Environment news

• Would abandoning hope help us to tackle the climate crisis?

  24-10-2024 17:35
  
  Leaders are eager to fill us with positivity, but research shows people in distress are more likely to take collective actionIf despair is the most unforgivable sin, then hope is surely the most abused virtue. That observation feels particularly apposite as we enter the Cop season, that time of United Nations megaconferences at the end of every year, when national leaders feel obliged to convince us the future will be better, despite growing evidence to the contrary.Climate instability and natur
  
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• Would abandoning false hope help us to tackle the climate crisis?

  24-10-2024 17:35
  
  Leaders are eager to fill us with positivity, but research shows people in distress are more likely to take collective actionIf despair is the most unforgivable sin, then hope is surely the most abused virtue. That observation feels particularly apposite as we enter the Cop season, that time of United Nations megaconferences at the end of every year, when national leaders feel obliged to convince us the future will be better, despite growing evidence to the contrary.Climate instability and natur
  
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• We need a dash of hope, but is too much diverting our gaze from the perils of the climate crisis? | Jonathan Watts

  24-10-2024 17:35
  Enforced positivity encourages risk instead of solid action and gives us a way to ignore the fast-approaching futureIf despair is the most unforgivable sin, then hope is surely the most abused virtue. That observation feels particularly apposite as we enter the Cop season – that time of United Nations megaconferences at the end of every year, when national leaders feel obliged to convince us the future will be better, despite growing evidence to the contrary.Climate instability and nature
  
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• ‘It’s a big lever for change’: the radical contract protecting Hamburg’s green space

  24-10-2024 16:50
  
  Citizen power forced Germany’s greenest city-state into a binding agreement balancing housing and natureWhen Fritz Schumacher laid out his vision for Hamburg a century ago, the sketch looked more like a fern than a town plan. Fronds of urban development radiated from the centre to tickle the countryside, bristling with dense rows of housing. The white spaces in between were to be filled with parks and playgrounds.Schumacher was Hamburg’s chief building officer in the early 20th centu
  
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• ‘Crunch time for real’: UN says time for climate delays has run out

  24-10-2024 16:00
  
  Means to stop catastrophic global heating exist, says UN chief, but political courage is needed to end world’s fossil fuel addictionThe huge cuts in carbon emissions now needed to end the climate crisis mean it is “crunch time for real”, according to the UN’s environment chief.An unprecedented global mobilisation of renewable energy, forest protection and other measures is needed to steer the world off the current path towards a catastrophic temperature rise of 3.1C, a re
  
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• US power grid added battery equivalent of 20 nuclear reactors in past four years

  24-10-2024 12:00
  
  Pace of growth helps maintain renewable energy when weather conditions interfere with wind and solarFaced with worsening climate-driven disasters and an electricity grid increasingly supplied by intermittent renewables, the US is rapidly installing huge batteries that are already starting to help prevent power blackouts.From barely anything just a few years ago, the US is now adding utility-scale batteries at a dizzying pace, having installed more than 20 gigawatts of battery capacity to the ele
  
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• Weatherwatch: On the brink of overshooting the 1.5C climate target

  24-10-2024 07:00
  Even temporarily passing the Paris 2015 limit will mean severe storms, heatwaves and floodsIn 2015, world leaders in Paris put great hope in keeping the rise in average global temperatures at or below 1.5C. But global temperatures continue rising relentlessly. The world is now on the brink of overshooting the 1.5C target, and then – what? The hope was to stop pumping out CO2 and also remove it from the atmosphere to avoid a cataclysm, but that would need 400 gigatonnes of CO2 to be removed
  
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• Biodiversity declining even faster in ‘protected’ areas, scientists warn Cop16

  24-10-2024 07:00
  Just designating key areas will not meet 30x30 target on nature loss, study says, pointing to oil drilling in parksBiodiversity is declining more quickly within key protected areas than outside them, according to research that scientists say is a “wake-up call” to global leaders discussing how to stop nature loss at the UN’s Cop16 talks in Colombia.Protecting 30% of land and water for nature by 2030 was one of the key targets settled on by world leaders in a landmark 2022 agree
  
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• Country diary: Three crab apple trees, steeped in their own mythology | Paul Evans

  24-10-2024 06:30
  
  The Marches, Powys: Many hundreds of years old, they are alive with stories, in their leaves that fall and in their holes full of creaturesTo walk into the green folds of hill country north of Llanfyllin is a kind of time travel. It’s not to return to the past, it’s to wander into a time that belongs so intimately to others, to trespass into a country of countless generations of people and trees within this tangle of road bends and stream banks, through secretive valleys in the
  
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• Carpet python discovered with platypus in its mouth in Australian creek – video

  24-10-2024 05:54
  
  Plant enthusiast Darren Williams made the discovery in Marys Creek State Forest just west of Gympie in Queensland. The male platypus was freshly killed, probably after what would have been a fierce struggle with the ambush predator. Williams and his companion Elliot Bowerman photographed the roughly 2-metre long carpet python with its jaw firmly clasped around the platypus before quickly moving on. 'We didn’t want to disturb the snake,' Bowerman said‘There is a python with a platypus
  
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• Polar bears face higher risk of disease in a warming Arctic

  24-10-2024 01:05 via bbc.com
  
  Climate change and sea ice loss leaves polar bears exposed to more diseases, research suggests.
  
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