Tree planting has been widely touted as a cost-effective way of reducing global warming, due to trees' ability to store large quantities of carbon from the atmosphere. But, an international group of scientists argue that tree planting at high latitudes will accelerate, rather than decelerate, global warming. Why? Because soils in the Arctic and Subarctic store immense amounts of carbon that may be released into the atmosphere when disturbed, and the trees will soak up more heat from the sun than white snow.
Breaking Waves: Ocean News
11/07/2024 - 11:50
11/07/2024 - 11:50
Plastic pollution exacerbates the impacts of all planetary boundaries, including climate change, ocean acidification and biodiversity loss, a new paper shows. Ahead of the final negotiations of the international Plastics Treaty, researchers urge decision-makers to stop viewing plastics pollution as merely a waste management problem.
11/07/2024 - 11:00
Analysis of 19m flights between 2019 and 2023 reveals 50% rise in emissions, condemned as ‘gratuitous waste’
Private jet flights have soared in recent years, with the resulting climate-heating emissions rising by 50%, the most comprehensive global analysis to date has revealed.
The assessment tracked more than 25,000 private jets and almost 19m flights between 2019 and 2023. It found almost half the jets travelled less than 500km and 900,000 were used “like taxis” for trips of less than 50km. Many flights were for holidays, arriving in sunny locations in the summertime. The Fifa World Cup in Qatar in 2022 attracted more than 1,800 private flights.
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11/07/2024 - 11:00
Pollution is affecting the climate, biodiversity, ecosystems, ocean acidification and human health, according to analysis
Plastic pollution is changing the processes of the entire Earth system, exacerbating climate change, biodiversity loss, ocean acidification, and the use of freshwater and land, according to scientific analysis.
Plastic must not be treated as a waste problem alone, the authors said, but as a product that poses harm to ecosystems and human health.
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11/07/2024 - 09:13
Jon Thompson tells industry conference there was ‘no evidence’ that bats were at risk from the trains
The cost of a “bat shed” to protect a species in woodland along the new HS2 high-speed line has risen to more than £100m, HS2’s chair has revealed.
The 1km-long mesh structure will be built where the London-Birmingham high-speed line emerges from a tunnel in Buckinghamshire, to protect a colony of Bechstein’s bats.
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11/07/2024 - 09:00
Annual FrogID week aims to collect thousands of recordings of country’s 250 frog species using downloadable smartphone app
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They moan, hum, whistle and click, and can be found almost everywhere, from the neighbourhood pond to the most remote outback dunny.
From 8 to 17 November, people across the country are encouraged to participate in FrogID week, Australia’s biggest frog count. The annual event, now in its seventh year, aims to collect thousands of recordings via an app, with the data providing a snapshot of how frogs are faring across the country.
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11/07/2024 - 08:58
Warming climate has caused rivers used for transport to dry up, leaving children with little food, water or school access, says Unicef
Two years of severe drought in the Amazon rainforest have left nearly half a million children facing shortages of water and food or limited access to school, according to a UN report.
Scant rainfall and extreme heat driven by the climate crisis have caused rivers in what is usually the wettest region on Earth to retreat so much that they can no longer be traversed by boats, cutting off communities.
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11/07/2024 - 08:00
Voters have never been swayed by ‘rational debate’. Only a genuine change in the way we do politics can prevent the march of the right
We were losing slowly. Now we are losing quickly. Democracy, accountability, human rights, social justice – all were rolling backwards as money swarmed our politics. Above all, our life-support systems – the Earth’s atmosphere, oceans, ecosystems, ice and snow – have been hammered and hammered, regardless of who is in power. Donald Trump might strike the killer blows, but he is not the cause of an ecocidal economic system. He is the embodiment of it.
Under Joe Biden, the US was missing its own climate goals, and those goals were insufficient to meet the global objective of limiting heating to 1.5C above preindustrial levels. That target in turn might not be tight enough to prevent a tipping of Earth systems. Already, at roughly 1.3C of heating, we see what looks alarmingly like climatic flickering: the ever wilder perturbations that tend to precede the collapse of a complex system.
George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist
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11/07/2024 - 06:00
Leading Colombian conservationists share their experiences working in the most dangerous country to fight for wildlife
Politicians, conservationists and business people from around the world met last week to discuss how to save nature at the Cop16 biodiversity conference in Cali, Colombia.
For those working on the ground, however, it is the most dangerous country in the world to fight for the environment. A third of the 196 environmental defenders killed last year were Colombian. Here, four conservationists give us a glimpse into their working lives and the dangers they face.
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11/07/2024 - 00:00
Conservation groups are asking for the decision to allow Hvalur to hunt to be put on hold until after election
A coalition of conservation and animal welfare groups are urging Iceland’s president to step in and stop any plans the prime minister has to issue a whaling licence to Europe’s last whaler before the Icelandic election at the end of the month.
Earlier this year, the country granted a one-year licence to Hvalur to kill more than 100 fin whales this hunting season, despite hopes the practice may have been stopped after concerns about cruelty led to a temporary suspension in 2023.
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