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People succumbed to heat at highest rates in Malta, Italy and Hungary, with health issues, loneliness and poverty exacerbating toll
Heat killed a record 50,000 people in European cities this summer, new research suggests, with scientists blaming climate breakdown for two in every three of the deaths.
Morgues and funeral homes filled with bodies from June to August as the heat added by planet-baking pollution cut short an extra 32,000 lives in urban areas, the researchers found. Hot days pushed vulnerable bodies into overdrive and warm nights prevented them from recovering.
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This week’s best wildlife photographs from around the world
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Company ordered to stop work at two sites in country, which has found itself at forefront of tech firms’ latest push
Behind a wire fence lies a vast gaping wound of earth. Before Google’s arrival a few months ago, an estimated quarter of a million trees occupied the 330 hectares (815 acres) of forest near the town of Muhos in rural northern Finland. Now they are all gone.
After the tech company illegally stripped the entire area to build a datacentre – taking even the top soil with it – all that remains is a vast expanse of mud indented with the trail marks of machinery, puddles and mounds of earth, roots and branches. Residents say that brown water flowing off the site is going into a stream that feeds the Oulujoki River.
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People near south Wales river were told to keep windows and doors shut after thousands of litres of kerosene from a GE Aerospace site got into the water
Oily slicks of kerosene still appeared to be leaking into the River Taff this week, several days after a breachof thousands of litres was spotted by members of the public.
The breach into the Welsh river was identified last Friday, after people reported strong chemical odours emanating from it. Natural Resources Wales (NRW) officers arrived on site soon afterwards to identify the source of the pollution and were assisted by the south Wales fire and rescue service, which placed absorbent mats and booms to contain as much kerosene as possible.
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An app and a camera phone are all that’s needed at more than 200 spots to help researchers monitor coastal areas
The shoreline changes with the weather. Tracking these changes over time is a labour-intensive task, and an army of citizen scientists with camera phones is a great asset.
The CoastSnap project started in Australia in 2017 and has spread to beaches worldwide. You may have spotted the setup while out walking along the coast: a cradle to rest your phone on while taking a picture and a sign explaining where to send the snap.
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Falmouth, Cornwall:The rainbow sea slug is a bizarre and breathtaking animal, and with warming seas it’s gaining a toehold in the south-west
I have never seen a species quite so flamboyant in appearance. A couple of centimetres in length, it was curled beneath the submerged rock like a piece of gaudy costume jewellery.
When the cry went up that one had been found, I had to prevent myself from breaking into a run as I navigated the slippery seaweed-covered boulders to catch my first glimpse of this rarity.
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PM pledges commitment to address climate crisis, saying in Guardian article that his ‘determination is unwavering’
Andy Burnham has said he will not “abandon the responsibility” of fighting the climate crisis after the government approved the Jackdaw gasfield, pledging to block new North Sea licences and keep Britain on track for net zero by 2050.
The comments are the prime minister’s most forthright yet on net zero, after many MPs have privately cast doubt on the authenticity of his commitment to tackling the climate crisis.
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After decades of violent displacement and land theft, the country’s quilombolacommunities are fighting back
For most of his 39 years, Josias Dias dos Santos, known as Jota, has endured degrading cycles of displacement as a quilombola, a descendant of Black people once enslaved on Brazil’s sugar cane and coffee plantations. He says his and other quilombola families subsisting in the rainforests in Pará, northern Brazil, were first forced out of their settlements by violent loggers, then by ranchers and miners.
Yet, they say the worst came with the arrival of the palm oil industry in what is now the country’s most deforested state. Palm oil companies producing biofuels and supplying global customers, subsidised by the federal government, have laid claim to ever larger tracts of traditional quilombola territory over the past two decades.
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With no wind to disperse the low cloud, mist and fog and less sunlight to burn it off, anticyclonic gloom can set in
In summer, a high-pressure system over the UK usually means fine weather. But in the colder months it can result in anticyclonic gloom, characterised by grey skies, mist, fog and drizzle.
A settled high-pressure system brings stable conditions and impedes the usual vertical movement of air. This is a recipe for sunshine when humidity is low, but can act like a lid, trapping atmospheric moisture near the surface.
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Rare small blues and dingy skippers among species found on former wheatfields two years after start of transformation under commercial nature project
An “amazing” abundance of 5,290 butterflies, including rare small blues and dingy skippers, has appeared on land that was barren wheatfields just two years ago.
The speed with which nature has bounced back at Halnaker Hill farm in West Sussex has surprised experts after 133 hectares (330 acres) of intensively farmed land were turned into a commercial nature restoration project.
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pub. Verso, London, New York, 2012
pub. Random House, 2006
