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Continued global heating could set irreversible course by triggering climate tipping points, but most people unaware
The world is closer than thought to a “point of no return” after which runaway global heating cannot be stopped, scientists have said.
Continued global heating could trigger climate tipping points, leading to a cascade of further tipping points and feedback loops, they said. This would lock the world into a new and hellish “hothouse Earth” climate far worse than the 2-3C temperature rise the world is on track to reach. The climate would also be very different to the benign conditions of the past 11,000 years, during which the whole of human civilisation developed.
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The radical project is an attempt to preserve wildlife in one of Europe’s most light-polluted countries, but can they persuade local people they will still feel safe?
Two yellowing street lamps cast a pool of light on the dark road winding into the woods outside Mazée village. This scene is typical for narrow countryside roads in Wallonia in the south of Belgium. “Having lights here is logical,” says André Detournay, 77, who has lived in the village for four decades. “I walk here with my dog and it makes me feel safe and gives me some protection from theft.”
Belgium glows like a Christmas decoration at night, as witnessed from space. It is one of the most light-polluted countries in Europe, with the Milky Way scarcely visible except in the most remote areas.
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Born of student disquiet after the 2008 crash, the group says it is reshaping economists’ education
As the fallout from the 2008 global financial crash reverberated around the world, a group of students at Harvard University in the US walked out of their introductory economics class complaining it was teaching a “specific and limited view” that perpetuated “a problematic and inefficient system of economic inequality”.
A few weeks later, on the other side of the Atlantic, economics students at Manchester University in the UK, unhappy that the rigid mathematical formulas they were being taught in the classroom bore little relation to the tumultuous economic fallout they were living through, set up a “post-crash economics society”.
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Vast flocks of birds return to Somerset and a rare grebe turns an ordinary walk into something special
After weeks of heavy rain, Cheddar reservoir in Somerset is finally full again – of water, and of birds. Thousands of coots, hundreds of gulls and ducks, and dozens of great crested grebes crowd the surface, some already moulting into their smart breeding plumage, crests and all.
They feed almost constantly, building up energy reserves for the breeding season. Among the throng are some less familiar visitors: a flock of scaup, the males bulkier than the nearby tufted ducks, with pale grey backs that catch the light. Flocks of goosanders dive frequently for food, the colourful males looking like a cormorant in extravagant drag.
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Kincraig, Badenoch: The Loch Insh Old Kirk is a compelling place, and yet, like the copious wildlife here, it is on the edge of existence
The snow has retreated to the tops of the Cairngorms and the last fragments of ice are crumbling at the edges of Loch Insh. In a muddy landscape, an old white church rises on a knoll on the northern shore. The simple stone building with its bell tower and arched windows dates to 1792, though the site was established by early monks from Iona, probably as far back as the seventh century. Indeed, some sources claim this as the site of longest continuous Christian worship in Scotland.
Those early monks would have built a stone cell here as a dwelling and a base for evangelising. A later chapel was dedicated to St Adamnan – the ninth abbot of Iona and Columba’s biographer – and a rough granite font remains from that time. The monks rang a bell to announce worship and the kirk still holds a bronze bell dating to AD900, one of only five left in Scotland. Resonant with legends, the bell was believed to have the power of healing and was once stolen and carried to Scone Palace – but it flew home, tolling the chapel’s name all the way over the Drumochter Pass.
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Exclusive: Analysts say there will be oil spill catastrophe that could be far bigger than Exxon Valdez disaster
Decrepit oil tankers in Iran’s sanctions-busting shadow fleet are a “ticking time bomb”, and it is only a matter of time before there is a catastrophic environmental disaster, maritime intelligence analysts have warned.
Such an oil spill could be far bigger than the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster that released 37,000 tonnes of crude oil into the sea, they said.
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My father, Alex Kirby, who has died of cancer aged 86, was a well-respected journalist – at the BBC and elsewhere – and, despite beginning his career in the church, ended up dedicating much of his life to chronicling the climate crisis.
Following a degree in theology at Keble College, Oxford, he trained for the priesthood at the Anglo-Catholic theological college in Mirfield, Yorkshire, and after ordination, became a deacon in the Isle of Dogs, east London.
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Intricate ice formations can grow on frozen lakes and seas when relatively warm ice is exposed to still air
Intricate fern-like “frost flowers”, said to be painted on windows and windscreens by Jack Frost, are a familiar feature of British winter. In Arctic regions there is an even prettier three-dimensional version.
These frost flowers are typically 3-4cm across and whole gardens of them grow on frozen lakes and seas. Like the window version, they are the result of ice crystals growing in a slow, orderly fashion.
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Emissions have plunged 75% since communist times in the birthplace of big oil – but for some the transition has been brutal
Once the frozen fields outside Bucharest have thawed, workers will assemble the largest solar farm in Europe: one million photovoltaic panels backed by batteries to power homes after sunset. But the 760MW project in southern Romania will not hold the title for long. In the north-west, authorities have approved a bigger plant that will boast a capacity of 1GW.
The sun-lit plots of silicon and glass will join a slew of projects that have rendered the Romanian economy unrecognisable from its polluted state when communism ended. They include an onshore windfarm near the Black Sea that for several years was Europe’s biggest, a nuclear power plant by the Danube whose lifetime is being extended by 30 years, and a fast-spreading patchwork of solar panels topping homes and shops across the country.
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US courts, scholars and Democrats are pushing back against the president’s aggressive drive to boost fossil fuels
Donald Trump’s aggressive drive to boost fossil fuels, including dirty coal, coupled with his administration’s moves to roll back wind and solar power, face mounting fire from courts, scholars and Democrats for raising the cost of electricity and worsening the climate crisis.
Four judges, including a Trump appointee, in recent weeks have issued temporary injunctions against interior department moves to halt work on five offshore wind projects in Virginia, New York and New England, which have cost billions of dollars and are far along in development.
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