise the country’s net zero agenda, create jobs and revitalise deprived areas.
Continue reading...
-
Levels even lower than in severe drought year of 2022, data shows, with water firms urged to ‘be proactive’
England’s reservoirs are at their lowest levels for a decade, new data reveals, as experts urge water companies to immediately put hosepipe bans in place.
In June, reservoirs across the country were 76% full, which is below their level in the severe drought year of 2022 when they were at 77% capacity at this time in the summer.
Continue reading...
-
Hollingside lane, Durham: Pleated inkcaps may live for a day but here we’ve been watching other fungi, such as dryad’s saddle, grow since spring
There were none here yesterday, and by the end of tomorrow they’ll have deliquesced and disappeared, but for now the neatly mown grass under our feet was studded with 2in-tall parasol inkcaps (Parasola plicatilis). They looked like an invasion of tiny parachutists; in reality they’d risen from the underworld.
They were here all along, as a mycelium of microscopically slender hyphae, down among the grassroots. Autumn is the fungal forager’s season but fungi, as hyphae or spores, are everywhere, unseen, all the time. Occasionally, driven by the imperative to reproduce, their ramifying network of independent threads collaborates, producing spores in toadstools. Some, like these inkcaps, are ephemeral; others, like the dryad’s saddle (Cerioporus squamosus) we’d been watching since spring, grow from teacup to tea-tray proportions, slowly digesting dead wood, taking months to reach maturity.
Continue reading...
-
Farmers are seeking ways to fend off birds who are stirring up soil in flooded paddy fields in Ferrara province
An unusual bird is ravaging crops and infuriating farmers in north-eastern Italy: the flamingo.
Flamingos are relatively recent arrivals in the area, and have settled into the flooded fields that produce rice for risotto in Ferrara province, between Venice and Ravenna.
Continue reading...
-
Site had to be saved from closure after visitor slump in 00s but is now a thriving biodiversity success story
Amid the gentle hills of Carmarthenshire’s Tywi valley, the domed glasshouse of the National Botanic Garden of Wales sparkles from miles away. Designed by Sir Norman Foster, when the garden opened in 2000 it was the largest single-span glasshouse in the world, set among 230 hectares (570 acres) of themed gardens and a nature reserve – but today, the most special part of the site is actually a modest hillside where Welsh black cattle graze.
At this time of year, there is little to see in the organically managed pasture other than the cows. But in the autumn, this field boasts an astonishing 23 different species of colourful waxcap mushrooms – some of which are considered as endangered as the Siberian tiger or mountain gorilla.
Continue reading...
-
In the US, hardly a food is untouched by immigrant labor – and Ice raids will profoundly affect the food labor system
From his father’s strawberry farm in central California, Tomás Diaz noticed a border patrol vehicle driving toward a field of workers. Diaz, himself Mexican American and a US citizen, yelled in Spanish: “Run for your life! That’s immigration!” As the men scattered, the agents grabbed whom they could. In the chaos, six workers escaped, and Diaz was detained for interrogation. “Why did you yell at the Mexicans to run?” an officer pressed. “No reason at all,” Diaz calmly replied.
This did not happen yesterday, but in 1953. Driven by fears of border infiltration by communists and “criminal” and “diseased” migrants, the Immigration and National Service (the Department of Homeland Security’s predecessor) carried out “Operation Wetback” from 1954 to 1957. Border patrol officers raided public spaces, workplaces and homes and formally deported about 400,000 Mexicans (hundreds of thousands more repatriated out of fear).
Continue reading...
-
Residents of Alabama’s Lowndes county are still fighting for basic sanitation after Trump’s DoJ canceled a landmark Biden-era agreement
Thelma and Willie Perryman spend most days out front of their family trailer in rural Alabama, shooting the breeze while enjoying the birdsong – and making sure their three-year-old grandson doesn’t wander into the sewage-sodden back yard.
They used to barbecue on the back porch looking out at the woods on their land until a couple of years back when the contaminated wastewater seeping out from a leaky old pipe got simply unbearable. Willie, 71, ripped out the sinking porch as branches began falling off a towering old hickory tree which is now completely dead and at risk of toppling.
Continue reading...
